Author Description

In the last 1920s, a group of young Kiowa artists, pursuing their education at the University of Oklahoma, encountered Swedish-born art professor Oscar Brousse Jacobson (1882-1966). With Jacobson's instruction and friendship, the Kiowa Six, as they are now known, ignited a spectacular movement in American Indian art, Jacobson, who was himself an accomplished painter, shared a lifelong bond with group member Stephen Mopope (1898-1974), a prolific Kiowa painter, dancer, and musician. This book explores the joint creativity of these two visionary figures. At the same time, the volume reveals how indigenous and immigrant communities of the early twentieth century traversed cultural, social, and racial divides. This book is a story of concurrences. For a specific period, immigrants such as Jacobson and disenfranchised indigenous people such as Mopope transformed Oklahoma into the center of exciting new developments in Indian art, which quickly spread to other parts of the United States and to Europe. Jacobson and Mopope came from radically different worlds, and were on unequal footing in terms of power and equality, but they both experienced, according to the author, forms of diaspora displacement. Seeking to root themselves anew in Oklahoma, the dispossessed artists fashioned new mediums of compelling and original art. Although their goals were compatible, Jacobson's and Mopope's subjects and styles diverged. Jacobson painted landscapes of the West, following a tradition of painting nature "as it was created," uninfluenced by human activity. Mopope, in contrast, strove to capture the cultural traditions of his people> the two artists shared a common nostalgia, however, for a past life that they could only re-create through their art. Whereas other books have emphasized the promotion of Indian art by Euro-Americans, this book is the first to focus on the agency of the Kiowa artists within the context of their collaboration with Jacobson. To capture the magnitude of Mopope and Jacobson's mutual accomplishments, the author draws from unique primary material related to the Kiowa artists, along with Swedish, American, and Kiowa sources. The volume is further enhanced by full-color reproductions of the artists' works and rare historical photographs.