Biography
Much has been written about the life and art of Oscar Howe in South Dakota over the past 40 years. Along with Harvey Dunn and Gutzon Borglum, Howe has become a cultural icon for many South Dakotans, an artist who is widely recognized as representing the best of the rich heritage and character of this unique land and its peoples. To many, Oscar Howe's stature is tied to his Native American heritage. He is seen as a model of cultural vitality, one who bridged the Indian and non-Indian worlds and achieved a continuity between an ancient tradition and the 20th century. Others see Howe's life as an inspiring story of personal achievement in the face of daunting obstacles. There is, of course, truth in both views, but there is much more to understanding this exceptional and complex man who means so much to the world.
For all of our pride in Oscar Howe as a South Dakotan, we must acknowledge that he belongs to the world. To be sure, it is generally recognized that Howe is a famous artist whose work has been shown in and collected by major museums in New York, London, and Paris; this is a necessary part of the legend. But beyond this, his true artistic stature is less understood and deserves elaboration.
On one level, Oscar Howe is internationally famous because he is one of a small handful of artists who defined the Native American Fine Arts Movement between the 1940s and the 1960s. This movement saw the emergence of a professional Indian Arts community dedicated to expressing Native American values as a vital part of 20th century culture. For many, Oscar Howe is the most innovative and modern Indian artist of his remarkable generation and a major influence on the course of Indian art today.
On another level, Oscar Howe's importance exists free from the context of his time and his Indian heritage, to be judged solely as art. Based as Howe was in his heritage, he ultimately saw his art in universal terms as expressions of fundamental human responses to spirit and beauty. Without pride, he often spoke of his art as having a power equal to that of Picasso and Matisse.
Perhaps the truest measure of Oscar Howe's greatness is that his artwork speaks to people from around the world who know little or nothing about the artist or his Indian heritage. Therein may lie a fresh perspective on Howe's art for South Dakotans who are close to his personal history.
Family
Born May 13, 1915, at Joe Creek on the Crow Creek Indian Reservation of South Dakota, Howe comes from an honored family. His great-grandfathers, Bone Necklace and White Bear, were hereditary chiefs of the Yankonai and noted orators who ably represented their people during the difficult times of the 1860s through the 1880s which marked a major change in the life of Plains Indians and the beginning of the reservation period.
This tradition of leadership was carried on by Howe's family to his generation, providing him with a rich and, as yet, unbroken heritage upon which to draw inspiration for his art. But this was a time of traumatic change when political and economic forces were at work to assimilate the American Indian.
Much of what Oscar Howe drew from his family came from his maternal grandmother, Shell Face, who instructed him in the oral tradition of his people. For Howe, his early childhood provided a direct contact with the glory days of Plains Indian culture, despite the poverty of reservation life.
Soon, the young boy instinctively began to translate the stories he heard into drawings, only to be discouraged by a father who considered his son's art to be foolish. Later in life, the artist enjoyed relating the story that when his father took away his pencils, he discovered charcoal from the stove. Not to be denied when the charcoal was confiscated, the child drew lines with a stick in the dirt. Thus, a four-year-old chose to be an artist.
Boarding School
In 1922, at age seven, Oscar Howe was sent to the Pierre Indian School, administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. His experiences there mirror those of many in his generation. Run on a military model, the school emphasized discipline enforced with physical punishment.
To make matters worse, Howe developed a skin disease that disfigured him so seriously he was ostracized by his peers. When this condition was complicated with a case of trachoma, threatening blindness, he was sent home as incurable.
Back on the Crow Creek Reservation, the tenacity of character that would characterize Howe's life took hold in the now ten-year-old boy. Too poor to afford medical attention, Howe treated himself with commercial soap daily for months on end until his skin cleared up. Shortly thereafter his eye affliction disappeared, and he returned to good health. He returned to Pierre Indian School determined to reclaim his respect. Art offered him this opportunity, and he graduated in 1933.
Santa Fe
Graduating into the world of the Depression and the dust bowl, Howe eventually found work on a road crew, but in 1935 was diagnosed with tuberculosis. This new crisis proved to be a gift in disguise, as it led to Howe's enrollment at the Santa Fe Indian School. Here he was selected as one of the students to participate in a recently established art program.
Known as The Studio, this innovative approach to teaching art was an early expression of a more receptive attitude toward American Indian culture. Under the tutelage of Dorothy Dunn, students were taught professional practices and encouraged to study their tribal heritage. This experiment received much public acclaim, and art from The Studio, was exhibited worldwide. This attention and the resulting sales of work gave young artists like Oscar Howe their first taste of the promise of a career in art.
Years later, Howe clearly relished the memory of the sale of his first painting for 50 cents, of which one-half went to the school. Of this modest beginning, Howe said he "was deliriously happy that quarter was the first money my life's work had produced, and I was as proud of it as though it was a million dollars."
In 1938, Oscar Howe graduated from the Santa Fe Indian School as salutatorian. Desperate for work, he accepted an appointment as art instructor at the Pierre Indian School for room and board until he joined the South Dakota Artist Project. In 1940, Howe was assigned to paint a mural in the dome of the Carnegie Library in Mitchell.
Mural Training
Based on his success in Mitchell, Howe was sent to study mural painting under Olle Nordmark and then was assigned to decorate the new auditorium in Mobridge in 1942. This was a major project involving ten large panels featuring Sioux ceremonies and the history of the Missouri River. One week into the project, Howe received notice that he was to report for military duty at once. With local help, his induction was delayed two weeks. Working 20 hours a day. Howe finished the murals which are a matter of community pride in Mobridge to this day.
Love and War
Howe served three and a half years in the U.S. Army with combat forces in North Africa, Italy, France and Germany. While in Germany, he met Adelheid Hampel; they fell in love and were engaged before he alone returned to the States in late 1945. There followed two years of correspondence. Then, in 1947, Howe won the grand prize in the second Annual National Indian Painting Competition at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and with his $350 prize, he sent for Heidi, and they were married in Chicago on July 29, 1947.
One child, Inge Dawn, was born in June 1948 while the Howes were living in Oklahoma and Oscar worked on a commission to illustrate a two-volume book entitled, North American Indian Costumes, subsequently published in 1952.
Higher Education
Equipped 
with the G.I. Bill and reinforced by a loving family, Oscar Howe returned to school at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell. Howe's association with DWU was to prove a unique one, for the institution quickly recognized the special talents of this "non-traditional" student. While yet a student, Howe was named artist-in-residence, and in his senior year served as acting head of the art department, replacing a faculty member on sabbatical leave.
He graduated in 1952 with a B.A. degree. The Mitchell community also recognized Howe's artistic gifts, and in 1948 he was appointed the designer for the Corn Palace panels, a task he did annually until 1971. There is no way to over estimate the impact of Howe's years in Mitchell on the artist's confidence and sense of purpose to confirm that here was a special person with rare gifts.
Honors and recognition came increasingly to Howe in the early 1950s, and sales of his art grew accordingly. Offered a teaching job at Dakota Wesleyan, Howe could easily have settled into a comfortable life, but he chose to push on and entered the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Oklahoma from which he graduated in 1954.
This choice proved critical to Howe's future in two ways: holding the terminal degree in his discipline established the artist as fully credentialed and opened doors that might have otherwise been closed to him. More significantly, his studies at the University of Oklahoma moved Howe into new aesthetic territory.
Leading the Way
By the time he began his graduate education, the style of Indian painting established by The Studio at Santa Fe had become stilted and formulaic. A general dissatisfaction with the "Santa Fe style" led to calls for new directions in Indian art, but produced few true innovations. In the face of the market pressure that supported the established style, only a handful of artists struck out boldly in new directions. Oscar Howe was one of these innovators.
When Howe entered the M.F.A. program at the University of Oklahoma, he encountered a faculty of young, dynamic professors who looked to the East Coast for their inspiration. According to John O'Neil, the chair of the Art Department and Oscar's thesis advisor, the faculty was initially leery of accepting an Indian artist and advised Howe they had nothing to offer a painter who had mastered the Santa Fe style.
Convinced of Howe's desire to explore new artistic options, the faculty finally accepted him into the program and allowed him to find his own direction. In retrospect, O'Neil finds the frequently-stated opinion that Howe was influenced by Cubism during his graduate education to be unfounded. Rather, he believes that Howe returned to the abstract traditions of Plains Indian art and utilized its linear patterns to add dimensionality or illusion to a style that had become flat and static.
In the fall of 1953, Howe was named director of art at the high school in Pierre, where he remained until 1957. During this time, Howe's art continued to be widely exhibited and to win awards, but his work was in transition. He found high school teaching constraining and life in Pierre much less congenial than his experiences in Mitchell.
As a noted artist with an M.F.A., Howe could easily have left South Dakota for the much more promising opportunities in the Southwest, as many urged him to do. In the end, it was his deep-seated love for the land of his people that made it impossible for him to leave South Dakota. Nonetheless, Howe needed a change, and he found one that brought him into his mature period.
USD
In 1957, Oscar Howe moved to The University of South Dakota as an assistant professor of art, artist-in-residence, and assistant director of the W. H. Over Museum. This new opportunity offered the artist a secure and challenging position in an environment which supported creative exploration.
However, as with most situations in life, his tenure at the university was not ideal. In Vermillion, Howe faced campus politics which often kept him outside the mainstream of his department and seldom accorded him the recognition that should have attended his many successes.
Despite these difficulties, he spent 25 years on the faculty at The University of South Dakota; these were wonderfully productive. He touched the lives of many students and served as a model for Indian artists across the nation. An advocate for Indian art, Howe served as a teacher and mentor for numerous students including many who went on to distinguished careers in art including Arthur Amiotte, Colleen Cutshall, Donald Montileaux, Herman Red Elk and Robert Penn.
Howe's years at the university saw him come into the full measure of his promise and also coincided with major changes in the direction of American Indian art, changes in which Howe played a central role.
One story, familiar though it may be, illustrates Howe's importance to modern Indian art. In 1958, he entered one of his innovative works in the prestigious Annual National Indian Painting Competition at the Philbrook, where he had been a regular exhibitor and prize winner for years. To his consternation, the painting was rejected as not being a "traditional Indian painting."
The situation led Howe to send the Philbrook curator a letter of protest which has become a virtual declaration of aesthetic independence for Indian artists. In it, Howe criticized the establishment for its patronizing, conservative and authoritarian position. The rules for the exhibition were subsequently changed, and the major barrier to individuality in Indian art was removed.
He died October 7, 1983, after a lengthy illness and is buried at Vermillion's Bluffview Cemetery.
During his distinguished life, Oscar Howe won numerous national art honors including 15 grand or first-place awards and the prestigious Waite Phillips Trophy for Outstanding Contributions to American Indian Art. He was named Artist Laureate of the state of South Dakota and was an honoree on the popular television program, "This is Your Life."
His work has been represented in over 60 solo exhibitions and innumerable group shows. Howe's art and life have been documented in more than 70 publications, and his work is included in public collections around the world.
Oscar Howe, a South Dakotan, is truly a credit to us all.
John A. Day, Director
University Art Galleries
The University of South Dakota
The South Dakota Magazine July/August 1996
