Mapping New Traditions

Norman Kolpas

Artist Michael Horse offers a contemporary perspective on Native American ledger art

U.S. MAP WITH 3 FIGURES, MIXED MEDIA, 21 X 29

"Beauty is before me, and beauty is behind me,” goes a traditional Navajo prayer. “Above and below me hovers the beautiful. I am surrounded by it. I am immersed in it.”

Those eloquent words aptly sum up the early inspirations that led Michael Horse to become an artist working in precious metals, semiprecious stones, and paints as well as establish a solid reputation as a film and television actor. And to hear him tell the story, he had no choice but to dedicate his life to aesthetic pursuits.

“Ever since I was really young, art was a part of my life,” he says of his early childhood years growing up near Tucson, AZ, in a true melting-pot family that included Yaqui, Mescalero Apache, Zuni, Hispanic, and European blood. “Everyone was an artist,” he continues. His mother painted in the formal figurative style fostered in the 1920s by educator Dorothy Dunn at the Santa Fe Indian School. His aunts were Pueblo potters. His uncles taught him to handcraft silver and turquoise into Southwestern jewelry in the traditional Zuni and Mescalero styles. “I learned from my elders that you cannot be a whole, healthy individual without art,” he sums up.

Those influences remained even after his immediate family relocated to the Los Angeles area when Michael was 10. “I still was never isolated from my culture. L.A. was the biggest urban Indian community in the nation. We used to go to big powwows in Southern California. It was an intertribal culture, and I grew up with a lot of Sioux and Cheyenne and Navajo kids. We would also go home to Arizona for big ceremonies, and I became a gourd dancer,” he says, citing a traditional dance that begins many powwows. “I never lost touch with my heritage.”

It seemed only natural, then, that Horse would pursue his own artistic career. During a year at the respected Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in 1973, he studied with such greats as stone sculptor Allan Houser, painter Fritz Scholder, and jeweler Charles Loloma. “People always say ‘Oh, what a wonderful experience it must have been,’” says Horse, echoing the responses he typically gets from people when they learn he studied under Houser in particular. “But he was a hard taskmaster. He taught me that my possibilities as an artist were endless if I worked hard enough. I learned from him the discipline of art. And I also realized that it wasn’t just about becoming a Native artist. I would be an artist.” Horse speaks that last sentence with an emphasis that all but eliminates the need to add the word “period.”

By the mid-1970s, Horse was earning a living as a jeweler and also sculpting traditional Indian images in alabaster and marble. His works sold well in such marquee venues as the Santa Fe Indian Market and the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, as well as at big Native American shows across California.

SUNFACE RINGS WITH SILVER AND INLAID STONES

His experience and reputation also led him at the time to become a cultural advisor to the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles. Housed in a castlelike Mission revival-style building not far from downtown, the museum is renowned for its collection of more than a half million American Indian artifacts, of which fewer than five percent are displayed at any given time. “I became good friends with the curators and would come and speak about Native jewelry and arts and traditions,” says Horse. “And they would let me go into their archives. It’s an incredible collection. They had stuff they didn’t even know they had.”

Horse’s most valued personal discovery at the Southwest Museum was ledger art. Taking its name from the record books on which white men recorded their possessions and accounts, the art form developed in the 1860s among the Plains Indians after their forced relocation onto reservations. Lacking the buffalo hides on which they traditionally painted, they began to record scenes from their vanishing traditions on lined ledger paper.

“Imagine,” says Horse, his voice halting with emotion, “you were a free person, and your only boundaries were where the buffalo or the wind would take you. Then, suddenly, you’re confined on a reservation and told you can’t hunt, you can’t sing your traditional songs or dance your traditional dances. Ledger art to Indians was almost like blues music to black people. They were painting pictures of the old days, remembering their times of freedom.”