Allan Houser

Allan Capron Houser or Haozous (June 30, 1914 – August 22, 1994) was a Chiricahua Apache sculptor, painter, and book illustrator born in Oklahoma.

He was one of the most renowned Native American painters and Modernist sculptors of the 20th century.

Houser's work can be found at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Oklahoma State Capitol Building, and in numerous major museum collections throughout North America, Europe, and Japan.

Additionally, Houser's Offering of the Sacred Pipe is on display at United States Mission to the United Nations in New York City.

Houser was born in 1914 to Sam and Blossom Haozous on the family farm near Apache and Fort Sill, Oklahoma, into the Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache tribe.

Geronimo had led the tribe in battle, and would later rely on his grandnephew Sam Haozous (Allan's father) to serve as his translator.

In 1934, a 20-year-old Haozous left Oklahoma to study at Dorothy Dunn's Art Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Dunn's method encouraged working from personal memory, avoiding techniques of perspective or modeling, and stylization of Native iconography.

For the latter, Haozous made hundreds of drawings and canvasses in Santa Fe and was one of Dunn's top students, but he found the program too constricting.

In 1939, Houser began his professional career by showing work at the 1939 New York World's Fair and the Golden Gate International Exposition.

He received his first major public commission to paint murals at the Main Interior Building in Washington, D.C.

He married Anna Maria Gallegos of Santa Fe, his wife for 55 years.

In 1940, he received another commission from the US Department of Interior to paint life-sized indoor murals.

He then returned to Fort Sill to study with Swedish muralist Olle Nordmark, who encouraged Houser to explore sculpture.

He made his first wood carvings that year.

When World War II interrupted Houser's life and career path, he moved his growing family to Los Angeles where he found work in the L.A. shipyards.

Houser worked by day and continued to paint and sculpt by night, making friends among students and faculty at the Pasadena Art Center.

Here, he was first exposed to the streamlined modernist sculptural statements of artists like Jean Arp, Constantin Brâncuși, and the English sculptor Henry Moore.

These three men – along with the English sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who was among the first sculptors to place sculptural voids within the solid planes of her works – would come to have a huge influence on Houser.

After World War II, Houser applied for a commission at the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas.

Haskell, a Native American boarding school, lost many graduates to the war and wanted a sculptural memorial to honor them.

Though Houser had been carving in wood since 1940, he had never before sculpted in stone.

He convinced the jury with his drawings and his conviction and completed the monumental work Comrade in Mourning from white Carrara marble in 1948.

It has become an iconic work, both for the artist and for Native American art in general.

In 1949, Houser received a Guggenheim Fellowship in sculpture and painting, which granted him two years to work on art and still provide for his growing family.

From 1952 to 1962, Houser worked as an art teacher at the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, Utah, which was primarily a Navajo boarding school.

The Intermountain years gave Houser time to teach, raise a family, and focus on his painting.

He completed hundreds of paintings there, experimenting with watercolors, oils, and other media.

While at Intermountain, he also worked as a children's book illustrator, providing drawings and paintings for seven titles – including an illustrated biography on the life of his grand-uncle Geronimo.

One of his notable students at the Intermountain Indian School was artist Robert Chee.

In 1962, Houser was asked to join the faculty of a new Native American art school, the Institute of American Indian Arts.

He returned to Santa Fe with his family to head up the Institute's sculpture department.

Casting his first bronzes in 1967, Houser was a student and teacher as well, bringing forth his own history and ideas for a student body from every corner of Native America.

He began working with the iconographies of other tribes, using modernist sculptural influences to forge the tribal and the abstract into a visual lexicon all his own.

During the early 1970s, Houser continued to teach at the Institute and began the rigorous production and exhibition cycle for which he became well known.

As head of the sculpture department, he felt compelled to work in as many sculptural media as possible, evidenced by his solo exhibition of stone, bronze, and welded steel sculptures at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona in 1970.

The following year, Houser exhibited paintings and sculpture at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, and in 1973 was awarded the Gold Medal in Sculpture at the Heard Museum Exhibition.

Exhibitions, awards, and accolades continued.

In 1975, he was asked to paint the official portrait of former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall.

That same year, he had a solo exhibition at the Governor's Gallery at the State Capitol in Santa Fe.