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Finding Frank Ashford

By John Andrews

Aberdeen’s Troy McQuillen became fascinated by the work of Frank Ashford at the K.O. Lee Aberdeen Public Library, which owns several oil paintings by the Brown County artist. McQuillen is searching the world for more of Ashford’s work, and hopes to answer at least some of the questions that remain about the quiet painter from Stratford. Photo by Stephanie Staab

There’s a painting in the Dacotah Prairie Museum in Aberdeen of a woman wearing a salmon-colored sleeveless dress, a floral print shawl, her left hand drawn to her chest as she gazes off the canvas directly at the viewer. Twelve years ago, when South Dakota Magazine assembled a list of paintings every South Dakotan should see, the late John Day — a widely respected art scholar and then curator of the Oscar Howe Gallery at the University of South Dakota — included Woman with a Shawl on his list of the 10 best paintings ever produced by a South Dakotan.

We know nothing about the identity of the woman and, for many years, very little about the man who painted her, even though Frank Ashford was considered among the best American artists of his time. Ashford grew up near Stratford and traveled the world, painting portraits of governors, Supreme Court justices, a U.S. president and the First Lady and other members of high society. He painted in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, Paris and the banks of the James River in Brown County.

Ashford likely produced hundreds of paintings, many of which have been lost since his death in 1960, several years before a young Troy McQuillen began noticing the few Ashfords hanging in Aberdeen’s public library. Decades later, those childhood memories sparked a quest to find as many of the old artist’s paintings as he can, and maybe learn something about the man along the way. Among his early discoveries? He’s not the first Aberdonian to go looking for Frank Ashford.

***

Elderkin Potter Ashford was a Civil War veteran, serving with the 23rd Iowa Volunteers at Milliken’s Bend, Vicksburg and Mobile, among other prominent battles. He moved his family to a homestead in Rondell Township, southeast of Aberdeen along the James River near Stratford in 1893. The Ashfords included his wife Cassandra, who suffered from arthritis and spent many years confined to a wheelchair, daughters Grace and Helen, and sons Ward, Fred and Frank, who was born in 1878.

The elder Ashford never lost his sense of patriotism. He hosted a grand celebration at his homestead every Memorial Day. Hundreds of people met to decorate graves at nearby Oakwood Cemetery, then heard speeches delivered from the front porch of the Ashford home. Many locals believed that Frank’s interest in painting portraits of politicians stemmed from those annual gatherings.

Just before he turned 18, Frank left Brown County for the Chicago Art Institute, where he studied drawing under Frederick Frier and John Vanderpoel. After three years in Chicago, he spent a year at the Pennsylvania Art Institute in Philadelphia and another year at the New York School of Art, studying in both places under William Merritt Chase, an Impressionist painter perhaps best known for his portraits.

Ashford’s self-portrait.

Following his studies, Ashford established a studio in Paris, where he painted for seven years. He visited home in April of 1912, sailing on a French ship called the Bretagne, which passed through the same North Atlantic iceberg field that doomed the Titanic later that same day.”We passengers aboard could not grasp the full purport of the tragedy,” Ashford told the Aberdeen Weekly News when he arrived in town in May.”It was so overwhelming, and many did not believe it until we reached New York.”

As World War I embroiled Europe, Ashford returned to the United States permanently in 1914. He spent time painting in New York, Minneapolis and Seattle before settling down in South Dakota sometime in the 1920s. A Sioux Falls Argus Leader story from that decade referred to Ashford as,”such a simple, common, everyday person, friendly and unassuming, and not at all what one would think of an artist who had lived in Paris.”

Ashford was briefly married around that time to a model he’d met in New York named Marjorie Rickel, but they divorced in 1929. Locals around Stratford believed the marriage ended because Rickel could not get accustomed to South Dakota’s rural lifestyle and was bitter about supporting her husband, who excelled in making art but struggled with financial management.

Ashford painted several prominent politicians and judges beginning in the 1920s, including Louis Brandeis, chief justice of the New York Supreme Court. He painted three South Dakota Supreme Court justices, as well as governors Andrew Lee and Charles Herreid. He later painted governors Leslie Jensen, Sigurd Anderson and Joe Foss twice, once as a politician and again as a World War II aviator.

His work was attracting an audience. In the late 1920s, he sold 11 oil paintings to be placed around the campus of the Dakota Hospital for the Insane in Yankton (today the Human Services Center). The purchase was an extension of the efforts of Dr. Leonard Mead, the hospital’s superintendent from 1891 to 1899 and again from 1901 until his death in 1920. Mead believed that creating a more welcoming environment through art and architectural beauty would help patients recover. He began an art collection with several watercolors in 1906, and the Ashford oils added to the campus dÈcor.

Perhaps Ashford’s biggest professional achievement came in 1927 when he learned that President Calvin Coolidge planned to spend the summer in the Black Hills. He asked his friend, state historian Doane Robinson, if it would be possible to have Coolidge and his wife Grace sit for portraits. The two exchanged letters, and eventually Sen. Peter Norbeck — among the architects of the president’s vacation to South Dakota — was added. The flurry of correspondence resulted in a sitting at the Custer State Park Game Lodge in July.

Remarkably, Ashford had the Coolidge paintings nearly finished by mid-August. He often said that he only needed to sit with a subject for three to five hours and could finish a nearly life-size portrait in about 10 days. Ashford produced two paintings each of the president and the First Lady. A portrait of Coolidge seated and wearing a light-colored suit and another of Grace Coolidge in a green dress hang in the lodge’s lobby. Another showing the president wearing a headdress and Grace in a red dress hang in the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum at Forbes College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Frank and his brother Fred (right), pictured in about 1940, were among five siblings who lived on the Ashford family’s Brown County homestead.

Ashford was happy with his Coolidge work.”The portrait of Coolidge, I think, is one of my best and it pleased him very much,” he wrote to a friend in Seattle.”Mr. Coolidge remarked that he thought it was the most satisfactory portrait that had been painted of him, which I considered a high compliment, as he had been painted by several noted artists.”

The following year, Ashford was commissioned to paint a portrait of William Henry Harrison Beadle, known in South Dakota as the savior of school lands because of his foresight to preserve two sections in each township for schools at a time when speculators gobbled up land at tremendously low prices. To commemorate the 90th anniversary of Beadle’s birth, the Young Citizens League and E.C. Clifford, the state superintendent of schools, created a plan to place Beadle’s picture in every South Dakota school. Ashford would paint the oil portrait and hundreds of prints would be made.

Ashford reportedly painted a portrait based on a photograph of Beadle, but the whereabouts of the original art and prints is a mystery.

Painting opportunities were slim during the Depression, World War II and the postwar years. Growing older and feeling lonely, he went to live with his brother and sister-in-law, Ward and Violet Ashford, in Salem, Oregon, in 1948. He became re-energized by the beauty of the Willamette Valley and painted several landscapes around the Ashfords’ farm. He also opened a studio, where he painted until returning to Aberdeen in 1956.

Ashford moved into the Boyd Apartments on the second floor of the Malchow Building downtown and settled into a routine. He met with locals for coffee and meals, and every afternoon stopped at Plymouth Clothing to visit a group of downtown business owners and friends. When he didn’t arrive on Nov. 21, 1960, they went to his apartment where they found him dead of a heart attack. Ashford was 82.

***

This story would be considerably shorter if not for the tireless work of Frances”Peg” Lamont. She spent more than a year researching Ashford for a paper presented at Augustana University’s annual Dakota Conference in 1990 and uncovered many of the aforementioned details about his life and career. Lamont served seven terms in the state senate from Aberdeen and was a longtime advocate for historic preservation, women, senior citizens and mental health. She was a founding member of the Dacotah Prairie Museum and Historic South Dakota, helped launch the Northeastern Mental Health Center and was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the Federal Council on Aging, where she served three terms. She remained active in several endeavors until her death in 2008 at age 94.

McQuillen discovered Ashford’s Yellow Chrysanthemums at Pomona College in California.

Lamont was visiting the Black Hills with her parents, Fred and Frances Stiles, in the 1930s when she first saw the 1927 Ashford portraits of Calvin and Grace Coolidge hanging at the Custer State Park Game Lodge. It served as her introduction to Ashford, who was never far from her mind, even as she left South Dakota to attend the University of Wisconsin at Madison and found work as a researcher and copy writer for the Ladies’ Home Journal and McCall’s in New York City.

She and her husband William Lamont, a Harvard-educated fellow South Dakotan, made their home in Aberdeen after their marriage in 1937. The Lamonts became entrenched in life in the Hub City while Ashford painted in and around Aberdeen and Oregon. When he died in 1960, Ashford left 23 paintings in his apartment and the family home near Stratford. Local attorneys Hugh Agor and Douglas Bantz became the executors of Ashford’s estate and struggled to sell the art. They bought several paintings themselves and donated others to the Alexander Mitchell Public Library (today the K.O. Lee Aberdeen Public Library) and the Dacotah Prairie Museum. Lamont ensured that the two Coolidge portraits made their way to Massachusetts. Others have simply disappeared.

Nearly 30 years later, with Ashford fading into obscurity, Lamont began to wonder what became of his paintings. She launched a worldwide search and tried to learn as much about Ashford as could be discovered.”For years, bits and pieces of Frank Ashford’s life had delighted me,” Lamont wrote.”Finally came the time to write about him, but libraries, art schools and records were scarce. The search for Ashford paintings has all the elements of untangling a mystery.” Fortunately, there were still several families in and around Stratford who shared their memories of Ashford. Those interviews, along with a smattering of publications and newspaper articles, revealed a prolific and energetic artist.”It seemed that wherever he stopped, even briefly, and found an interesting client, he established a studio and proceeded to paint with vigor and enthusiasm, turning out untold hundreds of artworks.”

Lamont successfully located several of those paintings, and today McQuillen is continuing her work. He is the owner of McQuillen Creative Group, an advertising and marketing business located across the street from the building where Ashford lived his final years. He also publishes Aberdeen Magazine and wrote a story about his Ashford quest in early 2018.”I used to go to the Alexander Mitchell Library a lot when I was a kid, and his paintings were all over,” McQuillen says.”The images were just burned into my brain. Then as an adult, I started a magazine and got on the library board and really started to wonder what these paintings were about. I learned about his national and international reputation for being a pretty good artist.”

The internet makes searching a little easier, with paintings occasionally showing up on online auction sites such as eBay (a seller in Portland, Oregon, is currently offering an Ashford portrait of a boy in a cowboy outfit for $795). But there remains a lot of sifting through historical paperwork. For example, a newspaper article from the 1950s mentioned that a couple donated two Ashford paintings to Pomona College in Claremont, California on behalf of a friend. McQuillen contacted the school, which had no record of it. But staff at the college’s Benton Museum of Art searched the archives and found a still life called Yellow Chrysanthemums, dated 1916 and signed”Ashford.” The second painting remains lost.

Woman with a Shawl, among Ashford’s most famous portraits, hangs at Aberdeen’s Dacotah Prairie Museum.

Another elusive painting is The Three Sisters, a critically acclaimed work that Ashford exhibited in Paris in 1912. Records indicate that he kept the painting, and a photograph from an exhibition in Aberdeen during the late 1950s shows it hanging on the wall. But The Three Sisters was not listed among the paintings in Ashford’s estate when he died.

Other works have disappeared even more recently. During Lamont’s search 30 years ago, she documented only five of the 11 paintings that were sold to the Human Services Center in Yankton. When McQuillen inquired in early 2021, he found just three: Modern Madonna, Lincoln the Lawyer and a portrait of former administrator George Sheldon Adams.

For South Dakotans wishing to see Ashford’s work firsthand, a trip to Aberdeen in the best bet. The Dacotah Prairie Museum owns a winter landscape and six portraits: Marjorie (his wife), Fred Hatterschiedt and Ole Swanson (both local businessmen), Woman with a Green Headband, Woman with Coral Necklace and Woman with a Shawl. The museum also has Ashford’s palette, easel, his lamp for portrait painting and his wooden traveling painting case, still filled with supplies.

The K.O. Lee Aberdeen Public Library has Woman in Pink; Abraham Lincoln (based on a rare ambrotype photograph that he owned taken of Lincoln in 1858 and similar to the Lincoln portrait at the Human Services Center); Governor Joe Foss, The Aviator and War Hero; Woman at Piano; and Ashford’s self-portrait, among other works.

McQuillen has also launched a website, which includes photographs of nearly 40 paintings that he has rediscovered, with more to come.”My goal here is that if people or antique stores have paintings by him, then at least they would know who he is and what they have,” he says.

It’s a modest goal to honor an equally modest man, who should always be remembered in South Dakota’s art world and beyond.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Modern Storyteller

By John Andrews

Downtown Rapid City has been artist Donald Montileaux’s home base for more than 40 years.

A pencil begins to scratch across a blank white sheet of paper. The noise is barely audible, but it’s there. Donald Montileaux is drawing Mickey Mouse.”It’s a stress reliever,” Montileaux says.”My other drawings take a lot of thinking, but Mickey, he just flows out of me.” He pauses for a moment.”You probably better not put that,” he says.”Walt Disney is gone, but his corporation is still around, and I might get in trouble.”

It seems doubtful that the multi-billion-dollar Walt Disney Corporation would kick up a fuss over a guy in South Dakota scrawling out a few Mickey Mouses just to keep his hands busy, especially if they knew the impact that one tiny cartoon character had on Montileaux’s life, and, in turn, the wider world of Native American art.

In his 71 years, Montileaux never earned a dime off a bootlegged Mickey Mouse. They’re drawn simply for the delight of his children and grandchildren, or because, after several decades of making art, his hands simply want to make more, even during an interview. His true passions are Indian warriors, horses and buffalo — not brown buffalo, but painted bright red, yellow or blue. His ledger art is an extension of the tribal tradition of painting or drawing on buffalo hides. Even casual observers can see the influences of his two main mentors: Herman Red Elk and the great Yanktonai artist Oscar Howe.

His paintings hang in homes and galleries around the world — and beyond. Within the last decade, Montileaux brought his art to the pages of children’s books, first as an illustrator and more recently as a storyteller. It was a long journey that required time, patience and ultimately acceptance from tribal elders as he sought to bring a much revered and protected Lakota tradition to a new medium.

And it all started at a kitchen table on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, when a father took his son into his lap and began teaching him how to draw Mickey Mouse.

***

Montileaux spent the first five years of his life in a small house in Kyle, the only child of Floyd and Clara Montileaux.”My mother and father only had eighth grade educations, and they had a hard time with life,” he says.”But they knew that the only way to really achieve anything was through education, and they wanted to give me a good education.”

The family moved to Rapid City, where Montileaux’s father took a job in a sawmill and his mother went to work as a dietician at St. John’s Hospital. Montileaux attended Catholic school through eighth grade. The course offerings did not include art, which led him to consider other career paths.”When I was in eighth grade, I wrote a little autobiography and said I wanted to become a priest. My dad was Lutheran, and my mom was Catholic. Dad said, ‘Maybe we need to broaden our son’s horizons a little bit.'”

They enrolled their son in public school, and an artistic fire that had been kindled on the reservation was reignited. Entertainment had been scarce in those days, so after the evening meal, while Montileaux’s mother washed dishes, he and his father grabbed a few comic books and sat at their kitchen table.”‘Let’s draw,’ he would say to me, and he’d help me. Mom was the judge. I drew a lot of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy. That’s how he entertained me, but he also instilled a desire to become an artist.”

That desire blossomed at Rapid City High School.”In ninth grade, I was signing up for classes and one was industrial arts,” he says.”I just saw ‘arts’ and said, ‘Oh, I love that. Art.’ So I signed up. I walked in the door and here are all these nails and hammers and saws. I thought, ‘This is not what I wanted.’ So, I headed to the counselor’s office, and he said, ‘You want fine arts.'”

“Confrontation” features Montileaux’s brightly colored horses that seem to fly off the pages of a century-old ledger book.

Montileaux explored ceramics, sculpture, drawing, painting — every artistic medium he could imagine. He was also drawn to the Sioux Indian Museum and Crafts Center in Halley Park, a facility administered by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board of the U.S. Department of the Interior.”I was too young to be in there alone so I would get kicked out. But I would continue to sneak in because they had this Native American wax figure called Oscar. I loved that guy.”

His precociousness aside, the museum curator, Ella Lebow, appreciated his persistence and, perhaps more importantly, recognized his artistic ability. In 1964, during his sophomore year, she recommended him for acceptance in a new summer art institute held at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion under the guidance of Oscar Howe.

The opportunity allowed Montileaux to learn from the two artists who became his lifelong friends and mentors — Howe and Herman Red Elk. Red Elk was a Yanktonai, born on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana in 1918. He became interested in art while recovering from tuberculosis at the Sioux Sanitarium in Rapid City. He enrolled in art courses at Black Hills State College in Spearfish and, through a program at the Sioux Indian Museum, studied traditional buffalo hide painting. Red Elk eventually joined the staff at the museum, where he remained until his death in 1986, and became one of the region’s most highly skilled hide painters.

Howe, born on the Crow Creek Reservation in 1915, is perhaps South Dakota’s most influential Native American artist. After studying at the Santa Fe Indian School, Howe abandoned the more traditional style he had learned there in favor of a more abstract method. His new paintings, marked by bright colors and pristine lines, helped push the boundaries of Native American art.

Howe taught at Pierre High School until 1957, when he was named artist in residence and professor of art at the University of South Dakota. He remained there until his retirement in 1980. In the early 1960s, he launched a summer art workshop designed to help students learn more about Native American art. Howe’s program lasted only a few years, but inspired the university’s current Oscar Howe Summer Art Institute, open to high school students in grades 10 through 12.

Red Elk and Montileaux traveled across the state together for Howe’s workshop in 1964 and again in 1965.”Oscar Howe was everything I wanted to be — an artist, a teacher and a family man,” Montileaux says.”He was a taskmaster and a professionalist. Before he even started drawing, he knew where those lines would go. He mentally had it in his head before he put it down on paper. So, for a 10th grader sitting in class — kind of wild and crazy and hard to stay attentive — he really had little time for me. But Herman was a mature adult, and he helped me get through that first two weeks with Oscar because Oscar was so regimented. But the second summer I went down there, I really became friends with Oscar because I had matured a little more and my drawings matured.”

Even though Montileaux had been a rough-around-the-edges sophomore in 1964, Howe could see that the young man had paid attention. Many of the techniques Howe had taught were becoming evident in Montileaux’s drawings. One night, Howe invited Montileaux and Red Elk to his home for dinner, where they met Howe’s wife, Heidi, and daughter, Inge Dawn.

“You don’t have a Lakota name,” Howe told him.”Montileaux is not a very Lakota name. So, Herman and I have been talking through the winter about a name for you. You’re like a little bird. You’re into everything. You fly all over, like a little yellow bird. So we’re going to give you the Lakota name Yellowbird. You’re going in a good direction, but you’re all over the place getting there.”

“I really feel proud of that,” Montileaux says.”Oscar and I developed a friendship. We became an extended family in the two weeks that I was there. After that, I could always call Oscar and talk to him. He was always available. After I became a successful artist and Oscar had passed away, Heidi would come to art shows and visit me. She would catch me up on the previous year. When she came into a show, everybody knew that for an hour don’t even come close to me, because that was Heidi’s and my time to talk.”

His stint in Vermillion helped Montileaux earn a full scholarship to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After three years there, he earned another full scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. But he soon discovered that the friendly and relaxed lifestyle to which he had grown accustomed in South Dakota and the Southwest did not exist on the East Coast. He came home and enrolled at Black Hills State College in Spearfish.

In 1970, he moved to the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation to teach elementary and junior high art.”I had wanted to be an art teacher, but I realized a teacher has not only the six or seven hours in the classroom, they devote 24 hours, seven days a week,” he says.”I had no time for my art.”

After three years at Cheyenne River, Montileaux moved back to Rapid City, hoping to find that ever elusive time to paint and draw.

***

That combination proved difficult to find. Montileaux needed a steady income, so he went to work at the Sioux Indian Museum, where he met his wife, Paulette. They were married in 1974.

In 1977, work was just finishing on the new Rushmore Plaza Civic Center. Montileaux took a job as a building foreman and was immediately thrust into preparations to host one of the most influential entertainers of all time.”I got hired two weeks before the building opened, and in less than a month we had Elvis Presley. It was just a buzz. Since I was the building foreman I got to go backstage when Elvis arrived. I was probably 5 feet from him, and I was just thrilled.”

A buffalo hunt scene from “Tasunka: A Lakota Horse Legend.”

Montileaux eventually became the Civic Center’s event coordinator and finally its assistant manager. In the meantime, he’d created an art studio in his home. But the demands of a full-time job meant he still couldn’t give his art the time it needed.”What little time I had I would go down there and try to get inspired. I always thought the pieces I produced during that period were all unfinished. They just didn’t have that quality, that polish, that they could have had if I’d had more time.”

Still, a highlight of Montileaux’s career came in 1995 when one of his paintings was launched into space aboard the shuttle Endeavour. Montileaux was looking for ways to support a program called SKILL (Scientific Knowledge for Indian Learning and Leadership), offered through the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Richard Gowen, the school’s president, suggested Montileaux do a painting and sell prints, the proceeds from which would help fund the program.

Montileaux produced a Badlands scene with three young Native Americans gazing into the starry night sky.”I could not think of a title for this piece,” he says.”We were at the printer and he says, ‘I’m going to push the button, we need a title.’ Everyone was talking about what they saw in the painting. I said, ‘I don’t know Ö Looking Beyond One’s Self.’ He said, ‘Man, that’s great!’ and he hit the print button.”

An engineer working on the Endeavour’s upcoming mission offered to include the painting in the shuttle’s payload, in an effort to further publicize the fundraiser. It blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on the morning of March 2, 1995. Montileaux was not there. Instead, he stepped out into his front yard in Rapid City before sunrise that morning and, at the very minute Endeavour was scheduled to launch, he looked up at the stars — just like the subjects in his painting — knowing that his work was on an unprecedented journey into the universe.

Montileaux’s painting completed 262 orbits aboard Endeavour. Upon its return to earth, it was given to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Montileaux and others from the School of Mines traveled to the nation’s capital and presented President Bill Clinton with the No. 1 print.

Montileaux remained a weekend and evening artist during his 22-year career with the Civic Center.”We’d go to art shows on the weekends, and I’d always come back so inspired. Then we’d have to go to work the next day. I wished that I could be a full-time artist, and just do this.”

Finally, in 1999, at age 51 and with his three children grown, Montileaux and his wife began to consider that very possibility.”If you can make the house payment and put some food on the table, that’s all we really need,” Paulette told him. So Montileaux retired and, for the first time in his professional life, focused solely on art.

***

“I tried it and it just blossomed,” Montileaux says of the transition. One reason for his immediate success was his ledger art, a form in which scenes are drawn or painted on authentic ledger paper used by Indian agents or merchants during the late 1800s and early 1900s.”It had been dormant for so long that everyone was totally excited about it,” he says.”It was just me and about 10 other people doing it, nationwide. It was a very limited number of us.”

“Lakota Horse Nation.”

Ledger art is an extension of the buffalo hide painting tradition at which Herman Red Elk excelled.”In the wintertime, Herman would tell me stories about his drawings and what they meant and their symbols. So I tried to be hide painter for a while, but he was a master. I researched and found that once the buffalo were annihilated from the plains, Indians had no way of holding on to their ceremonies and history because they didn’t have a written language. So they did ledger drawings.

“Hides were so hard to come by, and you had to have bone brushes and rabbit skin glue and earth pigments. It was dirty and hard to do. I picked up a colored pencil and laid it on a piece of ledger paper. All of my drawings that I used to do on those hides came alive on that piece of paper.”

While he collected awards for his ledger drawings, Montileaux’s paintings truly rounded into form, particularly the horses that have become his trademark. Once again, their origin lies with Herman Red Elk, and the stories he told while the two of them worked at the Sioux Indian Museum. Warriors used to survey the land for advantageous points from which to attack enemy tribes, Red Elk said, often a small rise or a hill. As they sprinted down the slope, warriors gave a small tug on their horses’ reins. A pouch of herbs slid into the mouths of their mounts, giving the animals a burst of energy.”He said the horses would just fly off the hill and into that enemy camp. As soon as he said the word ‘fly,’ my horses never galloped or loped again. My horses fly.”

The legs of a Montileaux horse are fully extended, sometimes inches and sometimes feet above the ground. Observers can almost hear them thundering across the prairie, just as Herman Red Elk said they did. It’s a technique that Montileaux has mastered.”Herman always told me that once you put that black paint onto a hide, you can’t make a mistake. You have to know where you are going with that line,” he says.”Herman used to close his eyes and draw his horses. And now today, I can close my eyes and I can draw my horses, too. It’s something that all artists have to do. We practice our craft so much that it becomes an extension of who we are.”

In Montileaux’s case, his art is very nearly an extension of the two great mentors who shaped his career.”The design that I put down is Herman. The brilliance of my color is probably Oscar showing through,” he says.”They’re not in any way close to Oscar’s presentation. But the training, how to mix colors, how to stretch my paper when I do a watercolor, he’s there. Every time I do something, Oscar’s there.”

***

In 2006, Montileaux’s art entered a new realm when he was asked to illustrate a children’s book. Tatanka and the Lakota People told the traditional Lakota story of how the holy man Tatanka turned himself into a buffalo to help the Pte Oyate (buffalo people) survive after their emergence from the underworld through Wind Cave in the Black Hills. The text was written and edited by a group of Lakota elders and scholars. Montileaux’s paintings were done in a two-dimensional style reminiscent of buffalo hide paintings.

Stories such as Tatanka were traditionally kept within the sacred realm of Lakota oral history. Montileaux recalls many evenings as a child on the Pine Ridge Reservation spent at his grandmother’s cabin, a tiny home with no electricity, listening to grandfathers and uncles tell stories. It was often the only form of available entertainment, and they commanded the room.”When my uncle Albert came, it was really kind of a gift,” Montileaux says.”We’d all gather around him and he’d just take us away, telling us about wild horses, and Indians and all these things that had happened. And we never once thought that he was keeping a tradition alive by being a storyteller. We just thought of him as Uncle Albert coming to tell us a story. I never thought of him as a traditional storyteller, but he was.”

Montileaux read stories to youth at the 2019 South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood.

In 2014, Montileaux sought to bridge the divide between oral history and written stories once again, this time as both illustrator and storyteller. The idea came while visiting Alex White Plume, a Lakota elder perhaps best known for his battles against the federal government over the legalization of industrial hemp.”One night, Alex told stories. He’s a terrific storyteller,” Montileaux recalls.”He sat down and told this story and I thought, ‘My God, I’ve heard that story from my grandpas, grandmas and uncles throughout my childhood.’ It just struck a chord that I would like to write that story. And I listened to it — really listened to it — for the first time, because Alex was such a great storyteller.”

The story was about tasunka, the horse, and how these new creatures, once tamed, made the Lakota people rich and powerful. Montileaux worked on a few early drafts and shared them with White Plume, who remained unsure.”I really like what you’re doing here, but storytellers traditionally tell the story verbally,” White Plume told him.”We don’t write things down because we want people to listen to us when we tell stories. We want to make an impact on them.”

Montileaux understood White Plume’s concerns but explained that the Lakota people aren’t as centered as they once were. They live around the world and gathering for traditional storytelling sessions is much more difficult in the 21st century. They needed a new way to hear the stories that remain so important to their culture.

He went back to his Rapid City studio and finalized his text and ledger drawings. He asked Agnes Gay, the assistant archivist at Oglala Lakota College in Kyle, to provide the Lakota translation. After a rewrite that more sharply focused the story for children in second through fifth grade, Tasunka: A Lakota Horse Legend was published by the South Dakota Historical Society Press in 2014.

Montileaux brought the finished version to White Plume’s ranch near Manderson, unsure of what the elder would have to say.”His eyes lit up as he paged through it. He was pretty happy with everything. You could tell by his voice. He got done with the book and said, ‘Sit down. You got some time? I want to tell you a story about muskrat and skunk.’ So he told me the story, and then he said, ‘You know, I’ve thought about this and I think maybe you’re the one. Maybe you’re the person who does this for our tribe.’ And that was really an honor, because he accepted the fact that the book was good, and he gave me another story. But he also accepted the fact that we had to write things down to keep them alive.”

That began the latest chapter of Montileaux’s life, that of modern-day storyteller. The state historical society press published Muskrat and Skunk in 2017. This story explains the origins of the Lakota drum, once again with an accompanying translation from Agnes Gay.

Montileaux’s books reached a wider audience in 2019, when the press published all three stories in one volume called Tatanka and Other Legends of the Lakota People. As the South Dakota Humanities Council’s Young Readers One Book author, Montileaux spoke to students across the state leading up to his appearance at the South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood. More than 10,000 copies of Tatanka were distributed to second graders statewide.

***

Montileaux has established an artistic routine in retirement. His home studio contains everything he needs to do ledger drawings. He’s always on the lookout for ledger paper, particularly books that date between 1870 and 1930. They’re more plentiful than a person might think. They usually turn up at auction sales, or friends let him know if they see one in an antique store or elsewhere.”Every day I wake up, get my slippers on and come to my room,” he says.”I either pull out a piece that I’ve been working on or I start something new and different. Oscar Howe used to tell me, ‘Do every piece like it’s going to end up in the New York Museum of Fine Art, or even in the Louvre. Always have that attitude when you’re doing a piece, that it’s going to go far and it’s going to be there forever.’ I’ve always had that attitude.”

He keeps his painting supplies at a studio inside Prairie Edge, a store and gallery specializing in Native American arts and crafts in downtown Rapid City. He’s currently at work on another children’s book and a series of murals that will be installed inside South Dakota State University’s new American Indian Student Center sometime in 2020. Still, he wants to push his own artistic boundaries.”I really like to look at nature now. I’m trying to be that type of artist, like Renoir and CÈzanne. You know how the colors of their fields look so bold and beautiful? I want to do that, but I want to incorporate some Lakota feeling into those pieces. Maybe a medicine wheel someplace.”

The pencil scratching begins to grow fainter.”He’s got some great ears, a little nose and his hand is coming up,” Montileaux says as he puts the finishing touches on Mickey Mouse. Donald Montileaux has received worldwide accolades and awards for his books and art, but for maybe just a moment, he’s back at that little kitchen table on the Pine Ridge Reservation where it all began.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Animal Wisdom Stories

By Bernie Hunhoff


Mark McGinnis has a reputation as an artist who isn’t afraid to mix politics and paint. Nuclear weapons, socialism vs. capitalism and foreign policy are issues he has dealt with throughout his career.

So you can understand his friends’ surprise when he started a series on animals — buffalo, coyotes, mice, frogs and the like.

It developed almost by chance. In 1991, McGinnis was finishing a series on explorers. As usual, he found a controversial angle. He was comparing the explorers’ textbook reputations with his own expression of their lives based on historical research.

“One of the paintings was of Balboa and his dog, Leoncico,” says McGinnis. “To my surprise, I found painting the dog to be very enjoyable. I had never painted animals before.”

A year later, contemplating his next series and weary of confrontational art, he remembered the enjoyment of doing the dog and decided to create a series of animals based on Greek fables.

He soon changed the focus from Greek to Lakota/Dakota. “I thought it would be foolish to do a series on Greek fables when I was sitting in a homeland rich in animal stories of our own.”

As with all his projects, McGinnis began with extensive research. He studied Native American animal legends in turn-of-the-century books about Indian life.

At the same time, he became active in the South Dakota Peace and Justice Center and agreed to interview members of the Lakota and Dakota tribes for a newspaper project. He met many people on the reservations who knew similar animal stories. He also developed an even greater admiration for the Native American culture. “The people I interviewed really opened my eyes to the wonderful diversity of the Indian people and the wisdom that is there.”

When he visited with Indians about the animal stories, he found many knew the tales. “Sometimes they had a slightly different version, but I was amazed at how many had heard the stories before.”

Although Indian literature has historically been passed on orally rather than in written form, McGinnis says it has been preserved, and his goal is not to educate Indians about Indian stories. “This project is structured primarily for the European-American audience. I hope it gets some exposure to the Native Americans in the state, but I don’t think of myself in any way as a person who is going to teach them about their culture.”

Though McGinnis’ previous artistic subjects seemed foreign to South Dakota, he is not. Born and raised in Aberdeen, the son of a Milwaukee Railroad worker, he studied art at Northern State College. He received a master’s of fine arts degree from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and was working for an Indianapolis art gallery when Northern State offered him a teaching position in 1976.

He came home and taught art for 30 years. McGinnis is now retired from teaching but he’s still making art, specializing in acrylic, black ink and watercolor in Boise, Idaho.

The Meadowlark and the Rattlesnake

Once upon a time, there was a mother meadowlark. She had some little baby birds, but they weren’t quite ready to fly yet.

While she was sitting there with her little ones, a big rattlesnake came and coiled around her nest. She was very frightened. She feared for her little ones. She didn’t quite know what to do. She was shaking. Her heart was beating very fast. She had to think real fast about what to do. So she said,”Oh! Your uncle is here, your uncle almost never comes, finally came today, so I must cook for him!”

She turned to her oldest little one. She said,”Go and borrow a kettle, cause I must cook for your uncle. He must be very hungry. Hurry back with the kettle!”

So she sent the oldest one on. Pretty soon, he didn’t come back for a long time, so the snake waited there and kinda moved around a little bit and squeezed the nest a little bit tighter. And she got scared again so she told the second to the oldest son, she said,”You go find your brother, he must have got lost.”

So the next one [went]. She was just sitting there just talking, trying to keep the snake occupied. She ran out of things to say and the snake got restless because they didn’t come with the kettle. He moved closer and closer and coiled up his head.

She said to the youngest.”Go find your brothers! They should have been back. Maybe they both got lost. Bring the kettle cause your uncle is very hungry. I gonna cook for him,” she said.

So the youngest [ran] out of the nest and left. So now she had all the young ones out of the net, she flapped her wings and she flew up out of the nest as fast as she could. She said,”There, sit there and wait for whoever is going to cook for you.”

— Buckskin Tokens: Contemporary Oral Narratives of the Sioux by R.D. Theisz, editor (1975)

The Eagle and the Beaver

Out of the quiet blue sky there shot like an arrow the great War-eagle. Beside the clear brown stream an old Beaver-woman was busily chopping wood. Yet she was not too busy to catch the whir of descending wings, and the Eagle reached too late the spot where she had vanished in the midst of the shining pool

He perched sullenly upon a dead tree nearby and kept his eyes steadily upon the smooth sheet of water above the dam.


After a time the water was gently stirred, and a sleek, brown head cautiously appeared above it.


“What right have you,” reproached the Beaver-woman,”to disturb thus the mother of a peaceful and hard-working people?”

“Ugh, I am hungry,” the Eagle replied shortly.

“Then why not do as we do — let other folks alone and work for a living?”

“That is all very well for you,” the Eagle retorted,”but not everybody can cut down trees with his teeth or live upon bark and weeds in a mud-plastered wigwam. I am a warrior, not an old woman!”

“It is true that some people are born trouble-makers,” returned the Beaver quietly.”Yet I see no good reason why you, as well as we, should not be content with plain fare and willing to toil for what you want. My work, moreover, is of use to others besides myself and my family, for with my dam-building I deepen the stream for the use of all the dwellers therein, while you are a terror to all living creatures that were weaker than yourself. You would do well to profit by my example.”

So saying, she dove down again to the bottom of the pool.

The Eagle waited patiently for a long time, but he saw nothing more of her; and so, in spite of his contempt for the harmless industry of an old Beaver-woman, it was he, not she, who was obliged to go hungry that morning.

— Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales Retold by Charles and Elaine Eastman (1909)

The Raccoon and the Crawfish

Sharp and cunning is the raccoon, say the Indians, by whom he is named Spotted Face.

A crawfish one evening wandered along a riverbank looking for something dead to feast. A raccoon was also looking for something to eat. He spied the crawfish and formed a plan to catch him.

He lay down on the bank and feigned to be dead. By the by, the crawfish came nearby.”Ho,” he thought,”here is a feast indeed, but is he really dead? I will go near and pinch him with my claws and find out.”

So he went near and pinched the raccoon on the nose and then on his soft paws. The raccoon never moved. The crawfish then pinched him on the ribs and tickled him so the raccoon could hardly keep from laughing. The crawfish at last left him.”The raccoon is surely dead,” he thought. And he hurried back to the crawfish village and reported his find to the chief.

All the villagers were called to go down to the feast. The chief bade the warriors and young men to paint their faces and dress in their gayest for a dance.

So they marched in a long line — first the warriors, with their weapons in hand, then the women with their babies and children — to the place where the raccoon lay. They formed a great circle about him and danced, singing:

We shall have a great feast

On the spotted-face beast, with the soft smooth paws:

He is dead!

He is dead!

We shall dance!

We shall have a good time

We shall feast on his flesh.

But as they danced, the raccoon suddenly sprang to his feet.

“Who is that you say you are going to eat? He has a spotted face, has he? He has soft paws, has he? I’ll break your ugly backs. I’ll break your rough bones. I’ll crunch your ugly, rough paws.” And he rushed among the crawfish, killing them by the scores. The crawfish warriors fought bravely and the women ran screaming, all to no purpose. They did not feast on the raccoon; the raccoon feasted on them!

— Myths and Legends of the Sioux by Marie McLaughlin (1916)

The Little Mice

Once upon a time, a prairie mouse busied herself all fall storing away a cache of beans. Every morning she was out early with her empty cast-off snakeskin, which she filled with ground beans and dragged home with her teeth.

The little mouse had a cousin who was fond of dancing and talk but who did not like to work. She was not careful to get her cache of beans, and the season was already well gone before she thought to bestir herself. When she came to realize her need she found she had no packing bag, so she went to her hardworking cousin and said,”Cousin, I have no beans stored for the winter, and the season is nearly gone. But I have no snakeskin to gather the beans in. Will you lend me one?”

“But why have you no packing bag? Where were you in the moon when the snakes cast off their skins?”

“I was here.”

“What were you doing?”

“I was busy talking and dancing.”

“And now you are punished,” said the other.”It is always so with lazy careless people. But I will let you have the snakeskin. And now go, and by hard work and industry try to recover your wasted time.”

— Myths and Legends of the Sioux by Marie McLaughlin (1916)

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 1993 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Art, Violence and Poker Alice

By Michael Zimny

Legend says that Poker Alice damaged this painting when she fired her shotgun inside her Sturgis brothel. Image courtesy of the Days of ’76 Museum.

There is art that memorializes, mourns, celebrates or foments violence. Then there are works that get a value-upgrade out of real acts of violence.

Henry Ford paid a mint for the rocking chair Abraham Lincoln was reclined in when John Wilkes Booth shot him. The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses killer art from shrunken heads to arms and armor. John Wayne Gacy’s clown paintings are creepy enough on their own, but his artist’s bio helps move the merchandise. If the platter Salome used to bring Herodias the head of John the Baptist could be certified, it would fetch some serious coin at Sotheby’s.

Legend says Poker Alice used her shotgun to value-appreciate a decent if unremarkable nude that used to hang on her brothel wall. The painting is now in the collections of Deadwood’s Days of’76 Museum. Reportedly, Alice laced it with holes at her Sturgis brothel and willed it to fellow madam Big Hulda. Local artifact collector Don Clowser later located it at a bar in Gillette, Wyoming. The museum has since had the painting restored.

Is the story true? What can be verified is that Poker Alice was familiar with firearms. There is plenty of legend to go around about Deadwood’s famous card shark. It’s hard to know whether she became a gambler from a young age as some suggest, or as the cigar-chomping elder in the famous photos; or if she impressed future husband Warren Tubbs by shooting a man, who aimed to stab him, with her .38.

She did kill a man. More than a dozen rowdy soldiers burst into her brothel one night in 1913, and according to the Deadwood Pioneer-Times,”started to clean out the place … by cutting the electric light wires and throwing rocks through the windows.” Locked and loaded, Poker Alice”started shooting into the crowd with a .22 rifle,” hitting two soldiers. Private Fred Koetzle was mortally wounded. Two days later the Pioneer-Times reported that the state’s attorney would not file charges against her for the shooting, though she would be charged with”keeping a house of ill fame.”

“Ill fame” surrounded Alice the rest of her days. At 78, some forgotten state’s attorney shut down her business and prosecuted her for prostitution and violating Prohibition. Gov. William Bulow pardoned her. By then she was already a legend, making appearances as an icon of the Old West at the early Days of’76 parades.

Poker Alice.

For decades, she gambled with accomplished gunslingers and took them for everything they had. She outlived three husbands and nearly all the more-famous fellow outlaws — like Wild Bill and Calamity Jane — she may have knocked one back with in the saloons of Deadwood’s”Badlands” district, into an era of gentrification (Black Hills style) that capitalized on the legend of the old days to attract tourists.

So it wouldn’t have been out of character for her to shoot up the place and lodge some shot in an artist-rendered lady of the evening’s backside.

The painting itself is not by an unknown. Astley David Middleton (A.D.M.) Cooper was a renowned artist and protÈgÈ of George Catlin, who had retraced Catlin’s journeys through the American West and often depicted Western, particularly Native American subjects. Like Catlin, he saw the tragedy of westward expansion. His best works serve as elegies for lost ways of life.

He was well regarded in his time, earning enough to build a garish Egyptian-themed studio in his home base of San Jose, and still has a cult following, though his stature has waned with time. He was also the kind of guy who would enjoy a night at a joint run by Poker Alice. He liked the nightlife and left behind a prodigious output of lowbrow nudes that may have been used to pay off bar tabs.

That’s the kind of Cooper that hung on the wall at the Poker Alice joint in Sturgis, and that legend says she honeycombed with buckshot. If it’s true, she may have embellished the work of a (sometimes) funereal artist with the forensic debris of some john’s last night on the town.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Altars of Grass and Sky

By Katie Hunhoff

George Prisbe-Przybysz in his studio.

“Approach your work like a priest to the altar,” said writer Ernest Hemingway. That quote is a favorite of Black Hills painter George Prisbe-Przybysz. Canvas on an easel is his altar. Dogs sit at his feet while he paints, and Beethoven wafts through his studio in a tiny hamlet called Hanna, 12 miles southwest of Lead.

Prisbe’s longtime friend, Augustana University art professor emeritus Carl Grupp, says the surroundings are part of Prisbe’s process.”I heard he wouldn’t start painting in his studio until he had everything the way he wanted it,” Grupp says.”It’s not just the paintings that are impeccable, but the whole environment he lives in and that he creates for himself.”

And once Prisbe begins to paint, it is a spiritual experience.”I don’t paint to find meaning in life, but to create meaning,” Prisbe says.”I am not entirely certain who or what is the author of my paintings. It is from my hand, through my heart, that they come to be, but some other force is at work.”

Prisbe is a native of Edmunds County. His high school didn’t offer art, but his mother encouraged him to play with clay and paint, and eventually art consumed much of his free time.”I never did hunt or fish, but I did play sports. It was not uncommon for me to go home after a game to draw or paint instead of hanging out downtown.”

Prisbe attended Northern State University in Aberdeen, then studied painting and printmaking at Ohio University. When professors labeled his art as having a”Midwestern aesthetic,” he worked to disprove them until the day he got a postcard featuring a Harvey Dunn painting in the mail, and he felt a renewed appreciation for the landscapes back home. That postcard image set him on the path to become a landscape painter, using oils, acrylics and watercolors.

Acetes, Pennington County.

Professor Grupp became acquainted with Prisbe when he traveled to Northern State to demonstrate how to make a monoprint.”I found a dead bird on campus and brought it inside and did a drawing of it on the plate,” Grupp recalls.”Shortly after, I saw George had prepared the most beautiful monotypes of that bird that I had ever seen done. And I was supposed to be teaching him.”

Grupp surmises that Prisbe’s landscapes may someday be as important to South Dakotans as Harvey Dunn’s works.”I don’t know of another artist who nowadays is doing that kind of impeccable research on the landscape. His dedication is powerful.”

Prisbe is a student of tonalism, a movement that began at the turn of the 20th century. He describes it as”typified by focused views of intimate and unpopulated landscapes, executed with subdued, harmonious modulations of color, unified by tonal values, and infused with spirituality, mood and emotion.” Tonalism emerged in Europe; one of its major figures, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, is Prisbe’s self-described hero in the art world. Prisbe and Corot share an interesting similarity; neither ventured past their home landscapes for inspiration.

Pathetique, Meade County.

A few years ago, Prisbe was painting in his studio on a bright July afternoon.”All of a sudden the room darkened and I heard a roaring sound, as of wind.” He looked out the window, expecting to see a summer storm.”What I saw was the same bright, calm day that I had experienced earlier. The dimmed light and intense sound continued for several more seconds before I realized I was not alone,” Prisbe recalls. He says he felt the presence to be Corot.”I sat there, stunned and shaken, for several more seconds before normalcy returned. Still, to this day, I do not know quite what to make of this, but I believe the experience to have been an honor.”

Prisbe is now working on a Bear Butte series.”The spiritual forces of the site are palpable. I am struck that no matter the angle or vantage point, the mountain is always unmistakable as Bear Butte. I doubt that my interest in Bear Butte and this series will end until I do.”

Prisbe is also on a mission to drive every mapped road in the state.”I have an old Game, Fish & Parks atlas and I have been diligently marking off roads since the early’80s. I realize how ridiculous and impossible this goal is,” he surmises,”but I like the idea. The rewards always prove worthwhile.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Oscar Howe’s ProtÈgÈ

Editor’s Note: Bobby Penn, a student of Oscar Howe, was among the foremost Native American artists of the late 20th century. He was a master of oil and acrylic painting, drawing and printmaking. His subjects focused primarily on Indian themes and his own life story. Penn died Feb. 7, 1999, after a long battle with lung problems. His work is included in public collections at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Vincent Price Gallery in Chicago. Some of Penn’s artwork is available through the Akta Lakota Museum online gallery. This story is revised from the July/August 1991 issue of South Dakota Magazine.

By Rick Geyerman

From its perch above a southern window in a century-old Clay County farmhouse, a stuffed crow watches Bob Penn paint South Dakota landscapes and Native American symbolisms. Outdoors, a pair of red-tail hawks flies above the hilly grasslands. Just a few country miles away is the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, where Penn studied under Oscar Howe, the master of Sioux art.

Penn, a 44-year-old Sicangu Sioux/Omaha, is rising to the top of his field and is currently doing some of his most bold and striking work. Penn paintings hang in permanent collections at the Smithsonian and the Vincent Price Gallery in Chicago, as well as a dozen regional galleries on the Northern Plains. He has been the focus of 16 one-man shows, including exhibits at the Dahl Fine Arts Center in Rapid City and the Two Rivers Gallery in Minneapolis. Next year, he will share the spotlight with two Oglala Sioux artists, Richard Red Owl and Arthur Amiotte, at an exhibit of Plains Indian Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Art. A new mural commissioned by the Hennepin County (Minneapolis) Medical Center and the mounting of a traveling retrospective occupy his current studio time.

He served as chairman of the art department of Sinte Gleska College in Mission for three years, and has also taught at three other institutions. Early this summer he taught the Oscar Howe Native American Art Institute at the University of South Dakota, an honor Penn particularly cherished. The workshop had been discontinued since Howe’s death in 1983. Penn originals can sell for many thousands of dollars, and thanks to his partner/wife Alta, many of his works are now marketed as prints.

He never imagined such success when growing up on the Winnebago Sioux Reservation in Nebraska. At the age of 8, he was placed in an orphanage. In the summer, the school closed and students were sent to foster homes.

Bob learned about farming, carpentry and machinery in boyhood summers. He also joined the orphanage boxing team and for two years was the national champion in his weight class. Every boxer on the orphanage team, in fact, placed as either the national champ or the runner-up.

Looking back, he attributes such success to the fact that other fighters cannot “psyche out” an Indian. Bob’s father was a professional boxer and Bob thought about going to the Olympics or turning pro. Instead, he turned to the other love of his life — painting.

Ironically, it was the second time art triumphed over combat for Penn. His first art lesson occurred when his father separated him from a fight with his brother, sat him down and drew an Indian chief’s head. “Sit here until you can do that,” he commanded. Bob was fascinated … and hooked on art.

He attended St. Francis Indian School on the Rosebud Reservation and then enrolled at USD in Vermillion and experienced “super shock.” It was the first time he felt the pains of prejudice. But it was also the place he met Oscar Howe, the Yanktonai Sioux from the Crow Creek Reservation who became South Dakota Artist Laureate and was recognized worldwide as the leading painter of Sioux art.

Howe rigorously fought the categorization of Indian art. In 1958, the curator of the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa refused one of Oscar’s works because it didn’t fit the “Indian style.” In an indignant reply, Howe wrote: “Who ever said that my paintings are not in the traditional Indian style has poor knowledge of Indian art indeed. There is much more to Indian art than pretty, stylized pictures. … Every bit in my paintings is a true studied fact of Indian paintings. Are we to be held back forever with individualism, dictated to, as the Indian always has been, put on reservations and treated like a child … ?

“Well, I am not going to stand for it,” continued Howe’s letter. “Indian art can compete with any art … I only hope the art world will not be one more contributor to holding us in chains.”

Howe’s letter cast off restrictions that had bound Indian artists for years at the Oklahoma exhibit. Indian painters deluged the competition with new and innovative styles of work.

It was in this atmosphere of new artistic freedom that Bob Penn began his instruction under Howe. For five years, the two worked together, often one-on-one, and Penn recalls these years as the most significant period of his life. Howe termed Penn his most talented student.

However, talent and hard work don’t always mean immediate success in the art world. Penn has paid his dues. He played in several rhythm and blues bands and worked as an artist for both the USD School of Medicine and USD Educational Media Services. Though much of the work involved graphic layout, signs and posters, he learned technique and self-discipline. Between jobs he traveled to show his art, and slowly his paintings gained popularity.

His career also was boosted by romance. He met his wife, Alta, when she was an art gallery curator in Sedona, Arizona. She is an artist in her own right, but she is also adept at business and handles most of the family financial arrangements. She spirits Bob’s works from the studio as soon as he finishes. “Otherwise,” she says, ”I’m likely to come downstairs and find that he’s done a touch-up, and covered a perfectly good painting completely with an entirely new one!”

They enjoy Clay County living. The hawks who patrol the river valley seem to welcome the Penns, and Bob and Alta persuaded their landlord to preserve the prairie grassland pasture which cascades southward from their front porch to the Vermillion River.

Vermillion, despite those first awkward years in the 1960s, has been good to Bob Penn. The university commissioned him to create a mural for the Lakota cafeteria in 1989. It is a traditional Sioux design Penn had contemplated for years, saving for just the right location. The pattern — narrow horizontal bands of color which represent the four directional winds, struck through with yellow (lightning) and anchored by a shield — wishes visitors a long and fruitful life.

W.H. Over Museum in Vermillion also commissioned a piece that Penn calls “in the Charles Russell style.” The museum is building a room to showcase the painting.

Penn has not yet seen the movie Dances With Wolves but says he was glad to hear it is not just another movie where the white super-hero comes along and saves the Indian. “I understand that (Costner as) Lt. Dunbar is respectful and inquisitive, willing to let the world be what it should be.”

Penn added, “I try to approach my art the same way. To be prejudiced closes so many doors to things you can learn.”

A look around his workshop makes it obvious that Penn, like his mentor Howe, is stretching the limits of what might be considered traditional. Abstracts, still lifes and unusual landscapes are on canvasses. With a smile, he notes that anything he does is Indian art solely because he is Indian.

“The important thing is not to draw limits for myself, but to continue exploring new media and styles,” he says. “If a brush stroke doesn’t give me the effect I’m seeking, I may go into the yard for a misshapen twig. Art is what forces me to grow … my desire is just so strong.”

The crow watches, always, from his roost by the farmhouse window. And the crow often appears in his works. Penn calls it his personal totem.

“Birds were important to the Indian,” he explained. “They could fly higher, carry the prayers closer to God. I chose the crow because of its cunning, its adaptability, and ability to survive. The crow is the organic shape of many of my works that balances the harder edges. For a good painting I try to find a balance; I try to live my life the same way.”

Rick Geyerman, of Mitchell, was a classmate of Bob Penn at USD in the 1960s. One of his avocations is freelance writing.