The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

BLACKOWL, ARCHIE (1911–1992).

Known among the Southern Cheyenne people as Aénȯhéévé’hȧtse (Flying Hawk), Archie Blackowl, Sr., was an artist and a chief. He was born on November 23, 1911, in Weatherford, Oklahoma, to White Cow/Woeste Crow Necklace and Wade Blackowl, who descended from Cheyenne chiefs Crow Necklace and Roman Nose. Archie Blackowl attended Fort Sill Indian Boarding School and Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. He married Mary Fay Shepherd, of Kingfisher, and later Faith Attocknie, the daughter of Comanche chief Albert Moaf-Pete-Tah-Werker At Tock-Nie. Blackowl fathered six children.

He began painting as a child and continued through his teens and early career. He received education as a diesel engineer for the Phillips Petroleum Company in California. Encouraged by several mentors, including Woody Crumbo and Frank Phillips, he pursued his passion for painting, finding great success as a leading figure in the Oklahoma Indian painting tradition.

Blackowl contributed to the Southern Plains “traditional” Indian painting style that developed in Oklahoma in the 1920s and 1930s and defined Native art throughout the twentieth century. The traditional style utilizes flat areas of bright color to create dynamic, two-dimensional scenes, often with minimal or no background. Often called the “flat” style, it developed further at Bacone College (Muscogee) and in New Mexico. Influenced in part by ancestral painting practices of decorating hides or the interiors of Plains lodges, the style references the tradition of ledger drawing and was formalized at federal boarding schools and in university-level painting schools for Native artists. A robust market swiftly developed and transformed the flat or traditional style into the first prominent, marketable art form for Native artists, defining the market for several generations.

Various accounts suggest that Archie Blackowl’s first attempts at painting grew from watching a Cheyenne elder paint a hide; the story demonstrates Blackowl’s significance as a person who witnessed ancestral practices. His paintings incorporate ancestral Cheyenne activities and ceremonial scenes linking them with contemporary contexts and with the marketplace. Many of his paintings in the flat style are dynamic and incorporate the fluidity of movement of dancers and ceremonial participants.

Always involved in his community’s ceremonial life, Blackowl participated in the Cheyenne Sun Dance, attended the Native American Church, and took part in a variety of cultural dances. As ceremonies, dances, and other aspects of Oklahoma tribal communities developed during the early twentieth century, they became his primary subjects. They represent the character of Cheyenne life, ranging from dramatic, dynamic, explosive dances with swirling fringe and feathers to more somber moments bound up in contemplative prayer. Dynamism and diversity became hallmarks of his significance to American Indian art.

Blackowl’s painting Sunrise Dance of the Sun Dance (1945) won first prize in the Plains category at the first-ever Philbrook Indian Annual (1946), a juried competition. Winning this prize anchored his legacy as a leading figure in the Great Plains Indian art scene, the Indian art market, and the Oklahoma traditional style. The painting depicts dancers and singers in the Cheyenne Sundance lodge, wearing ceremonial regalia, waving sage and willow bundles, and blowing eagle-bone whistles. The work also includes iconographic elements depicted in the flat style without a background or obvious referent but which may be interpreted to represent the four directions invoked in the Sundance. The painting remains in the collection of the Philbrook Museum. A winner of many competitions, Blackowl was named The Honored One from the Red Earth Art Competition in Oklahoma City.

In 1936 the Bureau of Indian Affairs supported the development of the Indian Art Center, a progressive program (at Fort Sill, separate from the Fort Sill Indian boarding school), in which students learned advanced techniques in fresco painting. Blackowl numbered among several notable students from many different tribes. Later these artists painted murals in many prominent public buildings. Under the auspices of the New Deal, Archie Blackowl produced several murals, of which his best-known works are located in Oklahoma at the Kiowa Hospital, Riverside Indian School, Philbrook Museum, Fred Jones, Jr. Museum of Art, Southern Plains Indian Museum, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, and Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.

Museums and institutions holding Blackowl’s works include the Palmer House in Chicago, Haskell Indian School (now Haskell Indian Nations University) in Lawrence, Kansas, Heard Museum in Phoenix, St. Louis Art Museum, The Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School in South Dakota, Red Rock State Park in New Mexico, and Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha. Archie Blackowl died on September 15, 1992, in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Alicia Harris