The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

KIOWA SIX.

The group now referred to as “the Kiowa Six” represents a major shift in twentieth-century American Indian art. The legacy of their work continues to influence markets and creative pursuits in Native art today. In 1926 Jack Hokeah (1901–69), Spencer Asah (1906–54), Stephen Mopope (1898–1974), and Monroe Tsatoke (1904–37), all members of the Kiowa tribe, began training at the University of Oklahoma (OU) under the direction of Oscar Brousse Jacobson, director of the University of Oklahoma School of Art (now the School of Visual Arts). A well-regarded painter of landscapes and a proponent of modernist aesthetics, Jacobson was a museum director, an arts promoter, and a significant supporter of Native artists throughout his tenure at OU. The following year, 1927, Lois Bou-ge-tah Smoky (Kaulaity) (1907–81), who had also received art training, joined the group. Smoky’s tenure was short, and when she went back home, her position was filled by James Auchiah (1906–74). All but Monroe Tsatoke received formal training in the arts beginning in 1914 at St. Patrick’s Mission School (Catholic) in Anadarko, then a federal facility known as the Anadarko Boarding School. At school, the talented young artists were instructed by Sister Olivia Taylor (1872–1931), a Choctaw nun.

Scholars and markets have at various times excluded Lois Smoky and James Auchiah from the group. With the omission of one or the other of these two individuals, for several decades the Kiowas were better known as “the Kiowa Five.” Traditional gender roles in the Native communities of the Great Plains region carried an expectation that women would create abstract designs and men would create figural representations, which led to some disquiet about Smoky’s depiction of human figures. Notably, art historians consider her paintings of women and children to be among the first by a Native woman to depict mothers and children. Due to the limited volume of her works, her paintings are now regarded as the most valuable in the marketplace.

In 1928 Jacobson organized the Kiowa artists’ paintings into an exhibition that traveled to the First International Art Exposition in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1929 in Nice, France, he oversaw the publication of a portfolio edition of the Kiowa students’ prints titled Kiowa Indian Art. Seven hundred copies were printed in France by the publisher C. Swedzecki, about whom little is known. These are now considered rare collector’s items. Some of the group went on to be active in painting murals in Oklahoma and Washington, D.C. Notably, James Auchiah and Stephen Mopope studied mural painting techniques under Olle Nordmark at the Indian Art Center at Fort Sill and painted murals in the U.S. Post Office in Anadarko and in the U.S. Department of the Interior building in Washington, D.C.

While the six Kiowa students were among the first in the country to receive formal art training at the university level, their legacy continues to reverberate throughout the arts industry in Oklahoma, the United States, and the world. Their work is widely collected, and their style of painting became quickly known as “the Oklahoma Flat Style,” which evolved into “the Bacone Flat Style,” and later into “the Traditional Indian Painting” style. Their artworks continue to make meaningful contributions to the legacies of the individual artists’ families, the culture of the Kiowa people, and to the arts generally in Oklahoma and beyond.

Alicia Harris