The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

MAHIER, EDITH ALBINA (1892–1967).

Edith Albina Mahier, a professor of art at the University of Oklahoma (OU), is celebrated in Oklahoma art history for her role in the instruction of pivotal American Indian artists. Also called Ely or Eli Mahier, she was born on December 14, 1892, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Henry and Maud Bell Roberts Mahier. She had five younger siblings: Mary Telcide, Salina Ann, William Henry Harrison, Frances Marie, and John Forrest.

Mahier received a bachelor of design degree from Newcomb Memorial College, the women’s associate of Tulane University, in New Orleans in 1916. She worked briefly as an illustrator for a New Orleans newspaper before being hired as a professor of art by Oscar Jacobson at the University of Oklahoma in 1917. A member of the Gamma Phi Beta sorority, Mahier was a well-loved and respected member of the university faculty.

She is best known for her involvement with twentieth-century American Indian artists. Notable students were the Kiowa Six, Acee Blue Eagle, and Dick (Walter Richard) West, Sr. She initially met her Kiowa students, Monroe Tsatoke, Steven Mopope, Jack Hokeah, and Spencer Asah, in 1926 after Bureau of Indian Affairs agent Susie Peters showed her drawings executed by the four. Peters made arrangements for the men to come to OU and live with Mahier in her home until Jacobson could officially enroll them in the university. They were eventually joined by two other Kiowa artists, Lois Smoky and James Auchiah. Mahier oversaw a personalized instruction program for the Kiowa Six and other American Indian artists. Her care for students also extended to artists Olinka Hrdy and Leonard Good, who went on to cite her as influential in supporting their artistic practices.

Mahier also had a successful career as an artist. After receiving teaching aid for her professorship, she visited art programs in New York and studied classics for a year in France and Italy. Predominately creating illustrations and woodblock prints, she often depicted dream-like, mystical memories of her Louisiana childhood. She focused on swamp and forest scenes and included fantastical creatures, such as goblins and nymphs, in her work.

Her most publicized piece was a 1939 New Deal–Era mural commissioned for the Watonga, Oklahoma, United States Post Office. The work was one of forty-one post office murals installed around the state. She was the only woman among seven artists selected to participate. Her oil-on-canvas mural, Roman Nose Canyon, was conceived in consultation with Watonga residents, Cheyenne community members, and OU anthropologists. After its installation in 1941 the mural was picketed by people who said that it inaccurately represented Southern Cheyenne regalia and perpetrated a “Vanishing Race” or assimilationist rhetoric. Protests were later assumed to be a publicity stunt by the local municipality.

After she returned to her professorship, Mahier shifted her focus from painting to textiles. Collaborating with her sister, Frances Mahier Brandon, she designed a line of American Indian–inspired clothing for the Dallas retailer Neiman Marcus. After the line became popular, she transferred from the OU School of Art to Home Economics. In her new position she taught classes on textiles and clothing design and organized student charity fashion shows.

Retiring from the university in 1963, she moved to Natchez, Mississippi, to be near her sisters. Edith Albina Mahier died on December 2, 1967, at age seventy-five.

Laurel Grimes