The early 1960s marked the start of a transition from the Indian art era circumscribed predominantly by non-Indian "experts" to a time when Native American artists began to shape and define their own visual, written, and performing arts. The decade of the 1960s also was the demarcation point between the federal Indian policies of termination and self-determination, producting a mix of programs that promoted both the assimilation of Indians into the dominant society and their cultural distinctiveness from it. Public and private support for contemporary native arts fostered a similar mix of freedom from stylistic and content constraints and a desire to respond to new audiences and marketplace opportunities. It was a period that saw the highest federal concentration on the economic advancement of artists since the government's Indian arts projects of the New Deal era.
———During the Kennedy administration, established and emerging Indian artists received heightened visibility, beginning with the commissioning of a work for the new president's inauguration by the Creek painter Solomon McCombs. McCombs, like other artists of his generation such as the painters Fred Beaver (Creek-Seminole) and Archie Blackowl (Cheyenne, was schooled in the "traditional Indian painting" technique at Bascone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Its arts programs were run from the 1930s into the 1970s by the senior painters Ace Blue Eagle (Creek), Woody Crumbo (Potawatomi-Creek), and Terry Saul (Choctaw-Chickasaw), and the painter-sculptor W. Richard West, Sr. (Cheyenne), who also taught at another arts center, the Haskell Institution in Lawrence, Kansas, and who received the art of Plains wood sculptor.
———Three contemporaries of the Bacone artists, in terms of age and stylistic training, who were prominent in the 1960s were the sculptor-painters Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache) and the painter Pablita Velarde (Santa Clara Pueblo) and Oscar Howe (Crow Creek Sioux). They had studied the flat-painting style at the Santa Fe Indian School's studio and quickly departed from the confines of the form. Houser would set the standard for Indian sculpture in that decade, as his son Bob Haozous would in the 1980x and 1990s. Mentor to hundreds of accomplished artists, including his apprentice sculptor Craig Goseyan (White Mountain Apache), Houser was awarded France's Palme Académique 1992 and the National Medal of Arts, for the only Indian ever to be so honored. Velarde's blend of traditional in imagery, natural materials, and modern painting techniques has influenced generations of Southwest painters, her daughter Helen Hardin and Tony Da (San Ildefonso Pueblo) among them.
———Oscar Howe's new work so startled the experts that his painting was rejected as nontraditional by the jury for the 1958 competition at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In response to artists' demands, arts competitions subsequently change their rules, and Howe's work swept the Philbrook's top awards in 1960 and 1961. Howe's success and his style were catalytic. He and such peers as W. Richard West, Sr., and Blackbear Basin (Kiowa-Comanche) energized younger painters like Doc Tate Nevaquaya (Comanche), John Hill (Creek-Cherokee), Ruth Blalock Jones (Delaware-Shawnee, and Bacone's first woman art director), and Howe's students who would become influences in their own right; the painter and sculptor Fritz Scholder (Luiseño); and the Oglala Sioux painters Arthur Amiotte and Donald Montileaux. In 1981, two years before he died, Howe said he had been "labeled wrongfully a Cubist. The basic design is Talokmu [spider web]. From an all-indian background, I developed my own style."
———In 1962, a federal focal point for native arts development was established in Santa Fe with the founding of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), which would be partially privatized in 1988, as the Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Arts and Culture Development. The IAIA plan was advanced early in the Kennedy administration by the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Southwest Indian Arts Project (1958-61), by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board (IACB), and by the poet-writer John Collier, the Indian Commissioner who had initiated the IACB in 1935. Pivotal to these developments was Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee), a designer-educator named to the IACB in 1961 and its chair from 1971 to 1995, who taught at the IAIA from its inception and was its president from 1967 to 1978.
———In 1964, as the IAIA was organizing the IACB sponsored a series of key shows starting with its first annual International Exhibition of Indian Art in Washington, D.C.. Among the featured artists was the self-taught painter-sculptor Jerone Tiger (Creek-Seminole), whose ethereal depictions of tribal life and simplicity of form commanded top honors in major competitions. One of Tiger's last group exhibits was the Smithsonian Institution's America Discovers Indian Art Show in 1967, the year in which a shooting accident ended his brilliant five-year career and life at twenty-six.
———Among other artists who rise to prominence in the 1960s and remained influential were George Morrison (Grand Portage Chippewa) and R. C. Gorman (Navajo). Morrison, a painter shaped by abstract expressions and surrealism in New York City and France from 1946 to 1963, taught art at the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Minnesota in his home state, where he also gained fame for his sculpted and collaged wood constructions and totems. Gorman, while painting was informed by his father, a painter Carl Gorman, and by muralists whose work he studied in Mexico, was the first living native artist whose works were shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Also a master of marketing, he opened his still-successful gallery in Taos, New Mexico, in 1968 as his lyrical portrayals of Navajo women became pop icons and as he gained celebrity status.
———Indian musicians and performers also made their mark in the 1960s. The recording artists Patrick Sky (Creek) and Buffy Sante-Marie (Cree) were leading folksinger-songwriters, often performing in Greenwich Village coffeehouses. Sante-marie, whose protest songs became anthems of the era, later gained fame as a Sesame Street regular and Academy Award-winning songwriter. Works of the composer Louis Ballard (Osage) were widely produced, notably The Gods Will Hear, a cantata which lyrics by Lloyd Kiva New, which was performed by the National Symphony Orchestra.
———Jesse Ed Davis (Kiowa) was a top rock guitar player from the 1960s through the 1980s, first with Taj Mahal and Leon Russell and later as a studio musician whose riffs became rock-and-roll staples. The saxophonist John Pepper (Creek and Kaw) developed a unique mix of jazz and tribal music, a first usually attributed to jazz great Miles Davis, who credited Pepper with it. Muriel Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock) made theater history as an actor with the leading experimental repertory group of the period, Joe Chaikin's Open Theatre, and would later be acclaimed as a director and innovator in women's theater.
———During the 1960s native images, words, and music were emblematic of the counterculture movement, which denounced the country's genocidal and ecocidal history and focused attention on ongoing Indian resistance. Native portrayals in pop, poster, and T-shirt art and theater, movies, and music were metaphors for causes of the day, the good-stereotype versions of Indian mascots and slogans in the sports world. The prolific-eration of Indian imagery encouraged many Indian artists to try to clear away the underbrush of stereotypical depictions, to rescue their symbols and history, to tell their own story, although some simply cashed in on the trend with their own Indian kitsch or became copy artists of those who drew inspiration from native peoples.
———Out of this swirl, native artists and would-be artists gravitated to the IAIA from reservations and urban areas, from traditional and assimilated upbringings. The IAIA;s most prominent teacher, Allan Houser, gave instruction in sculpture, painting, and design from 1962 to 1975 and helped put the school on the art world's map. In addition to developing skills in his students, he imparted the value of traditional and historical knowledge and cultural metaphor, elements his students cite as essential to their artistic and human growth at the IAIA. Houser also opened doors globally for younger artists and was responsible for the categories of sculpture and monumental sculpture being added to the Santa Fe Indian Market's national arts competition. In 1992, when the IAIA Museum opened, its permanent outdoor exhibition space was named the Allan Houser Art Park.
———Fritz Scholder taught at the IAIA from 1964 to 1969, arriving with a solid reputation as an excellent colorist in expressionist/pop art. He learned alongside and from IAIA students and faculty as they together developed new directions in Indian art that began to emerge in 1965, the year in which Scholder started to paint Indian subjects and T. C. Cannon (Kiowa and Caddo), started his two-year term of study there. Cannon (Paidoung-u-day), a painter-poet-musician, was the unrivaled school star, a natural and original artist, who shared with Scholder a penchant for image busting. Cannon, like several of his fellow students, went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute and to serve in Vietnam; others took time away from the IAIA to fight the Indian wars at home.
———Among other IAIA student innovators of the 1960s, some of whom would later teach there, were Larry Ahvakana (Inupiaq), Earl Biss (Crow), Parker Boyiddle (Kiowa-Wichita), Bennie Buffalo (Cheyenne), Sherman haddlesone (Kiowa), Don Chunestudey (Cherokee), Karita Coffey (Comanche), Grey Cohoe (Navajo), Lary DesJarlias (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), Earl Eder (Sioux), Phyllis Fife (Creek), Henry Gobin (Tulalip), Benjamin Harjo, Jr. (Seminole-Chawnee), Doug Hyde (Nez Perce), Bruce King (Oneida), King Kuka (Blackfeet), Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi and Choctaw), Bill Prokopioff (Aleut), Kevin Redstar (Crow), Bill Soza (Cahuilla), Richard Ray Whitman (Euchee and Pawnee), Ray Winters (Oglala Sioux), and Alfred Youngman (Cree).
———In 1969, N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) rose to world prominence with his Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his first novel, House Made of Dawn (1968), which he soon followed with The Way to Rainy Mountain. Momaday (Tsoai-talee), a writer-poet-painter with scores of books and exhibits to his credit, spawned a generation of native writers; he remains a professor of English and the most highly acclaimed Indian literary figure. Also in 1969, the lawyer-historian Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), published his best-selling popular history, Custer Died for Your Sins, which became the thesaurus of Indian political issues of the time, as did his second book, We Talk, You Listen.
———The singer-activist Floyd Westerman produced a record album, the title and themes of which were taken from Deloria's Custer, that became an anthem of Indian activism of the early 1970s. The most successful of the Indian musicians of the era, though, wee the rock groups and XIT. Westerman (Crow Creek Sioux) and American Indian Movement leaders of the period — Dennis J. Banks (Leech Lake Chippewa), Russell Means (Oglala Sioux) and John Trudell (Santee Sioux) — would gain fame as actors in the 1990s in films, including some about their own activities in the 1960s and 1970s.
———As Indian activism captured world attention, beginning with the 1969 takeover of Alcatraz Island, blockbuster movies and books about Indians generated increased interest in the "Indian story." Notable among these were the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) and the films Soldier Blue (1970) and Little Big Man (1971. The latter featured Dan George (Squamish), whose portrayal of a Cheyenne chief during the 1880s won the Best Supporting Actor award of the New York Film Critics. Will Sampson (Creek) received an Academy Award nomination in the same category for his performance as an asylum inmate in the 1875 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Although some documentaries and short films by native filmmakers such as Sandy Johnson Osawa (Makah) were produced in the 1970s, Indian producers would not come into their own until the 1980s. As of the time of this publication no major film has been directed or produced by a native person.
———Starting in 1971, native theater companies found and stage productions flourished. Most significant companies of the decade were Muriel Miguel's native women's improvisational group, Spiderwoman Theater Company, in New York; the American Indian Theater Company (AITC), also in New York; the Native American Theater Ensemble, in Tulsa; and the Red Earth Performing Arts Company, in Seattle. Significant productions included Body Indian (1972), Foghorn (1972) and 49 (1975, all developed by the AITC and shaped by the director Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa-Delaware); The Indian Experience (1975) by John Kaufman (Nez Perce); and the artist-writer Bruce King's play about Vietnam, Dust Off, first produced in Santa Fe in 1978.
———In 1972, the Smithsonian Institution's National Collection of Fine Art in Washington D.C., opened an exhibition, titled Two American Painters, of works by T. C. Cannon and Fritz Scholder, which toured European capitals in 1973. Hailed as exquisite, witty, and biting, their images became a measure of truth of the Indian past and skyrocketed to stardom in the visual arts and popular culture, a status enjoyed by Scholder through the present. Cannon's artistic influence continues, although his life ended in a car wreck in 1978, when he was thirty-two.
———The six-day takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in 1972 in Washington D.C., and the seventy-one-day occupation of the Oglala Sioux Reservation village of Wounded Knee in 1973 presented major energizing forces and images for native artists for that time and afterward. During the 1972 takeover, some IAIA students and graduates found tangible proof that their designs and artwork had been used and marketed without their consent or any compensations to them, also finding that among the most prominently displayed paintings identified as native work were a few by artists known to have been white people posing as Indians. The reaction by native artists to both situations was vigorous, beginning with the removal of the IAIA-student-design drapes from the BIA Commissioner's office and ending with the slashing of the pseudo_indian paintings and the imprinting of the word fake on the canvases.
———The style and success of Two American Painters — along with the international attention focused on conditions in U.S. Indian country — provided inspiration for native artists in all mediums and opportunities for grants, commissions, and shows. Among those whose careers were launched or received a boost beyond the decade were Henry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu), RIchard Glazer-Danay (Mohawk), Conrad House (Navajo and Oneida), Michael Cabotie (Hopi), Frank LaPena (Wintu-Nomtipom), George C. Longfish (Seneca/Tuscarora), Bull Reid (Haida), Juane Quick-to-See Smith (Salish), John Wilnoty (Cherokee), and Duffy Wilson (Tuscarora). Wilson, a sculptor, later directed the Native American Center for the Living Arts in Niagara Falls, which was codesigned, in a turtle shape, by a pre-eminent native architect, Dennis Sun Rhodes (Arapaho).
———Among artists who developed during the 1970s in the IAIA tradition were Delmar Boni (San Carlos Apache), David P. Bradley (White Earth Chippewa), Barry Coffin (Potawatomi-Creek), Anthony Gauthier (Winnebago), Bill Glass, Jr. (Cherokee), John Hoover (Aleut), Dan Namingah (Hopi), and Roxanne Swentzell (Santa Clara Pueblo). Several artists accomplished in both the written and visual arts also developed at IAIA during the 1970s, including Barney Bush (Shawnee-Cayuga), Grey Cohoe (Navajo), Alex Jacobs/Karoniaktaie (Akwesasne Mohawk), and Harold Littlebird (Santo Domingo Pueblo).
———In 1982, two events highlighted natives in the visual and performing arts and at the same time created a controversy that rocked the Indian and arts worlds. Night of the First Americans and Art of the First Americans — a glitzy stage and art show at the Kennedy Center and the follow-up exhibit at the Smithsonian — featured appearances and works by some artists who lately claimed to be native people. Several native artists and tribal leaders lodged complaints to Capitol Hill and with the press, generating investigations, exposes, marketplace reforms, and a new law. In 1989, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1935 was updated to protect native artists and consumers of Indian products, imposing stiff penalties of those fraudulently selling or promoting work as Indian produced. The amendments were sponsored by Senator (then Representative) Ben Nighthorse Campbell (Cheyenne), the only Indian and only producing artist in Congress.
———During the 1980s and into the following decade, among the highest lights in the visual arts were David P. Bradley, Bob Haozous, Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne), Conrad House, Jean LaMarr (Paiute/Pit River), James Lavador (Umatilla), Truman Lowe (Winnebago), Jack Malotte (Western Shoshone), and Susan Stewart (Crow). Bradley and House, admired as painters' painters and for their versatility, consistently captured honors in Indian art shows, such as the Santa Fe Indian Market, where Bradley was the only artist to take the top awards in both painting and sculpture and House in both painting and textile design. Bradley also was one of the leading artists behind the first state law (New Mexico's) protecting Indian art and artists, as well as a similar 1989 national law.
———LaMarr, widely recognized as an impeccable printmaker and painter, was included in a prestigious 1987 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Committed to Print: Social and Political Themes in Recent American Painted Art. Malotte, respected among other artists for his graphics and painting, produced works of social and political commentary that became symbols of numerous human-rights and environmental causes in his home state of Nevada and nationwide. Lavadour, known for his large-canvas oils, and Stewart, known for her acrylics and installations, also have concentrated their work in reservation communities in Oregon and Montana, respectively, training and promoting other Indian artists locally. Lowe, acclaimed for his sculptures and installations, also is an educator and the first native artist to chair a major art department, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
———Haozous, who often showed with Allan Houser in the prior decade, took center stage in the 1980s among contemporary sculptors, particularly with his massive works in steel, with each new piece greeted as a significant event in the art world into the 1990s. Among his masterworks are Apache Holocaust, a thirty-seven-floor-high painting and rusted steel sculpture with graffitied Apache names ascending the structure and a bound Apache man in traditional dress atop it. Heap of birds, among the world's top conceptual artists, produces textual art, as well as paintings, prints, and installations. Also a professor of art at the University of Oklahoma, he is the most widely exhibited of native artists. He gained international attention in 1983 with his In Our Language — computerized light messages in Cheyenne and English carried on the famous Times Square Billboard usually reserved for breaking news.
———Other visual artists who emerged in the 1980s and took their place among the leading and most innovative of native artists in the 1990s included the painters Tony Abeyta (Navajo), Dan Lomahaftewa (Hopi and Choctaw), Judith Lowry (Mountain Maidu), Mateo Romero (Cochiti Pueblo), Kay Walkingstick (Cherokee), and Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo); the ceramicists Anite Fields (Osage) and Peter B. Jones (Seneca); the glass potter-sculptor Tony Jojola (Isleta Pueblo); the clay potter-sculptor Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo); worker-conceptual artist Marcus Amerman (Choctaw); the doll maker Donald Tenoso (Hunkpapa Lakota); the photographers-multimedia artists Shelly Niro (Mohawk) and Jolene Richard (Tuscarora); and the installation and performance artists James Luna (Luiseño) and Nora Maranjo-Morse (Santa Clara Pueblo). Of these, the most well known is Luna, who has exhibited himself on a sawhorse in End of the Trail, in a museum case in The Artifact Piece, and as a new-age profit prophet in Shame-Man.
———Among the innovators in Indian music in the 1980s were the poet John Trudell and the musician Jesse Ed Davis, whose 1986 recording aka Graffiti Man, produced by Davis, was lauded in Rolling Stone by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan as the best record of the year. Following Davis's death in 1987, Trudell teamed up with a new band that included the traditional singer-drummer Quiltman (Warm Springs) and, with musical and promotion assistance by singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, produced records into the 1990s, most recently under the band name Bad Dog. Trudell immersed himself in poetry following the 1979 deaths of his wife, three children, and mother-in-law in a fire of suspicious origins. He also turned to film acting, debuting in the 1988 Pow-Wow Highway, with the actor Gary Farmer (Cayuga), and appearing in the 1992 Thunderheart with Graham Greene (Oneida) and Sheila Tousey (Menomiinee/Stockridge-Munsee), in which he played an activist being tracked by the FBI on the Oglala Sioux Reservation in the early 1970s, a role he had lived. He appeared as himself in the producer-actor-director Robert Redford's 1992 documentary about Leonard Peltier's case Incident at Oglala.
———The movie that heightened the visibility of natives in film, and in all the Indian arts, was the producer-actor-director Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, which swept the Oscars for 1990 and earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Graham Greene, who (like Gary Farmer) was an accomplished stage and film actor trained in the European classics. Opportunities for native actors, technicians, and consultants became more abundant. Films and television movies, including the megahit Disney cartoon Pocahontas (1995), a raft of TBS productions, and the popular BS series Northern Exposure, offered a seemingly endless source of employment in all but the decision-making capacities of the 1990s. The 1992 version of The Last of the Mohicans and its cast, including Dennis J. Banks and Russell Means, prompted the comedian Charlie Hill (Oneida) to quip, "AIM leaders in that movie would be like the Black Panthers starring in a remake of Little Black Sambo."
———During the 1990s the combination of the 1992 Columbus quincentenary and the financial success of Indian-theme films and television shows also opened doors for native producers, writers, and directors working in their own films, many of whom had struggled for backing and a forum for a decade or more. Sandy Johnson Osawa (Makah), the head of Upstream Productions in Seattle and a longtime producer-writer, became the first Indian producer to have a documentary aired by a major network, NBC, in prime time; The Seventh Fire a half-hour special on tribal fishing-rights struggles, was premiered in 1992. Also that year, PBS aired a two-hour special on Pueblo-European contact and relations, Surviving Columbus, directed by Diane Reyna (Taos Pueblo), written by Simon Ortiz, and produced by George Burdeau, Edmund Ladd (Zuni Pueblo), and Phil Lucas (Choctaw).
———In 1993, Robert Redford's Sundance Institute began a five-year program to promote native filmmakers, directors, and screenwriters, selecting at least two each year for its coveted program-development slots. Films by and about natives were featured throughout the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, which kicked off with a press conference on the native film project. Among the first selected to participate in the project were the young filmmakers Chris Ayer (Cheyenne and Arapaho) and Sherman Alexie (Coeur d'Alene) Also in 1994, the Scottsdale Center for the Arts and two Indian arts groups, Atlatl, and the Native American Producers Alliance, presented a native film and video festival in Scottsdale, "Imaging Indians," named after a film by the alliance's president, Victor Massayesva (Hopi). The festival featured Maseyesva's film as well as Everything Has a Spirit by Ava Hamilton (Arapaho) and Navajo Talking Pictures by Arlene Bowman (Navajo), and highlighted native film luminaries as panelists and performers.
———The Spiderwoman Theater Company continued into the 1990s as the Indian theater group in greatest demand. Its founder, Muriel Miguel, codirected a 1993 production in New York of Rez Sisters by the Canadian playwright Thomson Highway (Cree), whose Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing was given a dramatic reading there in 1994. Miguel's one-woman show, Hot and Soft, was produced off-Broadway in 1994; Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, a play by Miguel's niece, was produced in New York in 1991. A new native theater ensemble, Chuka Lokoli, developed in the early 1990s, and one of its improcisation pieces, In the Spirit, was produced in 1992; the work and Sneaky, by William S. Yellow Robe, Jr. (Assiniboine), were selected for the 1993 New Work Now! Festival at the Public Theater in New York.
———With the 1990s popularity of poetry slams and raging — the raucous styles of performance competitions and opening acts for rock and alternative styles in the growing circuit, most notably ASH (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muskogee), Lance Henson (Cheyenne), Alex Jacobs (Akwesasne Mohawk), and Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo). The poet by Joy Harjo (Muskogee) also turned to performance with her jazz/reggae band Poetic Justice, in the words-with-music style of John Trudell, she plays saxophone and performs her poetry, accompanied by the noted lawyer Susan M. Williams (Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux) on drums, the tribal judge Willie Bluehouse Johnson (Isleta Pueblo and Navajo) on guitar, John Wiliams (Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux) on bass, and Frank Poocha (Hopi-Pima) on keyboards. Several singers who developed in the earlier folk/ballad style performed and recorded in the 1990s including Delmar Boni, Sharon Burch (Navajo), Paul Ortega (Mescalero Apache) — all of whom sing in their own languages and in English — and Joanne Shenandoah (Oneida). In 1993, Buffy Sainte-Marie was instrumental in introducing a Music of Aboriginal Canada category for the Juno music awards; the first such honor went to Lawrence Martin (Cree) of the group Kashtin for its platinum hit, "akua tuta."
———Among the native music innovators in the 1990s were Red Thunder, a native rock band of Apache, Pueblo and Mayan musicians blending rock and tribal instruments and music, including a trap-set of traditional Indian drums. Red Thunder has commanded the largest viewing audience of any contemporary Indian music group. Cary Morin (Crow) and his group the Atoll rose to prominence with their reggae releases, including Dream Marquee in 1993, and Robby Bee in the Boyz from the Rez proved to be crowd pleasers throughout the Southwest with their mix of hip-hop, rap, and native beats. The flute player R. Carlos Nakai (Navajo-Ute), an established musician of the 1980s, became a highly successful recording artist in the New Age music market of the 1990s.
———The 1992 Columbus year provided the greatest number of exhibition and sales opportunities of any in the century. Some exhibitions offered commentary on the quincentenary itself, such as Atlatl's Submuloc Showl Columbus Wohs at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and We're Still Here at the American Indian Community House Gallery/Museum in New York City. Others ignored the topic, presenting fine art as its own statement — for example, The Morning Star Foundation's Venus from Native America: Contemporary Art for the Year of the Indigenous Peoples, which was the first native art show of national scope ever presented on Capitol Hill, in the House the Senate rotundas. The historic exhibition included paintings, sculpture, and mixed-media works by Tony Abeyta, Larry Ahvakana, Marcus Amerman, David R. Fox, Barry Coffin, Steve Deo (Yuchi/Creek), Dennis R. Fox, Jr. (Mandan.Hidatsa), Bob Haozous, Sharron Ahtone Harjo (Kiowa), Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, Valjean Hessing (Choctaw), Conrad House, Doug Hyde, Jean LaMarr, Linda Lomahaftewa, Jack Malotte, George Morrison, Stan Natchez (Shoshone/Paiute), Lillian Pitt (Wasco/Yakama), Martin Red Bear (Sicanju/Oglala Lakota), W. Richard West, Sr. Emmi Whitehorse, and Richard Ray Witman.
———Also in 1992, the IAIA opened its museum in Santa Fe with a stunning exhibit, Three Decades of Contemporary Indian Art of the Institute of American Indian Arts, curated by the museum's founding director, Richard Hill, Sr. (Tuscarora). Hill, an accomplished photographer and painter, later joined the staff of National Museum of the American Indians, working with the National Museum's director, W. Richard West, Jr. (Cheyenne), to guide the new museum to its official opening, and three major exhibits of works from the collection and a contemporary collaboration. The opening took place at the Custom House, a historic building in New York City and the home of the museum's permanent exhibit there, in late 1994, attracting the most press and public attention internationally of any native arts event. It is the new museum that holds the potential for being a major boom to all native arts, as well as the educational focal point in the United States regarding native peoples generally, into the twenty-first century.

SUZAN SHOWN HARJO (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muskogee)
The Morning Star Institute
Washington, D.C.