Exhibition highlights and expands the Museum’s collection of Native American art

Sacramento, Calif. – May 18, 2016When “A Show of Force: Sculpture by Allan Houser (Haozous), Featuring Recent Gifts from Loren G. Lipson” opens at the Crocker Art Museum this fall, several pieces from the exhibition will be added to the Museum’s growing collection of works by renowned Native American artists.

“A Show of Force” opens Oct. 30, 2016, and will run through Feb. 26, 2017, showcasing the work of Houser (born Allan Capron Haozous, 1914–1994), who is recognized worldwide for his figurative and modernist sculptures featuring Native American people and themes. His parents, Sam and Blossom Haozous, were among the population of Chiricahua Apaches imprisoned for 27 years by the United States government following Geronimo’s surrender in 1886. The first child in his family to be born outside of that captivity, Houser was raised on the family farm in Oklahoma. With limited formal education and no art instruction, he taught himself to draw and enrolled in the Painting Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School in 1934. He progressed quickly and garnered accolades, including mural commissions for the U.S. Interior Department in 1938–39. 

In 1942, Houser moved to Los Angeles and spent the next five years working in construction by day and painting at night. While there, he saw exhibitions of modernist sculpture, which would influence him as he later pursued three-dimensional forms. He joined the faculty of the new Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in 1962 and founded its sculpture department. He would ultimately create more than 1,000 sculptures in stone, wood, bronze, plaster and clay.

According to Interim Associate Curator Kristina P. Gilmore, “Allan Houser is arguably the most influential Native American artist in modern art history. His three decades as an art teacher and the example he set through his work still inspire artists to express their own personal heritage and experience in innovative ways. I like to think of him as one of the founders of contemporary Native American art.”

Houser’s work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, various branches of the Smithsonian Institution, the British Royal Collection and numerous other major museums in North America, Europe and Japan. A few of his awards and honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, the French Palmes d’Academique and the National Medal of Arts.

“A Show of Force” features 15 pieces in bronze and stone, several of them recent gifts to the Crocker from Lipson. Among these is “Force,” a signature work in Vermont marble depicting an eagle and dove, avian metaphors for war and peace, an unusual theme in the artist’s oeuvre. The new acquisitions expand the Crocker’s growing collection of Native American art, which includes more than 250 gifts from Dr. Lipson, mostly of Native American ceramics dating from 1800 to the present.

The Crocker Art Museum was the first public art museum in the Western U.S. and is one of the leading art museums in California today. Established in 1885, the Museum features one of the country’s finest collections of Californian art, exceptional holdings of master drawings, a comprehensive collection of international ceramics, as well as European, Asian, African, and Oceanic art. The Crocker is located at 216 O Street in downtown Sacramento. Museum hours are

10 a.m.–5 p.m., Tuesday–Sunday; 10 a.m.–9 p.m., Thursdays. Every third Sunday of the month is “Pay What You Wish Sunday” sponsored by Western Health Advantage. For more information, call or visit crockerartmuseum.org.    

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