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Lakota artist Tom Haukaas' last name means "hawk on a hill." It's an appropriate term, for Tom and his sister Linda cast their vision across a broad creative plain: they look back in time to ancient traditions and forward to ways of expressing the past in new media.
Examples of their ledger drawings and muslin paintings are now on display at Price-Dewey
Galleries, along with work by Hopi jeweler Sonwai. Also in this show, titled Drawing From Experience: Historic and Contemporary Plains Pictographic Art, are 19 drawings from the Vincent Price Ledger. The late film and stage actor, a one-time member and later chairman of the U.S. Department of the Interior's Indian Arts and Crafts Board, purchased the 1875-1878-era ledger in the 1960s. The ledger originally held 86 drawings, but after Price sold it, they became dispersed. For the show, 19 have been reassembled.
Ledger drawings date from the Plains Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s. Native artists, who traditionally painted battle and medicine pictures on buffalo robes or tepee liners, began using looted accounting ledgers or notebooks for their work. In those days men made the ledger drawings, while women specialized in quillwork and beadwork. Today both Linda and Tom are accomplished ledger artists.
"Both Linda and I usually use old period ledgers," Haukaas said. "But for this show, since I'm doing both mixed-media pieces and contemporary pieces, I'm using different kinds of paper as well as light canvas.
"I wanted to look at pieces that speak to heraldic deeds. I look at them from different cultures. My favorites are the marbles and friezes from the Parthenon, the Elgin Marbles. I saw them in London. I thought they were very beautiful. In many Greek stories, they're legendary parts of the cultural patrimony - the fight against the Amazons, the fight against the Persians, or the centaurs. They tended to be set in stone. Yes, literally and figuratively! All those images were standard; they were used in many buildings. Some of the individual scenes were used over and over."