This month's museum pick...

Learning from the Source at the Allan Houser Compound and Foundation

by Dea Adria Mallin

By the time I met Allan Houser (Ha-o-zous) in the late 1980s at his studio off State Highway 14, south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, he was one of the most distinguished and acclaimed of sculptors, respected nationally and internationally. His work is in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., in the National Portrait Gallery in Britain, in the Pompidou Museum in Paris, France. There have been major exhibitions in Berlin, Tokyo, Vienna, and Paris -- where the French government awarded Houser its prestigious Palmes d’Academique. And in 1992, he was awarded America’s top honor, the National Medal of Arts, by the president of the United States. While Houser is called “the patriarch of American Indian sculptors” whose narrative work took him from painting to printmaking to book illustration to sculpture, the abstraction of his monumental sculpture is part of the modern idiom of Arp, Brancusi, Hepworth, and Moore.

Allan Houser (1914-1994) was an American master in every sense. That is, he was also a Chiracahua Apache, of the first Americans. In this month’s theme of learning from the source, consider that Houser’s ancestors had migrated to the American Southwest between 1200 and 1400. By the 16^th century, Spaniards were making incursions on Apache land; the Apaches held their land during the 1700s, and in the process acquired and rode Spanish horses so well that when U.S. General Crook encountered the Apaches, he described them as “the finest light cavalry the world has seen.”

Abstract Crown Dancer I, fabricated bronze, 1991, by Allan Houser. The most complex of the fabricated bronze editions created late in his career with nearly 120 patterns used to craft this modern form of the Apache's most revered dance figure.

By 1850, when all Apaches had to fight hard to hold their lands against the brutal incursions of the new Americans with their agenda of “Manifest Destiny,” the Chiracahua Apaches fought the hardest. Trapped by promises of truce and treaties were such extraordinary leaders -- with intelligence, tenacity and courage -- as Chief Geronimo. By 1913, all that remained of 3,000 Chiracahua Apaches was 271 people. Ten out of every eleven had died from war, disease, or intentional starvation. When they were finally “given” their “freedom” in 1913, some went back to New Mexico to live on the Mescalero Apache reservation, while some stayed on, having accommodated to the white world, in and around Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Allan Houser was born just one year after his parents, Sam and Blossom Ha-o-zous, moved to Apache, Oklahoma, near Fort Sill, to farm 160 government-granted acres. Sam Haozous’ grandfather was the legendary Mimbreños chief, Mangas Coloradas, whose father-in-law was Cochise. At 14, Sam Haozous had been taken prisoner by an army of 5,000 U.S. troops, along with the ragged remnants of the Chiracahua, and served his uncle, the Chiracahua chieftain, Geronimo, as an interpreter during the 27-year captivity.

Despite their misfortunes, it is from Sam and Blossom that Allan and his siblings received a rare and beneficent vision of life. Like the Apache healing chants sung by his father, a lead singer who could go for eight hours without repeating a single song, Houser’s works in marble, bronze, steel, and stone share a classic sense of unity and balance, serenity and assurance, stillness and visionary gaze, and cross the boundaries of past and present.

Grounded in the experience of his own family, his life, and his people through Apache story, song, and myth, Allan Houser became a precious link, if not a national treasure, able to bridge through his art the spirit of Apache culture and modern American life. His images communicate the immutable emotions of family love, dignity, and the will to endure.

Today, more than a decade after his death, there is the Allan Houser Foundation, including the Allan Houser Compound of 110 acres. Houser acquired the property in 1976 when the original parcel was 50 acres, and he and his son Philip built or contracted out all the buildings. By the early 80s, there was a studio and foundry. Philip added a gallery in 1984, originally as a house for his parents. When Mrs. Houser realized she preferred to stay in town, Allan came out to work. But he didn’t cook, so he went home to Santa Fe to eat.  

High in the hills between Cerrillos and Galisteo, with a 360-degree sweep of the New Mexico landscape, the Foundation and Compound function as an indoor and outdoor museum for Allan Houser’s work. In the future looms the creation of an Allan Houser Museum in Santa Fe to contain the art collection of the Foundation and selected art from Mrs. Houser’s personal collection.

Currently, it is a resource for scholarly research, education projects worldwide, and national (currently, a year-long monumental sculpture exhibition at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, a major Houser retrospective at the Heard Museum in Scottsdale, Arizona, and in 2005, a major Houser retrospective of 69 sculptures at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.) and international exhibitions. Open to the public by appointment, there is the studio, the workshop, a complete archive, a teaching center, a gallery with smaller paintings, stone pieces, and drawings for sale, and over 80 enormous sculptures in the vast garden.

The Archive library preserves 239 sketchbooks and over 12,000 two-dimensional artworks of mostly undated, unpublished drawings of singers, drummers, shepherds, warriors, mothers, and children in arid Southwestern lands. Some are finished pieces, while others are studies exploring issues of form, shape, color. The curator pulls out a few of the 300-plus charcoal and pastel drawings in 65 drawers, and points out that none of the materials in the archives are for sale; rather, they are used for museum shows of Houser’s work. There are more than 200 three-dimensional bronze artist’s copies and unique originals in stone, wood, clay, plaster, and welded materials. There is a room with Mrs. Houser’s personal collection of bronzes and drawings. There is also Houser’s extensive library -- collections of Apache, Navajo, Plains, Northwest Coast and Pueblo Indian art and material culture, plus Oklahoma and Southwestern history, plus volumes on Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi, Jacques Lipschitz, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore.

Tremendously creative, tremendously productive, Houser move with ease and boldness among multiple modalities, from realism to naturalism, from figurative abstraction to pure abstraction. His work is characterized by elemental themes, carefully organized volume, dynamic tension, and a tenderness that he knew so well from his mother’s nurturing spirit.

As a youngster, Houser wanted to illustrate the stories that he heard from his parents, and his father would correct the details of his drawings to make them historically and culturally accurate.

When he was in his late teens, still drawing but serious about boxing, he heard that the Santa Fe Indian School was looking for art students, and left Oklahoma with $1 in his pocket. Dorothy Dunn, trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, had taught at other government schools for Indians and arrived to head the art program in Santa Fe in 1932. She was strong-willed, with rigid notions of what authentic Indian art was. Indians were then considered pretty much a vanishing culture, and photographers like Edward Sheriff Curtis and art teachers like Dunn were determined to preserve the aboriginal traditions as they perceived them. It was a time when Indian, or what is now called Native American art was regularly denied outside local juried exhibitions.

Still, there was incentive here for Dunn: collectors and patrons clamored for “Indian paintings,” even insisting on the use of pictographs, petroglyphs, hide painting, and ancient pottery design. But Dunn’s Indian students, who ranged in age from eleven to twenty-one, all wanted to learn traditional academic painting from perspective to chiaroscuro, as well as graphic illustration techniques.  

Allan Houser was twenty, Dunn was twenty-nine. Houser commented later that Dunn held him back, refusing him anything but searching his tribal roots for “traditional things.” There was regular contention between them, and she refused Houser’s request to study anatomy and do life drawing from models, telling him that “Indian is a thing you’re born into” and “You either paint like this, Mr. Houser, or it’s not Indian art.” Even after Allan Houser won his prizes and won a Guggenheim, Dorothy Dunn claimed to like only the very early work, the work using her criteria of linearity and flat color, and producing the likes of two-dimensional casein and tempera Indian dancers, warriors, hunters, and the quiet, if sorrowful, grandeur of the Apache family.

If Sam Haozous, looking over Allan’s shoulder, checked the authenticity of the saddlebags or the rider’s quirt, and Dorothy Dunn insisted on tradition and historical reference, Allan Houser was bent on experimentation, on taking his talents where his curiosity and interest led him.  

When he came of artistic age in the late 1930s, unlike a Jackson Pollock who had the wealthy Peggy Guggenheim as a patron, Allan Houser had to do everything on his own. He had his first solo exhibition of paintings in 1937 at the Museum of New Mexico, and shared a studio with a fellow Santa Fe Indian School friend. Houser recalled the time as “the first of my starving artist periods.”

He learned the muralist’s art by doing a mural for the World’s Fair in New York in 1936, and in 1939 was commissioned to paint two murals for the Department of the Interior in Washington, DC. In the 1940s, when Houser had a wife and children to support and moved to Los Angeles to work in construction, he was also able to spend time in the museums where he got his first in-depth exposure to European modern art.

And a commission to do sculpture. Entirely self-taught in sculpture, his first commission involved monumental work. Breathless with excitement, Houser transformed a massive, four-ton block of Carrara marble into Comrade in Mourning, a seven-and-a-half-foot figure commemorating Indian servicemen who died in WWII, for the Haskell Institute, in Kansas. He used a jackhammer and other improvised tools, and a how-to text he bought on sculpting. His biographer, Barbara Perlman, describes Comrade in Mourning as “expressive of youth and rich with the beauty of life, yet weighted by the knowledge of mortality.” No trite sentimentality mars the piece, which is a stoic tribute to heroism, avoiding any glorification of war. 

Houser won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949, moved to Arizona, and lived on the San Carlos Apache Reservation where daily existence was more traditional than it had been on the Oklahoma farm, but when a fire destroyed everything, he went back to Oklahoma, then to Utah to teach art.

By 1962, when Houser joined the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, he had begun to emerge as one of America’s most important Native American sculptors. Through Houser’s teaching, a generation of Native American artists was to learn not only technique, but the dignity, perseverance, and vision that Allan Houser was able to transmit to them.

“I’ve always been very proud about who I am and where I came from because of my mother and dad,” he said. “I’m a Chircahua Apache, and I’ll tell anybody in the world that I am. It’s good to be who you are. My family name Ha-o-zous means ‘pulling roots out of the ground.’ That refers to the practice of returning thanks to the earth whenever we take something from her. The Indians respected the earth and their deep connection to it, and that’s something to be proud of.”

Then Houser moved a step beyond. He will always be an Indian artist, but he wanted to lose the persistent qualifier of “Indian” or “Native American” in front of “artist” or “sculptor.” Houser taught his students that “heritage is essential, but if what has been created is art, it can and should hold its own anywhere in the world.”

If integrity took Houser repeatedly back to his roots, to everything his parents taught him about his past and about how to live in the present, it was innovation that always took Allan Houser forward.  

Thousands have copied his style, particularly the mother-child abstraction that is classic Houser from 1970s to mid-1980s, but none has Houser’s reach – or grasp. Two fine comprehensive tomes on Houser’s oeuvre exist: Barbara H. Perlman’s 1987 Allan Houser (Ha-o-zous) and the 2004 Harry N. Abrams publication by art historian W. Jackson Rushing entitled Allan Houser: An American Master.

I had visited Houser’s studio and gardens several times over the years, but 2006 marked the first time I had visited since Houser passed into the spirit world. The people who work here all loved Allan Houser, and that is palpable. Also palpable in the ever-changing light of New Mexico, and in the fall of each shadow, is the power of voice that seems to emerge from the sculptures. 

With more than eighty enormous sculptures, this place redefines sculpture garden. Think MOMA in New York City, and you have the surprise of a city garden with monumental sculpture, utterly hemmed in, if not dwarfed by a fixed cityscape of towering buildings. Think Allan Houser Foundation and you can meander the landscape that inspired Houser’s son Philip to spend six years carving out the paths, considering scope, juxtaposition of narrative, marble versus bronze, and the endless surprise of angles of vision for each piece of sculpture. For the Apache, it is the mountain spirits that have built up the surrounding rock formations. Lavender grows here, and grama grasses, and piñon and juniper trees, and when arroyos forms in the monsoon season, new drainage pathways must be worked out.

The sense of place is so breathtaking that it is not only a favorite, with or without a guided tour, for visitors to the area, but is sought for weddings, for corporate retreats, for theatre, and for ceremonial dances.

I walk around the gardens, each of the artist’s monumental pieces creating an entire world against the vast, cerulean sky, the mounded white poufs of cloud, the junipers and the dots of chamisas. I am reminded that what is called “negative space” in sculpture, Houser dubbed, in his inimitable yet humbly contrarian way, “positive space,” so that hollowed-out robed forms seem to expand the spirit as vibrant light throws warm pink shadows inside the negative volumes, and the carved cavities in the woman’s skirt in Desert Harvest are richly filled by sky and earth.   

I remember buying my only Houser print, The Apache Gan (Mountain Spirit) Dancer, at the Wheelwright Museum where, at the entrance, monumental Houser sculptures seem to shape the sky. I have print #104 of 528. The print was completed in the 1950s and reminds the Apaches that they were brought forth by the Life-Giver to “tend the Earth well, care for life, and be disciplined in behavior.” When the Apache got careless in their duties, Life-Giver sent his messengers, the Gans, down from the mountains to teach and guide. But the Apaches so tried the patience of the Gans that the sacred teachers finally left pictures of themselves on the rocks near cave entrances, then went back to their distant mountain homes, never to return. Since then, in ceremonial dances, the Apaches have impersonated the sacred figures to recreate their beneficent teachings.

As I move through the garden, perusing Buffalo Hunt, then Homeward Bound, and The Sacred Rain, and This Was Our Home, I remember a reception here where guests lined up to meet the American master. He was already in his seventies, craggy, soft-spoken, and vigorous, and he kindly answered the many questions that people asked under a hot, desert sun. When it was her turn, the woman in front of me, a Californian, said to him, “I can’t understand why you would even think of starting a huge sculptural piece at your advanced age,” Houser set his shoulders back and stood tall, as the Chiracahua Apache he was, and answered softly, his eyes looking directly into hers, “How does anyone know how long they will live? I’m still strong. When I wake up each day, I work, just as I always have worked. And I’m thankful to have another day. And Madame, you, too, will die.” It was a straightforward answer to an impudent question.

The woman harrumphed, but for Houser, life and death, like sunshine and rain, were an acceptable, integrated continuum. On his last trip to Carrara, Italy, he had ordered 18 tons of marble for his studio, and despite the pancreatic cancer that took him, just a week before he died, Allan Houser was jumping around the piece he was working on, setting free the image in the marble.

Here, on this piece of land that Houser fell in love with in the 1970s, he brought forth work in white marble and bronze, in metal and alabaster and steatite and limestone, in an aesthetic continually inspired, continually experimental, continually growing. Walk the acreage and pause to sit in the little nooks that give respite from the New Mexico sun, and be surprised as the vistas shift and rephrase the work. Ask to see the paintings in the storage rooms, and the breadth and depth of Houser’s art is striking. To the abstractions of dignity, spirit, humility, memory, and hope, Houser gave continuous form and shape – and life. That is Houser’s legacy, after all; that everything on these acres breathes life.