Painting Culture, Painting Nature

Gunlög Fur takes a unique approach to the history of Kiowa painting for sale during the early decades of the twentieth century. While others have written somewhat superficially about the Kiowa Five (Stephen Mopope, Monroe Tsatoke, James Auchiah, Jack Hokeah, and Spencer Asah, with Lois Smoky briefly a member of the group) who arrived at the University of Oklahoma in the late 1920s, none has examined a single artist in depth or compared his life and art to Oscar Jacobson’s, their instructor and “manager.” A Swedish immigrant who arrived in Norman in 1915 as Director of the School of Art, Jacobson (1882–1966) encouraged the Kiowas to paint, marketing both their painting and the artists as dancers worldwide. Fur organizes his discussion around concurrent but unequal histories that influenced each other. A comparison of Jacobson’s outsider status as a Swedish immigrant to that of the displaced Kiowas is not successful. Fur readily admits that even though Swedish immigrants worked to maintain their heritage in a new land, especially through art and other cultural practices, Jacobson did not face the demeaning position in which the government placed Native people. It could be argued that he contributed to it by impersonating Indians in plays at Yale and through his paternalistic position in Norman, even though he had actively sought to protect Native rights. Early in his friendship with the artists, he was given a Kiowa name and was able to portray himself as an expert on Native art.

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