Oscar Howe was born on the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation in South Dakota in 1915. He is descended from a chiefs of the Yanktonai band of Dakota. Howe's artistic ability was recognized early on and he was trained from a young age in mural painting, taught by Olle Nordmark.
Howe's goal was to portray the contemporary realities of Native American culture, particularly as seen from the reservation, through his art. In 1958 Howe's submission to the Philbrook Museum's show of Native American art was rejected because it was not "traditional" enough. Howe's use of the Native American Tohokmu (spiderweb) style of painting was seen as borrowing too heavily from European Cubist tradition by people incapable of conceiving that their dominant western culture may not have been the first to discover something. Nevermind that Cubism was inspired largely by non-white art Picasso referred to as "primitive".
“Who ever said, that my paintings are not in the traditional Indian style, has poor knowledge of Indian Art indeed. There is so much more to Indian Art than pretty, stylized pictures. There was also power and strength and individualism (emotional and intellectual insight) in the old Indian paintings. Every bit in my paintings is a true studied fact of Indian paintings. Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting, that is the most common way? We are to be herded like a bunch of sheep, with no right for individualism, dictated as the Indian has always been, put on reservations and treated like a child, and only the White Man knows what is best for him... Well, I am not going to stand for it. Indian Art can compete with any Art in the world, but not as a suppressed Art. I see so much of the mismanagement and treatment of my people. It makes me cry inside to look at these poor people. My father died there about three years ago in a little shack, my two brothers still living there in shacks, never enough to eat, never enough clothing, treated as second-class citizens. This is one of the reasons I have tried to keep the fine ways and culture of my forefathers alive. But one could easily turn to become a social protest painter. I only hope, the Art World will not be one more contributor to holding us in chains.”
