The Impact of Ledger Drawings on Native American Art

A new exhibition at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, reveals the impact of ledger drawings on transformations in Native American pictorial arts from the mid-Nineteenth Century to the present.

“Picturing Change: The Impact of Ledger Drawings on Native American Art,” will be on view through May 15. The works in this exhibition illustrate how Native American artists adopted and adapted Western materials, methods and conventions to their own artistic traditions, inventing new art forms that comment upon and document cultural transitions brought on by Western education and cultural domination.

Historically, figurative arts among the Plains Indians of North America chronicled the life of warriors and chiefs and their experiences of war, hunting, religious ceremony and courtship. These abstract visual narratives were created on rock, buffalo hides, robes and tepees.

Between the 1850s and the 1870s, Native American warriors experienced tremendous upheaval when increased contact and conflict with European Americans led to massive bloodshed and to the transformation of everyday life on the Plains. Through both peaceful and violent means, warrior-artists acquired ledger books, cloth, ink, pencils and colored pencils, and later notebooks, sketchbooks, muslin and watercolors, with which they visually recorded their historical past and the tumultuous confrontations of the present.

When the Southern Plains Indian Wars ended in 1875, US troops captured 72 of the most influential Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Caddo and Comanche chiefs and warriors and imprisoned them at Fort Marion in St Augustine, Fla., until 1878. Unexpectedly, their internment supported ledger drawing as a popular genre of Native arts. Prisoners were supplied with pencils, crayons, pens, watercolors, ledger books, autograph booklets and sketchbooks and encouraged to draw their memories and recent experiences.

These artists increasingly moved away from their prereservation artistic repertoire to observations of landscapes, cityscapes, education, regimentation and their own process of assimilation.

While Nineteenth Century warrior-artists documented the impact of conflict, captivity and cultural domination in their ledger drawings, their Twentieth Century descendents continued to use visual narratives on paper as a stepping stone into mainstream American fine arts practices. Today, many contemporary artists look back to the ledger drawings of their forefathers to create art that critiques America’s contested histories while also reconciling themselves to the cultural genocide of the past.

“Picturing Change: The Impact of Ledger Drawing on Native American Art” was organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. It is accompanied by a brochure. Lenders include Lesley Wilson, assistant librarian at the St Augustine Historical Society, and Candace S. Greene, collections and archives resource officer at the department of anthropology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

The Hood Museum of Art is open Tuesday-Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm, with evening hours on Wednesday until 9; Sunday, 12 to 5 pm. Admission is free. For information, www.HoodMuseum.Dartmouth.edu or 603-646-2808.