ALLAN HOUSER

– ALLAN HOUSER –

Apache, 1914-1994

A sculptor, a painter, and a Chiricahua Apache, Allan Houser was born to Sam and Blossom Haozous on a farm near Apache, Oklahoma, on June 30, 1914. He was twenty years old when he began his formal art training at the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico. In Santa Fe he shared a studio with Navajo painter Gerald Nailor, with whom he produced a series of murals for the U.S. Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C., in 1939. That same year Houser married Anna Marie Gallegos and returned Oklahoma. At the Fort Sill Indian School in Lawton he was encouraged to explore sculpture as an avenue of expression.

From 1951 to 1962 he was employed as a teacher and artist in residence at the Inter-Mountain Indian School in Brigham City, Utah. In 1962 he moved back to Santa Fe to become a founding faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts, serving as the head of its sculpture department until 1975 when he retired to devote more time to his own work. Having cast his first bronze in 1968, he subsequently established an international reputation for monumental figurative and abstract works in this medium.