Description:
Watercolor on paper. Signed l.c.: Smoky, Stamped u.r.: PLANCHE 30.
From: American Indian Painters, Vol. 1, p. 18: A grandniece of the famous Appiation, the last great chief of the Kiowas, Lois comes from a family of craftsmen and warriors. Born near Anadarko, in 1907, she was one of the original group brought to the University of Oklahoma in 1923. The painting of pictures was traditionally a masculine art among the Plains Indians. While the first five Kiowas were in the university, there was noticeable, among the men, a certain resentment towards Lois for participating in such an unladylike activity. Their resentment found expression in several, small, unkind annoyances to her, even to the extent of mutilating her work. The painting here reproduced represents her finest work. The "Kiowa Mother" with her papoose carrier strapped to her shoulders, stands very erect. She is evidently participating in some public celebration. The figure has the archaic angularity of the old historical Kiowa painting; at the same time it is very modern. Lois' few paintings in existence are mostly of mothers and children. All have feminine delicacy and charm. They are also instinctively sentimental towards motherhood and childhood. Most of them are harmonious arrangements of blue and yellow; the blue of the sky and the yellow of the grass of the great plains. For a year her watercolors were exhibited widely in the United States with the first Kiowa group. Her art career was brief but happy, and reached its high point with the reproduction in color of one of her works in the volume, "Kiowa Art", and with a feature story in one of the great Chicago newspapers. But it was soon over. She married and devoted herself to her young family as is the case so often with talented girls who abandon their career for domestic life. (Collection, Oscar Brousse Jacobson)