Born Allan Capron Haozous, Allan Houser is one of the most influential and renowned Native artists of the 20th century. Best known as a sculptor, Houser also excelled in drawing, painting, and teaching. Through his prodigious artistic output and a generation of students and followers, Houser forged and shaped the field of contemporary Native art.
Houser was Chiricahua Apache. His parents, Sam and Blossom Haozous, met while imprisoned at Fort Sill, OK. After famed Chiricahua leader Geronimo’s surrender to the US Army in 1886, Sam was one of a group of children and mothers jailed in St. Augustine, FL. Blossom was born in a prison camp at the Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama. Both were part of 250 Chiricahua later forcibly moved to Fort Sill, where they remained imprisoned until 1913. Allan was their first child born outside of captivity.
Houser’s artistic career began as a student of Dorothy Dunn’s at The Studio School at the Santa Fe Indian School, where he enrolled in response to an advertisement he saw at the Indian Office in Anadarko, OK. “I was twenty years old when I finally decided that I really wanted to paint,” he said. “I had learned a great deal about my tribal customs from my father and my mother, and the more I learned the more I wanted to put it down on canvas. That’s pretty much how it started.”1
In a move indicative of the Santa Fe Indian School’s pedagogy, administrators reportedly “suggested” he anglicize his name and change it from Haozous to Houser. Indeed, Houser considered Dunn’s painting instruction equally restrictive. He attended during the 1936-37 school year, overlapping with artists Timothy Begay and Harrison Begay, and earning straight A’s. Houser graduated with a certificate in 1937.2 He would later speak of “not caring” for Dunn’s perception of “Indian-style painting” and the art education he received.3
Still, Houser’s talent was immediately recognized by the New Deal and beyond. In terms of the New Deal: in addition to exhibiting his work at federal art centers across the country through the Federal Art Project, the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture commissioned Houser to paint murals in the Department of Interior building in Washington, DC, between 1939 and 1941. Houser also had a solo exhibition at what is now known as the New Mexico Museum of Art the year he graduated and another in 1939, and his work was also exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition and the New York World’s Fair in 1939.
He achieved even greater success later as he came into his own as an artist. After relocating to Los Angeles in 1942, Houser came into contact with modernist artists and by the end of the decade had established himself as a boundary-pushing, monumental sculptor. Houser broke open narrow expectations of sculpture and Native art, clearing the path to limitless possibilities.
In 1954, he was awarded the Palmes d’ Academiques, a special commendation from the French government, at the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial. In 1962, Houser established the sculpture department at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), the successor to The Studio School. He taught at IAIA for almost two decades. In 1992, he became the first Native artist to be awarded the National Medal of Arts. In 2004, a retrospective of his work served as the inaugural exhibition for the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.
