Plains Indians Drawings 1865-1935: Pages from a Visual History

Including more than 150 works by thirty-six artists, Plains Indians Drawings 1865-1935: Pages from a Visual History presented the first comprehensive look at the diversity, originality, and artistry of the ledger drawing. The selection included seldom-seen works from private collections and outstanding examples on loan from public institutions; some of the drawings had never been exhibited before. Made at a pivotal time in Native American history, the evocative works chronicled the traditional ways of the Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho, and provided an artistic record of how indigenous life changed irrevocably with the increased presence of white settlers and the U.S. military.

Plains Indian men had long inscribed their histories on buffalo hides. In the 19th century, they adopted a new, smaller-scale medium for their pictorial accounts: they began to draw on paper, using pens, pencils, and watercolors. The large, bound ledger book—commonly used for inventory by white traders and military men—as well as autograph books, sketchbooks, note paper, recycled stationery, and other paper materials were appropriated by Indian artists on the Great Plains as a new surface on which to draw.

In the earlier decades of the 19th century, pencils and notebooks were among the goods exchanged in trade. As the century progressed, they were often part of the plunder taken from white soldiers' bodies on the battlefield; in other cases, Indians held in prison or on reservations were provided with blank books in order to create drawings for sale to tourists. Remarkable for their elegant simplicity of line and the economy by which much historical data was conveyed, ledger drawings—as the genre was called, no matter the paper source—could be considered the first modern Indian art.