New Deal Easel Paintings

Wilson’s art collection also includes four New Deal easel paintings by well-known Native American artists. They include Acee Blue Eagle’s Woman Making Baskets, Knife Dancer, and Ready for the Hunt and Herbert White Buffalo’s Dancer.

‍Blue Eagle was born Alex C. McIntosh on August 16, 1907 near Anadarko, Oklahoma. He studied under Oscar Jacobson and Edith Mahier at the University of Oklahoma. He painted numerous murals throughout Oklahoma. In 1935, he toured the United States and Europe with the lecture “Life and Character of the American Indian”. Later that year he became the first Director of Art at Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma. In April of 1936, Blue Eagle was one of ten Oklahoma artists selected for the First National Exhibition of American Artists to be held in the Rockefeller Center in New York.

In 1941 during World War II, Blue Eagle entered the Air Force where he served at eighteen posts, leaving Indian murals at each. He was also a photographer on heavy bombers. His most famous mural was painted for the Battleship U.S.S. Oklahoma, which was sunk at Pearl Harbor.

Blue Eagle’s murals use the style first developed by a group known as the Kiowa Five artists at the University of Oklahoma. Through this style using sharp contours, flat areas of coloration and the absence of backgrounds, he helped create a stylistic formula of Traditional Indian Painting. Blue Eagle died June 18, 1959.

Herbert White Buffalo was born in 1917 and lived in Concho, Oklahoma on the Southern Cheyenne portion of the Arapaho-Cheyenne Reservation. His style of painting is similar to fellow Cheyenne artist Dick West and the Kiowa Five artists who studied at the Fort Sill Indian School and the University of Oklahoma.