Storyteller of the Native American
People
Featured
Artist
HOWARD TERPNING
Howard Terpning, our
featured artist, often referred to as
the "Storyteller of the Native American People", has concentrated his
award-filled career on painting pictures about
some of the Great Plains tribes: Blackfeet,
Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow, Comanche and
Apache. Terpning is intimately familiar with
the details of their lives, from facial bone
structure to everyday dress, from ceremonies
to the rhythms of community life. Terpning's
paintings cover the Plains Indian's "glory
days" of the early nineteenth century up to
their final, desperate demise: the extinction of
the buffalo and the displacement and disease of
the tribes as a result of the westward expansion
of the white man.
His paintings not only tell a story, they pull
the viewer into the emotional life of the individuals portrayed. There are moments of peace,
humor, pride, hard-won wisdom, young defiance and fear. The viewer feels the cold, the
hunger and the desperate poverty of hunters
when the great buffalo herds are extinct.
"I want to show them as people who were
not always at battle but as people who raised
children, made love, cooked meals, hunted
buffalo. Theirs was a life on the move," says
Terpning, "always looking for fresh grass, for
buffalo. Today we tend to romanticize it, but
in reality it was a hard life. The thing that
makes it appealing, however, is that it was such
a free existence."
Terpning is most proud of praise from
Native Americans today. At a recent art exhibition a Cheyenne woman stopped him
to say ....
"I
just want to touch you,
because you
are the only one
who perceives
our people __
as we __
perceive ourselves."
Indisputably one of the foremost artists working today, Howard Terpning has won all the highest prizes in Western art: countless awards from the Cowboy Artists of America, the Hubbard Art Award for Excellence, the National Academy of
Western Art's Prix de West (twice), the
Lifetime Achievement Award from the Gene
Autry Museum, and the Eiteljorg
Award for Excellence in American Western Art. His paintings hang in the permanent collection of major art museums
including the Gilcrease Museum, the National Cowboy
Hall of Fame, the Phoenix Art Museum, and now... the Eiteljorg Museum of American
Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis.
Born in Illinois and educated at the Chicago
Academy of Fine Arts and the American Academy of Art, Howard Terpning first gained
attention for his powerful magazine cover illustrations and for his eighty-three movie poster
illustrations.
In 1976, he walked away from a successful
illustration career to pursue his dream of
chronicling the Native American people.
Within two short years he became one of the
giants in his field.
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