Yanktonai Dakota artist Oscar Howe started a rebellion against “gatekeepers” who sought to keep Native art and artists in a narrow “cultural” lane. He helped spark a sea change in Indigenous art.
Howe, who went on to become a master of contemporary painting as well as a master Native artist, inspired others to blaze their own paths.
Other Native artists have also become known as masters in their field, some more daring, some known both as masters and rebels.
Painter and sculptor Fritz Scholder, a member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, frequently said he wasn’t an Indian, but his color-drenched impressionist images of modern Native life defined the mid-20th century.
Chiricahua Apache sculptor and painter Allan Houser once worked as a pipefitter and art instructor to support his family. He later created the sculpture school at the Institute of American Indian Arts and went on to international acclaim.
Charles Loloma was a Hopi jeweler whose work included gold jewelry, highlighted by intricately inlaid sugilite, lapis, diamond and nontraditional stones. However, it was initially rejected by Indian markets because collectors and market managers didn’t see it as “Indian” enough.
The Arizona Republic, part of the USA TODAY Network, visited with two acknowledged masters of Indigenous art.
Doug Hyde: ‘The stone speaks to me’
PRESCOTT, Ariz. — Doug Hyde meanders around the yard of his home and studio, pointing out stashes of stone. Blocks of alabaster, limestone, granite and marble lie about in the brown grass.
“The stones basically tell you what they want to be,” said Hyde, who has touched, cut and polished stone for more than 60 years as one of Indian Country’s master sculptors.
Peeking through the door of one outbuilding, visitors can see an array of power tools. Another building houses polishing equipment. Yet another holds maquettes, miniature versions of some of Hyde’s signature pieces, and a collection of paintings and supplies.
Hyde, who is of Assiniboine, Nez Perce and Chippewa heritage, is known around the world for his ability to create life from cold stone. He estimates his work is in more than 50 museums, including the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington; the Heard Museum in Phoenix; the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma; the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis; and the Museum of the Southwest in Scottsdale, Arizona.
His stone and bronze sculptures can also be found in art centers, private collections and public spaces, including many commissions from tribes.
His commissions hold pride of place in many cities, including Phoenix, where his massive bronze Code Talker dominates a major street corner. Intertribal Greeting, also in bronze, welcomes visitors to the Heard Museum just down the street.
Yet Hyde, who grew up in Idaho and Oregon, is matter-of-fact about his accomplishments. When he was 7, his mother was sent to a tuberculosis clinic, and Hyde and his seven siblings were sent to a Catholic children’s home. Over the seven years he spent there, he learned how to care for chickens and how to cook.
Then he received some colored pencils and found he had a knack for art. “I did some pencil drawings of some of the girls,” he said. “Most of the time they didn’t like them.”
Hyde went to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1963. Then 17, he had never been away from home. Although he didn’t do very well in painting, another medium called to him.
“Wow, this is a stone,” Hyde said. “You can turn it, you look at it from the top and walk around the back side and it changes, and it’s something somebody could touch.” Ideas swirled in the boy’s head. “I said that’s what I really wanted to do.”
Allan Houser, another master sculptor, was Hyde’s instructor. “I made deals with my teachers to get out of my English and my history classes and such so that I could go to the studio and work on stone,” Hyde said.
Soon he was carving stone over the summer. Hyde estimated he made about $2.80 an hour carving pieces for the Miccosukees for their casino.
After graduating in 1966, he got a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was frustrated by the remedial classes.
“I’d already completed 100 sculptures, and they’re only working in plaster,” he said.
Hyde decided to give that up and join the Army. Three days later, he was training in Fort Lewis, Washington, preparing to go to war in Vietnam.
That’s where he nearly lost his life when a grenade blew up just four feet away.
“I spent nine months in the hospital,” Hyde said. “That cured me wanting to be in the military.”
He went home, married and ended up working carving tombstones after being laid off from a local lumber mill. Hyde carved 10 sculptures and some paintings and got a show at the Northern Plains Museum in Browning, Montana.
“They sold everything.”
Hyde’s life changed again when Houser called and offered him his old teaching job in Santa Fe. Hyde changed the class up, teaching how to sculpt with power tools as he had been doing.
Over the years, Hyde said his perspective on finishing the pieces changed. “I started paying more attention to what people could see from the top or the sides of it and then figuring how to finish everything.”
That evolving attention to sight lines around the sculptures plus his growing acumen as an artist led to more commissions and awards. After his time teaching at IAIA, Hyde shared studio space with some of the greatest artists of the 20th century, including Houser, T.C. Cannon, Earl Biss and Kevin Red Star.
“It was almost like a sacred place because it was so creative during those years.” Hyde thinks that synergy helped change how people thought of Indian art.
“It’s a real change in philosophy; you’re an Indian artist but you’re also a great artist,” he said. “We got invited to museums and invitational shows, and we pushed the envelope.”
Commissions for monument works rolled in. Hyde has not stopped working and creating ever since. When a reporter asked where his art was headed, Hyde replied, “To my studio every morning.”
But on a more serious note, he said he never thinks about where he’s headed, just what he’s working on that day. “Right now, my octopus lady piece is my whole world until she’s done.
“I don’t know how to describe it when the stone makes you happy,” he said.
Jeremy Frey: ‘I didn’t like that there was a ‘wall’ there’
Some Indigenous artists have smashed the “Native artist” box to be known simply as an “artist.”
Unlike Hyde or other acknowledged Native art masters, Passamaquoddy basket maker Jeremy Frey hasn’t shown or sold his work at an Indian market for several years. That’s because he’s been exclusively represented since 2023 by Karma, a contemporary gallery and bookstore based in New York and Los Angeles.
The journey from his childhood home in tribal housing in remote Motahkmikuhk, or Indian Township, Maine, along the U.S.-Canadian border to a top-shelf art gallery in Manhattan was defined by culture, family and brown ash trees.
Breaking down the “wall” that divides Indigenous arts from the mainstream has long been a goal for Frey, who said he’s always had his hands into something related to art.
“I used to carve. I used to sculpt. I’ve worked in metals and painted,” he said. “I think that when you have passion, it doesn’t matter what it was.”
But then he moved on to the oldest art form of the four tribes of Maine known as the Wabanaki, or People of the Dawn: Basketry. He has since dedicated half his life to it.
His mother, Gal Frey, taught him the arduous technique of making a basket. Later, he apprenticed with various makers through the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance, a group credited with saving the art form after it had declined to just a few artists.
His first traditional basket was completed and sold in 2002. He told a reporter in 2018 that traditionally the first basket isn’t sold, but he needed the money.
Making fancy baskets in traditional shapes like ears of corn and acorns soon lost its appeal, and Frey branched out to make baskets purely as art.
That drive to self-improvement and new directions as an artist led to opportunities such as a fellowship with United States Artists. The grant enabled Frey to devote time to refining, redefining and innovating an ancient craft.
It also helped him and his wife, Ganessa, a Penobscot basketmaker, to support their three kids while building his career.
In 2011, Frey was the first-ever basket artist, and only the second Native artist, to win the two most prestigious competitions – the Heard Indian Fair and Market and the Santa Fe Indian Market – in the same year.
He won a second Best of Show award from the Heard Indian Fair in 2015.
Then karma – or rather, Karma – found Frey.
“When I first encountered Jeremy’s work at the 2022 New England Triennial, I knew I was seeing something special,” said Karma owner Brendan Dugan. “I kept circling back to his baskets until it became clear that I had to meet the artist who created them.”
Karma has represented Frey ever since.
The hard labor of making Wabanaki baskets
Wabanaki basket-making isn’t for wimps. It’s a long, arduous process.
First, Frey heads out to the woods to locate a brown ash tree. It must be the right size with a straight trunk and free of disease. He cuts the tree, brings the trunk back home to his studio just north of Bangor, removes the bark and then pounds the rings loose with the flat of an axe.
He then carefully slices the rings into long, thin strips called splints. The splints can be stored and curled up on shelves until he’s ready to create the final steps.
Frey then takes a specially made tool known as a gauge. These hardwood tools are embedded with razor-sharp metal blades of different widths. Some gauges have been handed down over generations, while others are recently made. Holding one end of the splint, Frey painstakingly runs the gauge down the length of it, slicing strips as small as one-thirty-second of an inch wide. He can then dye the strips to a desired color or leave them as naturally light wood.
After all this labor, Frey can finally start the basket. He uses a variety of hardwood forms to weave the floor and walls of a basket, and sweetgrass, another traditional Wabanaki material, and cedar bark for accents.
But that’s where he branches away from “craft” and moves toward “art.” He bends the splints into razor-sharp points, uses several colors to define the weaving and creates new shapes like vases and double-wall basketry using contrastingly dyed splints. He designs for lines that flow, that are perfect.
Frey also adorns some of his baskets with designs made with porcupine quills. Determined to best himself with each creation, Frey worked to hone his art – and his gauges.
“I didn’t think I’d be making contemporary art,” he said. But pushing himself also drove him to master old techniques while creating new forms. “Each basket leads to the next basket.”
Frey thought it would be 20 years before he would be the subject of a one-man exhibit, and “all of a sudden it was 20 years later, and then I was offered a solo show.”
That was at the Portland Museum of Art. The exhibit “Woven” ran from May through September and will travel to Chicago next. Like other firsts in Frey’s career, it’s also the first time a Maine Indian artist was so honored.
Frey continued his innovative streak. “I have woven sculpture, I have a video, I have my prints in there,” he said. “I’m doing something new but having it make sense to my audience.”
There’s another benefit to gallery representation: Karma cocoons Frey from mundane tasks like sales, public relations or making travel arrangements.
“I can just make art,” he said.
He has time to sit in his studio and think about innovations and new ways to weave art from the humble brown ash tree. “It’s this moment of growth.”
Although he’s glad to be freed from the minutiae surrounding the business end of art, Frey misses the Indian market scene. “I want to go back someday and be a judge just to pay back,” he said. “But now I have to get through this really busy time because everything’s happening all at once.”
One factor may limit what he’s able to accomplish: the emerald ash borer. This tiny iridescent green insect, accidentally imported from Asia on pallets, is deadly to ash trees and will likely wipe out more than a billion of them before it’s done reproducing itself across the Northeast.
Frey has been building up a supply of ash in anticipation of the day it disappears and, like other basketmakers, explores new materials.
The video “Ash,” created for the “Woven” exhibit, shows the toll exacted from losing ash trees, a central point in the Maine Indian cultures including the Passamaquoddy. After Frey shows the monthslong process of making one of his exquisite baskets, he sets it ablaze, signifying the damage the ash borer will do.
Just as his mom and other relatives taught him, Frey is teaching the next generation of Wabanaki basketmakers. His apprentice, Penobscot/Cherokee Caleb Hoffman, won the Best of Basketry award at the 2024 Santa Fe Indian Market.
And the accolades continue. The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, awarded Frey the 25th Rappaport Prize, the first-ever for an Indigenous artist. In addition to a grant, Frey was set to deliver a lecture at the museum in October.
But for all the acclaim, awards and international attention, Frey said, “I just feel blessed and honored and humbled to be recognized for all the hard work I’ve done.
“I don’t know that one person really deserves this, but if they’re going to do this, it might as well be me.”
Debra Krol reports on Indigenous communities at the confluence of climate, culture and commerce in Arizona and the Intermountain West. Reach Krol at debra.krol@azcentral.com. Follow her on X @debkrol.
Coverage of Indigenous issues at the intersection of climate, culture and commerce is supported by the Catena Foundation.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Masters of Indigenous art break down ‘walls’ to enter the mainstream