Allan Houser Drawings: The Centennial Exhibition

After training at The Studio of the Santa Fe Indian School in the 1930s, the Chiricahua Apache artist Allan Houser (1914–1994) had both commercial and critical success as a painter and sculptor. Unlike some artists, he generally was not comfortable working in a painterly style but, believing that charcoals and pastels would enable him to intensify the freshness and spontaneity of his imagery, Houser began to focus on drawing. Houser built a dedicated drawing and design studio in Santa Fe in 1990 and was extremely prolific over the next four years. Allan Houser Drawings: The Centennial Exhibition offers a critical examination of Houser’s career as a draughtsman, from his early career to the rich body of work he produced late in life. Both the publication and the accompanying exhibition coincided with the centennial of Houser’s birth and a national celebration of the artist’s legacy.