Oscar Howe (Mazuha Hokshina)

Yanktonai Dakota (Sioux), 1915-1983

BiographyOscar Howe (Mazuha Hokshina or "Trader Boy", 1915 – 1983, was an Yanktonai Dakota artist from South Dakota, who became well known for his casein and tempera paintings. He is credited with influencing contemporary Native American art, paving the way for future artists. His art style is marked by bright color, dynamic motion and pristine lines.

Oscar Howe was born in Joe Creek, South Dakota in 1915 on the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation. His Dakota name was Mazuha Hokshina, or "Trader Boy." Descended from hereditary chiefs, he belonged to the Yanktonai band of Dakota people. He attended the Pierre Indian School (an boarding school) in South Dakota in 1933.

His artistic talent was recognized when he was young, and he studied in Dorothy Dunn’s art program at the Studio of Santa Fe Indian School from 1933 to 1938. In 1940 Howe was sent by the South Dakota Artists Project (a division of the Works Progress Administration in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration) to Fort Sill Indian Art Center in Lawton, Oklahoma, to study mural painting techniques with Olle Nordmark. WPA artists were being commissioned to do murals in numerous federal buildings and sometimes local public buildings as well.

After working for several years and serving in World War II, Howe went to college on the GI Bill, earning his B.A. degree at Dakota Wesleyan University in 1952. Having worked as an artist for more than a decade, he also taught as Artist-in-Residence. He received his M.F.A. at the University of Oklahoma in 1954.

He was discharged from the Army in 1945 and returned to the United States. Howe won the Grand Purchase Prize in 1947 at the Indian Art Annual, sponsored by Philbrook Art Center.

Howe's early paintings are similar to other work produced by the Santa Fe Indian School. Later he developed a distinctive style of his own. Howe began with traditional Sioux "straight line" painting, based on hide and later ledger paintings of the 19th century. It was "an artistic form which symbolizes truth or righteousness. he infused it with the Native American art style Tohokmu (spider web), and his work has been compared to Cubism. Through his art, he wanted to portray the contemporary realities of his tribal culture.

During the 1930s and the Great Depression, Howe was employed by the Works Progress Administration in South Dakota. He painted a set of murals for the municipal auditorium in Mobridge and a mural within the dome of the old Carnegie Library, now the Carnegie Resource Center, in Mitchell, South Dakota. Howe worked as an art instructor at Pierre High School in 1939. From 1948 to 1971, he designed panels for the Corn Palace in Mitchell.

Howe became Professor of Art at the University of South Dakota, in Vermillion, South Dakota, in 1957. He taught there until 1983.

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