Review of Imprisoned Art, Complex Patronage: Plains Drawings by Howling Wolf and Zotom at the Autry National Center by Joyce M. Szabo

Authors

Phillip Earenfight, Dickinson College

Date of this Version

Summer 2012

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 32:3 (Summer 2012).

Comments

Copyright © 2012 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.

Abstract

Imprisoned Art adds to its author's growing list of impressive publications that consider the so-called ledger drawings created by Plains Indian warriors incarcerated, as prisoners of the Southern Plains wars, at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, between 1875 and 1879. It focuses on what were once two fully intact books of drawings, one by Zotom (Kiowa), the other by Howling Wolf (Cheyenne). Treated earlier in Dorothy Dunn's 1877: Plains Indian Sketch Books of Zo-Tom and Howling Wolf (1969), and, with respect to Howling Wolf, in Szabo's Howling Wolf and the History of Ledger Art (1994), the books receive here a comprehensive analysis that considers not only the artists and their drawings, but, most significantly, their patron.