25 Facts About Allan Houser

Allan Capron Houser or Haozous was a Chiricahua Apache sculptor, painter and book illustrator born in Oklahoma.

Allan Houser was one of the most renowned Native American painters and Modernist sculptors of the 20th century.

Additionally, Allan Houser's Offering of the Sacred Pipe is on display at United States Mission to the United Nations in New York City.

In 1934, Allan Houser left Oklahoma at the age of 20 to study at Dorothy Dunn's Art Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In 1939, Allan Houser began his professional career by showing work at the 1939 New York World's Fair and the Golden Gate International Exposition.

Allan Houser received his first major public commission to paint murals at the Main Interior Building in Washington, DC.

Allan Houser married Anna Maria Gallegos of Santa Fe, his wife for 55 years.

Allan Houser then returned to Fort Sill to study with Swedish muralist Olle Nordmark, who encouraged Houser to explore sculpture.

Allan Houser worked by day and continued to paint and sculpt by night, making friends among students and faculty at the Pasadena Art Center.

Allan Houser convinced the jury with his drawings and his conviction, and completed the monumental work Comrades in Mourning from white Carrara marble in 1948.

In 1949, Allan Houser received a Guggenheim Fellowship in sculpture and painting, which granted him two years to work on art and still provide for growing family.

From 1952 to 1962, Allan Houser worked as an art teacher at the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, Utah, which was primarily a Navajo boarding school.

Allan Houser completed hundreds of paintings there, experimenting with watercolors, oils and other media.

In 1962, Allan Houser was asked to join the faculty of a new Native American art school, the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Allan Houser returned to Santa Fe with his family to head up the Institute's sculpture department.

Allan Houser began working with the iconographies of other tribes, using modernist sculptural influences to forge the tribal and the abstract into a visual lexicon all his own.

Allan Houser continued to produce remarkable figurative pieces as well, including the life-sized bronze work Chiricahua Apache Family, dedicated in 1983 at the Fort Sill Apache Tribal Center in Apache, OK.

Allan Houser's work was explored in a series on American Indian artists for the Public Broadcasting System.

Houser's primary skill as a draftsman is evident in the astounding volume of drawn work that was left behind in the Allan Houser Archive, located at the Houser family compound and sculpture garden in southern Santa Fe County, New Mexico.

Allan Houser died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the age of eighty in August 1994.

Allan Houser was fortunate to have been the kind of artist who did not need to be "discovered" after his death, for he enjoyed a career in which he was able to create not just for his own satisfaction, but for an appreciative public as well.

The non-profit Allan Houser Foundation is devoted to the proliferation of the Houser name.

In 2018, Allan Houser became one of the inductees in the first induction ceremony held by the National Native American Hall of Fame.

Allan Houser's work continues to receive academic and institutional exposure.

Allan Houser's work was part of Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting, a survey at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center.