17 wearing shoes and getting disconnected from a lot of things that are here on the earth, maybe we lose that ability,” he says. “The Shawnees have a prophet who said that when the earth became covered with spider webs, it would end. What did he mean by spider webs? It could be all the telephone poles and the high line wires that are going across the country.” It is his brighter works that have made him a household name in Oklahoma’s arts community. Oklahoma commissioned him to create a poster and used it along with another Harjo piece, A Returning of Nations, to promote its centennial celebration in 2007. The Oklahoma Museum of Natural History and the Red Earth Center have displayed his work, and state officials have given his work as gifts to visiting dignitaries, such as Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That didn’t happen overnight. Living with his grandparents on their farm outside of the southern Oklahoma town of Byng, he spent his childhood running around the backwoods of Pontotoc County with a sketchpad. After high school graduation in 1965, he attended Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts where he met his mentor, the famed painter, printmaker and sculptor Seymour Tubis, who encouraged the aspiring cartoonist to do printmaking. Harjo spent two years in Santa Fe while his love of printmaking grew. “When I lay my drawing on the block of wood and start to carve into it, it’s like peace of mind,” Harjo says. “I’m carving and seeing things fall away and reveal themselves on the block of wood. Then, once I’ve carved out the basic block, if I add other colors to it, I have to do more woodcarving. When I discovered I wanted to print, I wanted to print trees. I wanted to print concrete. I wanted to print anything that I could find.” After he graduated from the arts institute, Tubis talked him into attending OSU, where he found a good friend in Moses Jackson, a 1969 art graduate, and inspiring professors in Dean Bloodgood, Dale McKinney and Nick Bormann, who allowed him to work more with Native American topics. His work became more abstract, often with backstories that would be unnoticeable to others, such as My Daddy’s House, a painting that’s not a painting of a house, but of a series of concentric circles, symbols and colors arranged like points on a compass. He only called it that because he expected it to sell for enough money to buy his dad a house. “It’s the four directions, white, red, yellow and black. Yet other cultures also have those colors as their directions. The red circle around it is continuing life. The hands that are around it represent friendship. The trees represent the earth. The forest and the half mountains represent the earth,” Harjo says. “Before I enclosed it with the two circles, it vibrated. I could see it in my eye moving. Then when I closed it up, it quit vibrating. I added those little design elements that are in between the women I painted. And then coming out of the center, going in all directions are birds, and birds represent prayer to the Creator.” Drafted in 1969, he spent a year in Vietnam attached to an artillery regiment. He prefers to keep his distance from Vietnam, and it doesn’t appear in his work. He returned to OSU after two years in the military to finish his degree. Afterward, he moved to Tulsa where he caught the attention of famed country music promoter Jim Halsey. Halsey bought several of Harjo’s paintings and set up a mobile art gallery with a local collector, Diane Henry, who showed some of the artist’s early work. The ’70s was a time full of Indian artists, Harjo says, and it lasted until the oil bust and bank failures of the late 1970s and early 1980s. While many of his peers sought other careers, he stuck out the downturn. He credits Barbara, his wife of 27 years, with keeping them on track. She freed him to focus solely on his art when she began handling the business of booking shows and festivals. They live in Oklahoma City where Harjo, now an award-winning, internationally known artist, continues his search for balance working in his home studio. “When I was growing up, we would go to stomp dances. If we went to the dance, my grandmother would say, ‘Don’t tell anybody at the church,’ because there was a separation. It was not right if you were a Christian to go to the dance — to practice the other way of seeing the Creator,” he says. “And I think that’s a great detriment to a lot of our people. Once you become totally absorbed in Christianity, or one belief in God, you repudiate your tribal belief in the Creator and all living things. “There are the positive aspects of the medicine people who can help heal with the mind. Yet at the same time, you can carry that too far and always try to heal with the mind when there is help such as drugs that can alleviate the situation. “There’s got to be a happy balance. And that’s what I think life is about — maintaining balance in whatever you do, whether it’s your friendships, your artwork or the way you live.” Along Came a Spider
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