Skip to main content
Black Hawk's extraordinary drawing book contains scenes of hunting, natural history drawings, dance scenes, and numerous depictions of warfare and ceremony. During the winter of 1880-81 William Caton, a trader at the Cheyenne River Agency in Dakota Territory, offered Black Hawk a credit of 50 cents for each drawing he made. Later they were bound into this book.
Exhibition History"The 45th Annual Winter Antique Show," New York, NY, January 12, 1999 – January 25, 1999.
"Plains Indian Drawings 1865-1935," Drawing Center, New York City, NY, November 2, 1996 - December 21, 1996; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI, January 17, 1997 - March 30, 1997; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON, Canada, November 16, 1997 - January 4, 1998.
"Picturing Change: The Impact of Ledger Drawing on Native American Art," Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH, December 11, 2004 - May 15, 2005.
"Art of the American Indian: The Thaw Collection," The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, March 2, 2010 - May 30, 2010; Minneapolis Museum of Art, Minneapolis, MN, October 24, 2010 - January 9, 2011; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, April 24, 2011 - September 23, 2011; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, December 4, 2011 - February 12, 2012.
"Indians of the Plains, Art and Life in North America," Musee du Quai Branly, France, April 8, 2014 - July 20, 2014; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, September 20, 2014 - January 18, 2015; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Februray 23, 2015 - May 24, 2015.
"American Indian Art from the Fenimore Art Museum: The Thaw Collection," The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, May 9, 2017 - October 8, 2017.
"American Indian Art from the Fenimore Art Museum: The Thaw Collection," Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY, October 13, 2018 - December 31, 2018.
"American Indian Art from the Fenimore Art Museum: The Thaw Collection," Mitchell Gallery, St John's College, Annapolis, MD, February 28, 2020 - April 26, 2020.
ProvenanceWilliam Edward Caton, Cheyenne Agency, Dakota Territory; Bessie C. Irvin Trust; Sotheby's, New York City; Alecander Gallery, New York City
BibliographySotheby's. 21 October 1994, Sale 6610, lot 174.
Sotheby's Art at Auction the Art Market Review 1994-95. London: Conran Octopus Limited, 1995, p. 186.
Sotheby's Preview. July 1995: 26-27.
Maine Antique Digest, February 1995, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, 1-B, 2-B.
Berlo, Janet Catherine. "Spirit Horses and Thunder Beings." In Grand Street. New York: Jean Stein & Torsten Wiesel. Stein, Jean, ed. Vol. 14, no. 4, 1996, frontispiece, pp.199-208.
Berlo, Janet Catherine. "Plains Indian Drawings, 1865-1935: Pages from of Visual History - A Traveling Exhibition of Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa and Arapaho Graphic Arts." American Indian Art Magazine. Vol.22, No.1 (Winter 1996):58.
Berlo, Janet. "Nineteenth-century Plains Indian drawings." The Magazine Antiques. vol.CL, no.5, (November 1996): 694, pl.XX.
Cotter, Holland. "On Ledger Paper, the Fall of the American Indian." The New York Times, 15 November 1996, C24.
Vincent, Gilbert T. and Janet Catherine Berlo. "Black Hawk's Drawing of a Vision." The Magazine Antiques (January 1997): 200-201.
A.L. "Thaw's Indian Wing." Artnews. Vol.94, No.6. (Summer 1995): 52.
Taylor, Colin. Sun'ka Wakan. Sacred Horse of the Plains Indians: Ethos and Regalia. Germany: Verlag fur Amerikanistik, Wyk auf Foehr, 1995, p.30, fig.4c.
Berlo, Janet C., ed. Plains Indians Drawings 1865 - 1935: Pages from A Visual History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996. pp 35-39, p. 71, pls. 1 & 2, pp. 188-193, cat nos. 114-119.
Coleman, Winfield. "Art as Cosmology: Cheyenne Women's Rawhide Painting." Tribal Arts, Vol.V, No.1 (Summer 1998):48-60.
Berlo, Janet C. and Ruth B. Phillips. Native North American Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp.25 & 247, fig.16.
Vincent, Gilbert et al. Art of the North American Indians: The Thaw Collection. Cooperstown, New York: Fenimore Art Museum, 2000, pp. 145-147.
Berlo, Janet Catherine. Spirit Beings and Sun Dancers: Black Hawk's Vision of the Lakota World. New York: George Braziller, 2000.
Catalog of Collages by Arthur Amiotte. The Wheelwright Museum, 2006, p. 10.
Cowdrey, Mike and Ned & Jody Martin. American Indian Horse Masks. Nicasio, CA: Hawk Hill Press, 2006, fig.3.1 p. 17 (plate 8), fig. 3.4 p. 20 (plate 2).
Used in "Living with Art" textbook by McGraw Hill.
Getlein, Mark. Living with Art. 8th edition. New York: McGraw Hill, 2008. p. 148, fig. 6.1.
Miller, Angels L., Janet C. Berlo, Bryan J. Wolf and Jennifer L. Roberts. American Art, History, and Culture Identity Encounters. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008, pg. 315, fig 9.39.
Fognell, Eva. “Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collections.” Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum, 2010. pp. 72-72.
Fognell, Eva. “Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection.” American Indian Art Magazine 36, no. 4 (Autumn 2011). p. 81, fig. 10.
Rosoff, Nancy B., and Susan Kennedy Zeller. Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains. Seattle: Brooklyn Museum and University of Washington Press, 2011. p. 87 (fig. 82).
Sage, Helene. Native American Horse Gear. Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2012. p. 137, fig. 7-6, p. 144, fig. 8--3.
Levine, Emily. Witness: A Hunkpapha Historian's Strong-Heart Song of the Lakotas. University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Cover and plates 1, 5, 6, 7, 15, 16 and 26.
Torrence, Gaylord. The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky. Skira Rizzoli, 2014. Plate 85, p. 213.
Berlo, Jonathan, and Ruth Phillips. Native North American Art. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. First edition 1998, pp. 31-32, fig. 1.24.
Murdock, Michelle, ed. 50 at 20: Masterpieces of American Indian Art from the Thaw Collection. Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum, 2015, p. 16.
Fognell, Eva and Alexander Brier Marr, eds. Art of the North American Indians: The Thaw Collection at the Fenimore Art Museum, 2nd ed. Cooperstown, New York: Fenimore Art Museum, 2016, p. 168.
Mahers, Savannah and Chris O'Connell. "F is for Fake: How Likely Fraudulent Indigenous Artworks Landed on Museum Walls in Wyoming." [Web entry.] Wyoming Public Media, October 20, 2020.
Dana Claxton, ed., The Sioux Project--Tatanka Oyate (exh. cat. MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada, 2020), p.41.
Artist
Black Hawk
(1832 - 1889, Sans Arcs Lakota (Teton Sioux))
Drawing Book
Date1880-1881
DimensionsOverall (Open Dimensions): 10 1/4 × 1 3/4 × 31 in. (26 × 4.4 × 78.7 cm)
Object numberT0614
Credit LineGift of Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw
Photograph by Richard Walker
Label TextInitially, the content of ledger drawings continued the tradition of depicting military exploits and important acts of personal heroism already established in traditional representational painting on buffalo hides and animal skins. As the U.S. government forced Plains peoples onto reservations, mostly completed by the end of the 1870s, Plains artists added scenes of ceremony and daily life from before the reservation period to the repertoire of their artwork. These scenes reflected the social and cultural changes brought by reservation life within the larger context of forced assimilation.Black Hawk's extraordinary drawing book contains scenes of hunting, natural history drawings, dance scenes, and numerous depictions of warfare and ceremony. During the winter of 1880-81 William Caton, a trader at the Cheyenne River Agency in Dakota Territory, offered Black Hawk a credit of 50 cents for each drawing he made. Later they were bound into this book.
Exhibition History"The 45th Annual Winter Antique Show," New York, NY, January 12, 1999 – January 25, 1999.
"Plains Indian Drawings 1865-1935," Drawing Center, New York City, NY, November 2, 1996 - December 21, 1996; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI, January 17, 1997 - March 30, 1997; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON, Canada, November 16, 1997 - January 4, 1998.
"Picturing Change: The Impact of Ledger Drawing on Native American Art," Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH, December 11, 2004 - May 15, 2005.
"Art of the American Indian: The Thaw Collection," The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, March 2, 2010 - May 30, 2010; Minneapolis Museum of Art, Minneapolis, MN, October 24, 2010 - January 9, 2011; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, April 24, 2011 - September 23, 2011; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, December 4, 2011 - February 12, 2012.
"Indians of the Plains, Art and Life in North America," Musee du Quai Branly, France, April 8, 2014 - July 20, 2014; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, September 20, 2014 - January 18, 2015; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Februray 23, 2015 - May 24, 2015.
"American Indian Art from the Fenimore Art Museum: The Thaw Collection," The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, May 9, 2017 - October 8, 2017.
"American Indian Art from the Fenimore Art Museum: The Thaw Collection," Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY, October 13, 2018 - December 31, 2018.
"American Indian Art from the Fenimore Art Museum: The Thaw Collection," Mitchell Gallery, St John's College, Annapolis, MD, February 28, 2020 - April 26, 2020.
ProvenanceWilliam Edward Caton, Cheyenne Agency, Dakota Territory; Bessie C. Irvin Trust; Sotheby's, New York City; Alecander Gallery, New York City
BibliographySotheby's. 21 October 1994, Sale 6610, lot 174.
Sotheby's Art at Auction the Art Market Review 1994-95. London: Conran Octopus Limited, 1995, p. 186.
Sotheby's Preview. July 1995: 26-27.
Maine Antique Digest, February 1995, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, 1-B, 2-B.
Berlo, Janet Catherine. "Spirit Horses and Thunder Beings." In Grand Street. New York: Jean Stein & Torsten Wiesel. Stein, Jean, ed. Vol. 14, no. 4, 1996, frontispiece, pp.199-208.
Berlo, Janet Catherine. "Plains Indian Drawings, 1865-1935: Pages from of Visual History - A Traveling Exhibition of Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa and Arapaho Graphic Arts." American Indian Art Magazine. Vol.22, No.1 (Winter 1996):58.
Berlo, Janet. "Nineteenth-century Plains Indian drawings." The Magazine Antiques. vol.CL, no.5, (November 1996): 694, pl.XX.
Cotter, Holland. "On Ledger Paper, the Fall of the American Indian." The New York Times, 15 November 1996, C24.
Vincent, Gilbert T. and Janet Catherine Berlo. "Black Hawk's Drawing of a Vision." The Magazine Antiques (January 1997): 200-201.
A.L. "Thaw's Indian Wing." Artnews. Vol.94, No.6. (Summer 1995): 52.
Taylor, Colin. Sun'ka Wakan. Sacred Horse of the Plains Indians: Ethos and Regalia. Germany: Verlag fur Amerikanistik, Wyk auf Foehr, 1995, p.30, fig.4c.
Berlo, Janet C., ed. Plains Indians Drawings 1865 - 1935: Pages from A Visual History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996. pp 35-39, p. 71, pls. 1 & 2, pp. 188-193, cat nos. 114-119.
Coleman, Winfield. "Art as Cosmology: Cheyenne Women's Rawhide Painting." Tribal Arts, Vol.V, No.1 (Summer 1998):48-60.
Berlo, Janet C. and Ruth B. Phillips. Native North American Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp.25 & 247, fig.16.
Vincent, Gilbert et al. Art of the North American Indians: The Thaw Collection. Cooperstown, New York: Fenimore Art Museum, 2000, pp. 145-147.
Berlo, Janet Catherine. Spirit Beings and Sun Dancers: Black Hawk's Vision of the Lakota World. New York: George Braziller, 2000.
Catalog of Collages by Arthur Amiotte. The Wheelwright Museum, 2006, p. 10.
Cowdrey, Mike and Ned & Jody Martin. American Indian Horse Masks. Nicasio, CA: Hawk Hill Press, 2006, fig.3.1 p. 17 (plate 8), fig. 3.4 p. 20 (plate 2).
Used in "Living with Art" textbook by McGraw Hill.
Getlein, Mark. Living with Art. 8th edition. New York: McGraw Hill, 2008. p. 148, fig. 6.1.
Miller, Angels L., Janet C. Berlo, Bryan J. Wolf and Jennifer L. Roberts. American Art, History, and Culture Identity Encounters. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2008, pg. 315, fig 9.39.
Fognell, Eva. “Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collections.” Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum, 2010. pp. 72-72.
Fognell, Eva. “Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection.” American Indian Art Magazine 36, no. 4 (Autumn 2011). p. 81, fig. 10.
Rosoff, Nancy B., and Susan Kennedy Zeller. Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains. Seattle: Brooklyn Museum and University of Washington Press, 2011. p. 87 (fig. 82).
Sage, Helene. Native American Horse Gear. Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2012. p. 137, fig. 7-6, p. 144, fig. 8--3.
Levine, Emily. Witness: A Hunkpapha Historian's Strong-Heart Song of the Lakotas. University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Cover and plates 1, 5, 6, 7, 15, 16 and 26.
Torrence, Gaylord. The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky. Skira Rizzoli, 2014. Plate 85, p. 213.
Berlo, Jonathan, and Ruth Phillips. Native North American Art. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. First edition 1998, pp. 31-32, fig. 1.24.
Murdock, Michelle, ed. 50 at 20: Masterpieces of American Indian Art from the Thaw Collection. Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum, 2015, p. 16.
Fognell, Eva and Alexander Brier Marr, eds. Art of the North American Indians: The Thaw Collection at the Fenimore Art Museum, 2nd ed. Cooperstown, New York: Fenimore Art Museum, 2016, p. 168.
Mahers, Savannah and Chris O'Connell. "F is for Fake: How Likely Fraudulent Indigenous Artworks Landed on Museum Walls in Wyoming." [Web entry.] Wyoming Public Media, October 20, 2020.
Dana Claxton, ed., The Sioux Project--Tatanka Oyate (exh. cat. MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada, 2020), p.41.
On View
On view
