Allan Capron Houser

Allan Capron Houser, also known as Haozous, or “The Sound of Pulling Roots,” was a Chiricahua Apache painter and sculptor. He was born in Oklahoma and trained in New Mexico at the Santa Fe Indian School from 1934 to 1937. In 1938, the federal government commissioned Houser to paint two murals for the Indian Arts and Crafts Shop at the Department of the Interior building in Washington, D.C. One year later, he was invited back to create a series of murals for the eighth floor penthouse together with Navajo painter Gerald Nailor, Potawatomi artist Woody Crumbo, and Zia Pueblo painter Velino Herrera.

Houser exhibited at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, before returning to Oklahoma, where he started to sculpt in wood and stone. In 1948, he completed an important commission in Carrara marble titled Comrade in Mourning for the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. In 1949, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and from 1952 to 1962, he taught art at the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham, Utah. During this time, he created illustrations for seven children’s books. In 1962, he was invited to teach at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he headed the sculpture department for thirteen years. After retirement, he entered the most prolific stage of his career creating sculptures depicting Native subject matter in an abstract language. Two years before his death in 1994, Houser received the National Medal of Arts from President George H. W. Bush, becoming the first Native American artist to receive the award.