Deer

In his mural, Deer, Potawatomi artist Woody Crumbo composes a tender scene of a doe with her fawn. At center, a stylized sun haloes the head of the doe, and Crumbo stages both animals in a landscape with tufted grass and flowing reeds next to asmall pond. Design elements encircle the central vignette with two stylized Peyote birds painted in the upper corners. This aquatic spirit bird represents the renewal of life and is an important emblem of the Peyote Religion, which originated in the territory now called Oklahoma.

Woodrow Wilson Crumbo, better known as Woody Crumbo, was Director of Art at Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma, when he traveled to Washington, D.C. to complete his mural series at the new Department of the Interior building in 1940. He was one of four Native American artists who painted 2,200 feet of murals for the eighth-floor penthouse, which served as the employee lounge. While Crumbo painted the south corridor, Zia Pueblo artist Velino Herrera covered the north corridor. In the main room, the walls were divided between Chiricahua Apache artist Allan Houser and Navajo painter Gerald Nailor. The Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, insisted on commissioning artwork by Native American artists. Because of this mandate, the Section of Fine Arts invited Crumbo, Herrera, Houser, and Nailor to participate in the penthouse project and contacted two Kiowa artists, James Auchiah and Stephen Mopope, to paint murals for the cafeteria.