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 at the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico 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. A 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 Comrades in Mourning for the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. In 1949, Houser 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, where he headed the sculpture department for thirteen years. After retirement, Houser entered the most prolific stage of his career, creating sculptures depicting Native subject matter in an abstract style. Two years before his death in 1994, he received the National Medal of Arts from President George H. W. Bush. Houser was the first Native American artist to receive this award.