Editor’s note: This is one in an occasional series on “forgotten” ancestors who may not have been fully recognized for their achievements.
Raymond Wilson
Special to ICT
Woody Crumbo of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation was an acclaimed artist, dancer and musician, but he also played a major role in convincing the non-Native American arts community to recognize and accept Native artistry as a significant art form.
He’s perhaps best known for a series of wall murals he began painting in 1939 for the U.S. Department of the Interior’s building in Washington, D.C., where they still can be seen today. He’s also noted for a mural, “The Rainbow Trail,” painted in 1943 on the wall of the U.S. Post Office in Nowata, Oklahoma.
His works went far beyond murals, however. Known for his art techniques that included silkscreen, watercolors, oil and egg tempera, etching, and printmaking, his works can be found in major art museums, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Gilcrease Museum in Oklahoma, among others.
Woodrow Wilson Crumbo was born Jan. 31, 1912, on his mother’s allotment in Indian Territory near Lexington, Oklahoma. His father, Alexander Crumbo, was non-Native, but his mother, Mary Hurd, was Citizen Potawatomi.
Woody, as he was known, was the youngest of 12 children, and for a brief time attended Riverside Indian School near Anadarko, Oklahoma.
In 1919, Crumbo became an orphan and lived with relatives and other Native families. For several years, he did not attend school, and instead herded cattle and horses, made flutes, and sketched friends and animals, especially horses and birds.
In 1929, Woody returned to school, enrolling at Chilocco Indian Agricultural School near the Oklahoma/Kansas border, north of Ponca City, Oklahoma.
Susie Peters, a non-Native artist, helped develop his artistic talents, and she played a role in Crumbo’s first major art sale: the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s purchase of over 20 of his paintings in 1932.
By then, he was attending the American Indian Institute in Wichita, Kansas, on a scholarship, and he graduated valedictorian in 1933.
He then attended Wichita University, taking mural painting courses from non-Native professors Olaf/Olle Nordmark and watercolor painting from Clayton Staples. Crumbo also developed a long-lasting relationship with Thurlow Lieurance, a Wichita University professor of music and a composer who recorded Native American music and held performances that included Native dances.
Crumbo next attended the University of Oklahoma from 1936-1938, and took painting and drawing courses.
During his years in school learning different art techniques, Crumbo helped finance his education by dancing and playing the flute. He and other Native dancers performed at several reservations sponsored by a government program, and many of his artworks portray Native people dancing and playing the flute.
From 1938-1941 and again from 1943-1945, Crumbo served as director of the Art Department at Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma. And in 1939, the federal government chose Crumbo and other Native artists to paint wall murals at the new Department of the Interior building in Washington, D.C.
Between 1941 and 1943, in the midst of World War II, Crumbo worked as a designer at Cessna Aircraft in Wichita and later at Douglas Aircraft in Tulsa.
In 1945, the Thomas Gilcrease Institute in Tulsa hired him as an artist-in-residence to create an American Indian art collection. Crumbo worked on the project for three years, and he and Gilcrease became good friends.
Crumbo also worked at other museums, including the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa and the El Paso Art Museum, to improve their Native American art collections.
At Philbrook, he helped establish an annual Native American art fair in the mid-1940s that lasted for over 30 years and emphasized the importance of Native art. During his time in El Paso, he served as curator and acting director.
Besides living in Oklahoma and Texas, Crumbo loved parts of the West and Southwest, living in La Junta, Colorado, and in Taos and in Cimarron, New Mexico.
Over the years, his reputation grew, and he sold many of his works. For example, complete, numbered sets of his silkscreens and etchings are owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and by the late Queen Elizabeth II of England.
Among his honors are the Julius Rosenwald Foundation Fellowship, 1945; the Oklahoma Hall of Fame, 1975; state chairman of the Oklahoma Bicentennial Commission, 1976; the Oklahoma Arts Council, 1979-1984; and Oklahoma Ambassador of Good Will, 1982.
Crumbo died on April 4, 1989, at age 77, in Cimarron, New Mexico, and is buried in Pierce, Oklahoma.
Sources: Library of Congress; Voices of Oklahoma; Wichita State University; Oklahoma Arts Council; Robert Perry, “Uprising! Woody Crumbo’s Indian Art” (2009).