THE KIOWA SIX
 
The work of the Kiowa Six artists represents a watershed in 20th-century American Indian art. In about 1914, Sister Mary Olivia Taylor, a Choctaw/Chickasaw woman, began providing art instruction to Stephen Mopope, Jack Hokeah, Spencer Asah, James Auchiah, and Lois Smoky at the St. Patrick’s Mission School in Anadarko, Oklahoma. Several years later, Susie Peters, a field matron for the Kiowa Agency, organized a fine arts class that provided informal art instruction to these and other Kiowa young people. Peters then arranged for six students to enroll in art classes at the University of Oklahoma. Several, including Monroe Tsatoke began attending the university as early as 1926. Others, including Lois Smoky arrived shortly thereafter. Smoky’s tenure in the program was short-lived.
 
The director of the University’s School of Art, Oscar Brousse Jacobson, organized an exhibition of the Kiowa work that traveled widely beginning in 1928. The display was featured at the International Folk Art Congress in Prague and a print portfolio of the exhibited works, titled Kiowa Indian Art, was published in Paris in 1929. The paintings of the Kiowa Six were part of a larger Native exhibition in the United States National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1932—the only time Indigenous artists have ever shown in the American national pavilion.
 
In a 1975 interview, Muscogee Creek artist Fred Beaver commented on the legacy of the Kiowa Six:
 
“This tradition of Indian Art, at least here in Oklahoma, was created by people who trained themselves and didn’t have very much influence from European art and knew almost nothing about it. . . . The way we paint, that came from us. Just like I taught myself to paint; so did Mopope and Tsatoke and all those Kiowa boys.”
 
“I know this as a fact cause I saw those Kiowas and I knew Dr. Jacobson pretty well . . . I know that Miss Peters pretty much let them do what they wanted to do. Their art was their own, all the way.”