Yesterday, we featured some of Wings’s current collectible miniatures, pottery and spoons designed expressly as diminutive versions of their functional and ceremonial counterparts. I mentioned then that Wings has long created such small works, noting that his pottery miniatures most often took the form of seed pots and bowls.
To that end, I thought it might be appropriate to highlight a pair of such bowls that were nevertheless unique in design and execution: a pair of overlay bowls featuring ledger horses.
“Ledger horses” are a thing in Native art, but the label has come to embody multiple meanings. Originally, the label referred specifically to a type of art work that originated on the Northern Plains well over a century ago. As colonial invaders pursued their offiical policy of “Manifest Destiny” and all that it implied (up to, including, and far beyond what would be Theodore Roosevelt’s characterization of a “good Indian”), Native art suffered along with language, tradition, spirituality, and simply survival. White invaders’ heedless slaughter of the buffalo reduced the availability of hides, long used as “canvases”; the razing of the land to build forts and homes and towns destroyed plant life, including plants used as natural pigments. And, of course, the rounding up of the people and herding them into internment camps cut off any chance of obtaining the materials needed to create in the first place.
But the human spirit is a strange and wonderful thing, and its artistic impulses will not be denied. Art is as fundamental as breathing, and our peoples have always known that it is a path to Spirit, powerful Medicine. And so, Natives thus interned cast about for new canvases.
They found them . . . in the midden heaps of the Cavalry forts and colonial settlements.
The Army brought with them books called ledgers: large bound volumes filled with pale pages of paper ruled with fine lines. They used them to track expenses, supplies, etc. — just as any modern ledger would be used (although today, the ledgers are almost entirely virtual, pixels on a screen rather than pages in a book). And, predictably, when the invading forces, military or otherwise, filled a ledger and finished with its contents, they threw it out.
Natives were there to retrieve it.
They used the pages — line-ruled and inscribed by fountain pens, long tallies of flour and coffee and horseshoes and horseflesh and rifles and ammunition and wagon wheels and the thousand and one other things that keeps an army stocked — as canvases for art of a wholly indigenous sort. Today, it’s known expressly as “ledger art.”
In additional to a whole new art form, they became a new sort of historical record, as well: one that recorded the daily lives of the Natives of those lands. And, considering those lifeways, a popular element was, of course, the horse.
Equally popular was one expression of the horse: racing across the page at full gallop, legs extended in both directions, sometimes with a rider, sometimes alone, nearly always painted traditionally, for the hunt or for war. That style, that image of the running horse, has given rise to the label “ledger horse.”
It’s one of Wings’s favorite genres: He has several pieces of ledger art in his personal collection, and decades ago, long before it became fashionable for Native pop culture purposes, he incorporated ledger horses into his own work.
Two of them race across today’s featured works, a pair from some six or seven years ago.
The one shown above is the inside of the bowl whose reverse is shown immediately below.
He began the piece with the work on this side, what would become the outer walls of the bowl. He stamped in in concentric circles of traditional symbols, all arrayed around a highly styled Guiding Star at the center, one made of a tiny central Morning Star whose four spokes exploded into feathery rays. He ringed the star with sunrise symbols, then worked his way outward with rows of lodge symbols that met in the center of their rows to form Eyes of Spirit.
Wings then drew a ledger horse on sheet silver, used a jeweler’s saw to cut it out, and accented it with hand-stamped physical features and the traditional painted patterns that would have been found on an actual 19th-Century Indian pony. He soldered it carefully to the blank side of the round bowl, still flat, and scattered a few stamped celestial symbols around it. He then gently shaped the silver so that its sides flowed upward, working carefully until it took shape recognizeably as a bowl.
The impact of the heavy stampwork on the reverse combined with the soft patina given the bowl’s interior worked together to give the surface a soft cloud-like finish, as though the horse raced through clouds of stardust in the night sky.
Wings then created a companion piece, a second overlay bowl in similar design. Again, he began it the same way, with the exterior first:
I always thought that the reverse of this bowl was, if anything, even more beautiful than the other one. Indeed, it was one of his most perfect designs, the freehand stampwork extraordinarily detailed and uniform, hoops within hoops of powerful traditional symbols — positive/negative symbols that alternate as both thunderheads and kiva steps; signs of the Four Sacred Directions resting inside their own individual sacred hoops; Eyes of Spirit — all arrayed around a very different, yet equally highly stylized Morning Star. It was a powerful collection of images, and one executed flawlessly.
He used a similar design for the interior of the bowl, racing ledger horse surrounded by scattered suns and stars:
But despite the obvious similarities, the two horses are not identical. Even beyond the natural variation that comes with work done entirely freehand, the horses are designed with different detailing. The subtle stampwork around horse varies, too, scattered randomly to create slightly different cosmos for each horse.
These were not among his most expensive collectibles: Their small size and open-pot styling ensured that. They were, however, some of his most beautiful, and most traditionally inspirited.
For people like us, “horse people,” they captured the spirit of these great half-wild beings and brought them home in a world all their own — a world that links them to their progenitors who galloped across the lined pages of old ledgers, and to their living counterparts who still race across the land beneath starry skies.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
