“This is one of my
favorite paintings because of the combination of the location and the
subject,” says James Bama. “I had the chance to attend two different
ceremonies this holy man performed. He’s a Crow Indian and a member of
the Whistling Water Clan. The Crow are the only plains tribe with a clan
system. I think there are about ten different clans in the tribe and the
Whistling Water Clan is the largest. That makes him a very important
person in Crow society and an impressive subject to paint.The Holy City
is a lava formation about eight miles from my house. It is in the
Bighorn National Forest, which leads into Yellowstone National Park. The
same volcanic activity that created Yellowstone’s landscape formed
these. They are very dramatic. Putting the two together made a great
deal of sense to me because they are both such moving subjects. At first
take, one would think that they represent two very different kinds of
inspiration, but the more you think about it, the more you realize they
actually belong together.”
For James Bama, moving
to Wyoming from New York City proved to be, perhaps, one of the finest
career choices he ever made.“I paint people,” says Jim. “When I first
moved out here, folks were still alive that lived here before Wyoming
was even a state. The frontier was still alive. I would go to pow-wows,
rodeos, the reservations and even rendezvous to seek these people out.
No one was focusing then on painting real people as I did.”
Though Lloyd Chavez is a Mountain Ute, he poses here with traditional
Shoshone Indian accoutrements. Artist James Bama found him to be a
particularly striking model and painted him four times over the years,
here with a sparrow hawk tied in his hair, a seashell necklace draped
across his neck and a deerskin quiver slung across his back.
The
animal hide stretched behind Chavez is covered in paintings depicting
Indian dances, a buffalo hunt and a captured American flag. In the
absence of a written language, such paintings recorded events in the
life of an individual or family. Sometimes the paintings were done in
calendar style, visually recounting the highlights of each passing year.
The paintings often decorated a warrior’s tepee, so that all who passed
could recognize the great deeds of the warrior within.
James Bama has derived a great deal of joy from the
friendships he has developed with many of the Native American subjects of his
portraits. Years ago, he discovered that on a personal level, they are often
very different from the confrontational image they often project. For example,
Wes Studi, a full-blooded Cherokee, established an impressive screen-acting
career with his intense portrayals of a Pawnee war-party leader in Dances with Wolves and as the vengeful Magua in
The Last of the Mohicans,
yet Bama found him genial and obliging. During their visits to the Bama home,
Studi and his children often spent happy hours playing basketball with the
artist and his son. The cultural gap was bridged as two fathers enjoyed time
with their children.
More than any other animal, the buffalo embodies the
rugged tenacity required to survive on the frontier. The day Bama encountered
this buffalo, the snow was fourteen inches deep and the animal’s coat and hooves
were crusted with ice, but still the animal ventured on. This evocative winter
scene follows in the footsteps of the immensely successful Chuck Wagon in the
Snow; Old Saddle in the Snow and Old Sod House.
This boy is one of four Arapaho brothers who danced
at a festival. From the badges on his shirt (hand-made from snapshots of his
family) to the unique markings on his face, the young dancer is a perfect
example of Native American youth today. Young Indian Dancer is a natural partner
to Indian Boy at Crow Fair, Bama’s last Small Work, which featured another of
the four dancing brothers.
To create the scene that would become Heading
for the High Ground, artist James Bama called upon his friend Jim Williams.
Williams, says Bama, is a “real modern-day mountain man. He used to trap and
he lived in the Southwest in a cave. He had an old-fashioned porcelain
bathtub and all that you would expect. He’s a terrific guy.” With Williams
signed on to model for the painting, they traveled to nearby Rimrock Dude
Ranch to borrow a horse for the day.
Clifton DeSerca, a Sioux, lives and works in the
modern world but has strong ties to the last days of the free-roaming
horseback Native American of the plains. His great-grandfather was Black
Elk, a Sioux holy man whose autobiography is considered one of the most
important pieces of Native American literature. As a young man, Black Elk
participated in the battle of the Little Big Horn. In his older years, he
told his story to John G. Neihardt who translated it into the classic Black
Elk Speaks. DeSerca serves his people by being involved in a reservation
outreach program working with alcoholics. He is portrayed here wearing a
Sioux headdress and a historic shirt from the trading-post period.
