Description

Striking color images depict traditional lifeways and the pain of imprisonment

During the 1870s, Cheyenne and Kiowa prisoners of war at Fort Marion, Florida, graphically recorded their responses to incarceration in drawings that conveyed both the present reality of imprisonment and nostalgic memories of home. Now a leading authority on American Indian drawings and paintings examines an important collection of these drawings to reveal how art blossomed at Fort Marion.

The Silberman Collection is an unusually complete group of images that illustrate the artists’ fascination with the world outside the southern plains, their living conditions and survival strategies as prisoners, and their reminiscences of pre-reservation life. Joyce M. Szabo explains the significance of this preeminent collection, which focuses on seven of the prisoner-artists―most notably Zotom and Making Medicine. Through a selection of 120 striking color images, Szabo shows how each artist creatively recorded his experiences.