A981 Woody Crumbo

About the artist

WOODROW WILSON “WOODY” CRUMBO

(Potawatomi   b. 1912 – 1989)

The art of Woody Crumbo communicates the spirit of the American Indian in harmony with nature and all men. His work is exuberant where deer and horses soar like weightless spirits and figures swoop into dance and buffalo run.

“Woody” Crumbo was an artist, flautist, and dancer who lived and worked mostly in the West of the United States. Crumbo works in oil and egg tempera, as well as in watercolor, sculpture, stained glass, and silkscreen. Under the guidance of Olle Nordmark, he also learned etching.  As an independent prospector in New Mexico in the late 1950s, he found one of the largest beryllium veins in the nation, valued at millions of dollars.

His paintings are held by several major museums throughout the United States and abroad, including:

… The Smithsonian Institution: American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery

… The Metropolitan Museum of Art

… The largest collection (175 pieces) at the Thomas Gilcrease Institute in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Crumbo was a 1978 inductee into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame for his paintings. He was appointed as an "ambassador of good will" for Oklahoma in 1982 by Governor George Nigh.

... Queen Elizabeth of England owns a complete numbered set of Crumbo's etchings and silk screens

… the Museum of Modern Art, New York City owns a complete numbered set of Crumbo's etchings and silk screens

He was born near Lexington, Oklahoma on January 31, 1912 as Woodrow Wilson Crumbo on his Potawatomi mother’s (Mary Ann Hurd) tribal allotment of land. His French father, Alex, was a horse trader.  Unfortunately, by the time he was seven in 1919 he was an orphan, but his nomadic early life, living with different Indian families around Sand Springs Oklahoma, including Creek and Sioux, and later becoming friends with a group of Kiowas with whom he studied art, instilled an appreciation for the diverse and disappearing cultures and traditions of the country’s tribes.  With art, he found a way to honor, promote, and preserve this history. Being orphaned, his education was stopped for ten years.  In the desolate plains of Oklahoma, Crumbo learned to dance and play the flute - creative exercises that 

would be a constant in his art and life. Crumbo played the ceremonial cedar wood flute of the Kiowas and was a featured soloist with the Wichita symphony in 1932-1934.

When Crumbo was 17, he began studying art at the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School. He earned a scholarship to the Wichita American Indian Institute, graduating as valedictorian and continued his studies at Wichita University and the then University of Oklahoma.

While studying at Wichita University and later the University of Oklahoma, he supported himself as a dancer, learning different tribe’s dances from across the nation. This is probably why out of all his portrait paintings, the dancers feel the most present and alive, the detail on their costumes studied down to each feather tip. 

While he had a knack for any and all art forms, with painting and printmaking Crumbo found distinction.

He was one of the first Native American artists to dive into oil painting as a medium, adding dimension to the flat figure style popularized by the “Kiowa Six” in tempura. Inspired by the narrative, representational qualities of Plains hide painting and Ledger art, the Kiowa Six had created a new style of painting that portrayed ceremonial and social scenes of Kiowa life and stories from oral history, which is characterized by solid color fields, minimal backgrounds, a flat perspective, and emphasis on details of dance regalia. While capturing traditional symbolism and ceremony were a major focus, his experimentation progressed with his career, becoming less and less what was expected from Native American art. This was especially true with his animals.

None of Crumbo’s work was aimed at figurative realism, but with the animals he especially brought out what he saw as their spirit, often in vivid blues and lunging, long steps.

Yet as many artists have found, widespread success isn’t a guarantee for financial security, and he had a plan, a rather outlandish plan. In 1954 he ordered a mineral identification kit for $3 from a catalogue in 1954 and started prospecting with Max Evans, a Western artist. Even with their inexperience, in two years they’d discovered deposits of uranium, copper, and one of the biggest known finds of beryllium worth millions, freeing Crumbo to focus exclusively on art.

Looking at the wide-eyed deer and rainbow-hued stallions, it is probably not much of a surprise that peyote and its spiritual visions inspired Crumbo. In 1938, he became director of art at Bacone College (the oldest college in Oklahoma, founded as the Indian University in 1880), taking over from Acee Blue Eagle, another artist who had an inclination towards gravity-defying blue deer. While there, he created a stained glass window for the chapel, which is one of the very few Native American-made church windows in the world, and definitely the only one to feature a peyote ceremony motif right in the middle of a Baptist church.

In 1939, the U. S. Department of the Interior, which includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs as one of its constituent agencies, commissioned him to paint murals on the walls of its building in Washington,       D. C. A few years later he curated a collection of Native American art at the Thomas Gilcrease Institute in Tulsa. Crumbo's "peyote bird" design became the logo for the Gilcrease Museum.

From 1948 to 1960, Crumbo lived in Taos, New Mexico. He exhibited at numerous shows and became more widely known both nationally and internationally because he adapted some of his work to techniques of engraving and printing, making affordable editions.

In the 1950s, Crumbo bought a $3 mail-order mineral identification kit; he took up prospecting with fellow artist Max Evans. The two found deposits of ore worth millions, including a vein of beryllium that the New Mexico School of Mines identified at the time as "among the greatest beryllium finds in the nation."  Crumbo became "a major stockholder in Taos Uranium and Exploration Corp. that was formed by a group of Texas investors to develop the claims" for beryllium and copper.   With his first interest as art, Crumbo served as Assistant Director of the El Paso, Texas Museum of Art from 1960–1967 and briefly as Director in 1968.

He left to work independently at art and explore humanitarian efforts. He’d been a fierce supporter of preserving culture. He aided the Isleta Pueblo Indians of New Mexico to gain federal recognition and regain their tribal status and donated money to help the Potawatomi build a cultural heritage center near Shawnee. In 1973 he took up residence near Checotah, Oklahoma, where he continued to create and to promote Native American art. In 1978, he was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.

He moved to Cimarron, New Mexico in 1988, and died there in 1989. His body was returned for burial in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

When Crumbo died on April 4, 1989, he’d spent years working as a curator at museums like the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa and the El Paso Museum of Art in Texas to expand and establish their Native American art collections. His art also remains affordable thanks to Crumbo’s interest in accessibility, and even if their mass production has contributed to their devaluing, the loving portrayals of a culture that even as he painted it was fading gave it an undeniable value. As Crumbo once said:

“I have always painted with the desire of developing Indian art so that it may be judged on art standards rather than on its value as a curio — I am attempting to record Indian customs and legends now, while they are alive, to make them a part of the great American culture before these, too, become lost, only to be fragmentarily pieced together by fact and supposition.”