Oral history interview with Robert Taylor

Little Thunder: [Today is September 15, 2010. My name is Julie Pearson-Little Thunder and I am here in Claremore, Oklahoma talking with Robert Taylor. This interview is part of the Oklahoma Native Artists series of the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at the Oklahoma State University Library. Robert,] can you talk to me about where you were born and grew up?

Taylor: I was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma [in] 1951 [in] Osteopathic Hospital and I was raised in Tulsa. I've lived here all my life, until I went to the Navy in 1970.

Little Thunder: What is or are your tribal affiliations?

Taylor: My whole bloodline, I always tell everyone, I'm a true Oklahoman. On my mother's side its Cherokee, Osage, and Scottish. On my father's side it's Blackfoot, Crow, and Black-Dutch.

Little Thunder: Where did you go to school? It was here in Tulsa, I guess, but what school and what kinds of school activities were you involved in?

Taylor: I graduated from Will Rogers High School in 1969. I played baseball and football there, went on a baseball and football scholarship to Central Missouri State in Warrensburg, [Missouri] and was injured the first semester there in 1:00football. I decided I'd attend Tulsa University, who had offered me a baseball scholarship. So I decided I'd just quit Missouri and go to Tulsa, forgetting at that time that there was a draft and in between schools I was drafted, so I joined the Navy.

Little Thunder: Was art ever one of your school activities?

Taylor: No. The only time I had art in school was in elementary school at Andrew Jackson. We had art class from the fourth through the sixth grade. Art just became an avenue that I'd always dabbled with, I have an uncle who is a professional artist and his name is Wallace Hughes. He kind of inspired in me the idea of drawing, but I always wanted to be a writer. I discovered people were more interested in the things I do more than the things I write. (Laughs) So when I got out of the Navy I started pursuing art.

Little Thunder: I was going to ask you about one of the influences on your early art. I also wondered, I think I remember you mentioning going to pow-wows with your grandpa. I don't know if you feel like that was an influence, but could you just talk about some of the other influences that, looking back you might 2:00interpret as--?

Taylor: The earliest influence that I can remember, first off would be my grandfather, simply because he was the male role model. He was the one that really taught me a lot about living. He had a third grade education and was probably one of the smartest men I've ever known. One of my uncles, one of his sons, Wallace Hughes, who was a wildlife artist and he, at that time, was working for the state of Oklahoma. He did wildlife work and he did a lot of birds. Through him, to this day I still doodle the same Bald Eagle he taught me to draw when I was six years old. At one of our family functions, while we were putting the watermelons in the water trough to cool them down, we had wrapping paper stretched around these tables and I asked him to teach me. He showed me. He said, "I can teach anybody to draw something," and he taught me this little 3:00eagle and to this day I still doodle it.

I was fortunate enough to get to visit with him; he passed away this past May. I visited with him just before that. I asked him if he remembered the day we were out there by the barn and he taught me that and he remembered it, without me coaching him, he remembered most of our conversation. That really impressed me. He was a big influence and my grandfather, through his--just the way he actually lived his life, that's in all Native beliefs, all tribes around the world, true honor is how you live your life and my grandfather was a master of that. In my youth he'd take me around to some of the pow-wows and it's through him that I was really introduced to that side of my lineage. Then as I grew older, as a lot of urban Indians, that wasn't as cool as other things going on and I really 4:00never gave any more thought to it until I was in the service. That's when I started going back and remembering the things my grandfather, the places he had taken me, the things he had taught me. The last time I saw him was the day I left for the service at the bus depot. I always say if there's one thing I'd change I'd go back and have a lot more conversation with him.

Through that, I had a daughter, Mallory. I wanted her to have a little of the same experience I had in youth. It kind of took me back. I was surprised the impact it had on me going back to pow-wows. Luckily, Mallory took to it, she wanted to dance and through that discovered one of the women, whose daughter helped Mallory learn to dance. It was the same woman whose land we used to go to pow-wows on when I was a little boy. We both used to laugh saying we probably played with each other out there running around the field, making all the adults mad at us. So that was the big influence from my grandfather early on.

Little Thunder: I'm assuming we're talking about the Vietnam War that you were in the service.

Taylor: Yes. I was in the Navy from 1970 until 1972 when my ship that I was on was decommissioned.

Little Thunder: So once you got out, that was when you sort of knew, based on the response you'd been getting, that you wanted to earn your living as an artist. Did you immediately begin painting full-time, or how did you negotiate that?

Taylor: I had a panoply of jobs. (Laughs) I always laugh because a couple of my good friends who had hired me since those days. One of them, Doris Litrell, who let me work in her gallery. At that time, my desire was still to write, but I was starting to pursue the art more.

Little Thunder: Give me a ballpark time period.

Taylor: About 1973, '74, a friend of mine, three of us opened a bar in Tulsa. 6:00Through that we had a lot of free time but it also gave us an income that we built it up for two years. We had the bar and then we sold it and that is when I decided with what I'd made from that, and I still had some money saved from the Navy, I needed to just develop what I wanted to do and art really started to be the facilitator for me. I moved to Grand Lake and lived up there, off on Monkey Island. At the time there was nothing there but me and Susan Leggett and Shangri-La. That's where I started working on trying to learn color.

Little Thunder: I know that successful artists usually have a support system of some kind. What was your early support system like, and it might have changed over the years, too?

Taylor: Well, that panoply of jobs which was barely getting me by. At that time 7:00probably a lot of my friends hated to see me show up with something in my hands because they knew I was going to give them something they would have to hang up and at that time was probably terrible. All the art I was doing, if you said you liked it, it was yours. Because I was still trying to learn, so I wasn't really trying to go professional, until actually I got involved with Susan Leggett, who became the mother of our daughter, we got married. She was the one who pushed me to become a full-time artist.

Little Thunder: You've sort of already described your artistic training, which is mostly being self-taught. Did you take any workshops at any point?

Taylor: After Grand Lake, that's where Susan and I first really met each other, when we moved back to Tulsa and got married, she let it slip that she thought I 8:00was getting better with color one day. She said that, and she had never said anything to me before. Then when she let me know that she had been afraid that she'd have to live with all this other stuff I had been painting up until that point. She said she thought I was getting better and that maybe it would be a little bit faster along the road if I took a few classes.

Little Thunder: So was your palette primarily dark at that point?

Taylor: Oh, it was very gaudy, very bright, very flat traditional, too. It was all flat traditional style, then it got even worse and busier when I started trying to join different styles with the flat. So I went into Tulsa Junior College and took an art class there and discovered that they were more interested in teaching me what art to make rather than how to make it. So, I quit that.

Little Thunder: In terms of trying to dictate content to you?

Taylor: I was asked by the head of the art department actually, her name was 9:00Nota Johnson and that's who I had as an instructor. I still remember her because one day she asked me why I always did sad pictures and that right there was the last day I attended that class. However, I went back to Tulsa Junior College a year later to take another class under a man by the name of Pat Gordon, who is a water colorist in Tulsa, who I admired immensely his ability and after meeting him, I found that he was a really good instructor. He spent most of his time teaching us how to do what we wanted to do. Through him I was introduced to color and I should say the reason I was introduced to him was after my first experience I decided [to take] private lessons. There's an artist in Tulsa named Herb Robb, and Susan was a friend of Herb's wife and that's how I met them. Through them, I found out he was classically trained in New York City as a 10:00portrait painter and I asked him if he would teach me color. He started me using oil paints, I think I was paying him $40 a week for two lessons a week and I was able to paint one grisaille. He allowed me only black and white. He said if I wanted more color I had to learn first the shades. I did one painting under his tutelage, and then my money ran out. He told me then that Pat Gordon taught a class and that's somebody I should check in with. I took one semester with Pat Gordon. The black and white training of Herb, and Pat Gordon teaching me about color values, that's been my whole official training.

Little Thunder: What Indian art galleries were around at the time and what galleries were you connected with at the start of your career? Or were they even Indian galleries?

Taylor: At the very beginning there was-- I spent years of just painting, like I 11:00said, and occasionally some friends would ask to buy a piece and I'd charge them $20 or something or maybe $5 for family members. And Susan kept saying that if you think you want to do this for a living, that I should pursue it. [In 1978 or '79 I met] Neva and Otis Wilson of Western Heritage Gallery. I walked in with five pieces, three of them flat traditional and two of them were wildlife paintings, but more expressionist. I remember Otis picked a 16x20 and he held it up and he said, "So you want to be an artist?" I said, "Yes," and he said, "So 12:00you plan on doing more paintings than these five?" And I said, "Yes." He said, "So you don't have to put everything you think on one canvas." He held back one of them. It was so busy and gaudy, he took the other four and told me to take that one home with me to always remember that.

Otis contacted me a couple weeks later and told me he sold three of them. Nothing inspires an artist more than sales, so from that I started working with Otis and then when they decided to move, I went to Linda Greever of the Art Market. And at that time I had been going in there off and on anyway and there was an artist, Ben Harjo, who was working the gallery and I struck up conversations with Ben and Linda. I decided to present myself to her and I started dealing with Linda Greever and that would have been probably around the early '80s.

Little Thunder: What about art shows or art competitions? When did you begin 13:00entering some of those?

Taylor: I started entering the local competitive shows, real small shows. There used to be a small show up in Vinita and there's a couple of small shows around. I started entering those and I actually won a couple of them. Then I decided, with that under my belt, I would approach the Trail of Tears show in Tahlequah and that's the first major competitive show that show I entered. I entered that for several years.

Little Thunder: And that was a major national Indian art show. In terms of awards that you've won?

Taylor: I won several grand awards at these small shows, and that's what pushed me into trying to get into the Trail of Tears show. Through that I started striking up friendships with some of the artists and I met a few of those through Linda Greever, since that was basically strictly an Indian Gallery. The 14:00prestige of [the Trail of Tears] show continued me entering several years and I garnered several awards, the Jerome Tiger Award twice. After several years of that, I decided to move on from competitive shows. I think they have their place, but I think the best place for them is for younger artists starting out, as I was at that time. The one thing I noticed about competitive shows, on the local level is that you are handed a roster of who's in it. All of us who have been here long enough, we see certain names. We know those people are going to win awards, and that's really nice, but it really dampens [the spirits of the up and coming artist]. I can remember when I first started out. It was that way at the Trail of Tears. I could list who was going to win the first three or four years. Then the year I finally won it, of course I thought, well this is a good 15:00deal (laughs), but I discovered that you keep plugging away. It's one of the things that you reach a point, I think, competitive shows serve their purpose up to a point.

Little Thunder: What was the lay of the land in terms of Indian art at that time, in terms of what the media coverage was like, or what kinds of styles were popular?

Taylor: Well the 1980s is where I started to notice, and I think all of us noticed that the real interest, there's the research and some of it interested in the Native and tribal thoughts. There's [when] the trib[al] self-garnished in a lot more pride and there was a lot of movements and so there was a lot of media coverage on almost anything Indian at that time and there was a lot of oil money. For this local area there was a lot of money being thrown around in the 16:00Indian art world, as though we had just been discovered. The lay of the land at the time was that everybody realized that there were two basic collectors at that time and they were the ones who had been around since the beginning of the historical side of what we used to call the elder's and the old timers. They were collecting their work and they weren't real appreciative of us trying to change the style.

I preface that by saying by 1980, I was no longer doing anything flat traditional. It was more, I'd say my work's allegorical but it's more expressionistic as far as the way it's presented. There was a group of younger collectors and younger artists who were all starting to branch that way and we were starting to push the fabric in the '80s. I think that's what garnered Oklahoma's notoriety. I think we started in the late '70s into the '80s when 17:00Oklahoma actually started surfacing as being something different versus most of the other Native shows and Native art. I think that comes from the [fact] that Oklahoma's a melting pot because of the Land Run, but also it is a melting pot of Tribes before the Land Run.

All of our tribes, there was only three or four tribes originally in this area, but now we have all of this congregation of so many tribal groups and as anything, you're subject to your environment, so all kinds of things were traded: songs, ceremonies, dress-- It's just like now, starting in the '80s, if it was going to be Indian, there was going to be a lot of feathers flying everywhere and that became the big thing that everybody was looking for. I guess that's how, I can wander and meander a lot about that, it's because of that group of collectors, though, that started in the '80s and '90s, who were willing 18:00to see a change. And a lot of them were the children of major collectors of historical work of the elders, of our elders. They wanted the stories. Their parents had met Acee Blue Eagle, they had met Woody Crumbo and Monroe Tsatoke, if you go back far enough. And they had those stories, which like anything art is emotion and it is supposed to have a story to it. I don't care if it's a painting or a flower, there's a story to it. The younger group who wanted the stories, luckily the bulk of Indian collectors across the breadth of the nation like the stories that are coming out of Oklahoma artists because--I can get in trouble with this a lot--we weren't as tied to tribal identity as a lot of the other artists were because of our environment. Also, I think there's a bigger 19:00movement that wasn't so much political in Oklahoma, it was more about documenting actual heritage and that means things had to be put down in black and white or color. It had to be documented beyond just the oral history and Oklahoma artists started pushing those envelopes.

Little Thunder: You've already started to describe for me the media that you began working in, for example Pat Gordon was teaching mostly water colors, is that correct?

Taylor: Yes.

Little Thunder: You were working, did mostly black and whites, but can you tell me what kind of medium you prefer now?

Taylor: I started out in watercolor and I blended acrylic a little bit and pen and ink became my mainstay all the way up until the early 1980s when I went to Oklahoma City and I saw a Paul Pletka art show. I'd seen some of his work in 20:00magazines, but when I saw this show, it just completely took me away. My whole style changed and I came home and I put away the watercolor, the acrylic, and I started with oils. I went from doing flat traditional to wildlife to more landscape to try to show the world itself bigger than any individual. I put small figures on this massive landscape and I was also painting on a small scale. After that show, I decided I was going to go more figurative and expressionistic and surrealistic. I have to also add at that same time I had an opportunity to be introduced to a lot of Salvador Dali work. Between Pletka and Dali, I was just completely blown away and my whole style changed and I went to oils.

Little Thunder: How about your current materials, what kinds of materials do you currently use and why?

Taylor: Well the oils were short lived. (Laughter) I used oils up to 1984 because that's when my daughter was born. I've always had the studio in my house, the toxicity of oils, plus other things you already have in the studio, it was a concern. So I packed my oils up, thought I'd try acrylics and I discovered you can use acrylics and come close to the same, not really the same values, but you can come close, so I went to acrylics and to this day I still use acrylics. I liked the oil. I liked physically moving the paint that you do with oils. I liked blending with hands, physically feeling the buttery substance, but I also don't like the dry time. Like a lot of artists you sell 22:00out that idea versus a full year to actually wait to varnish. An acrylic is done as soon as it dries in fifteen to twenty minutes.

Little Thunder: I think you mostly use canvas, but occasionally you use boards, is that correct?

Taylor: Yes, I prefer canvas; I like board, but it's a lot slower. When I use a board I still use the oil techniques. I used oil on board a lot and I like that glazing and it's a slow build up. But board, when you get to a certain size, weight and warping becomes a problem. So canvas is good, I like canvas, I still do some pen and ink on paper.

Little Thunder: Can you describe your creative process, beginning with how you generate ideas?

Taylor: I'd say I probably have more of an idea and look for, in search of a 23:00vehicle to get the story out. I'll say I'm one of the lucky ones, I'll die not having put out the different things I'd like to be able to put out. I keep two different little books. One of them is titles and that title will tell me what I need to say, and the other one is stories. That story is in search of a title and the painting, when it's finished, will get the title. When I finish a piece, the inspiration comes just from the human experience. I think it comes to all artists regardless--even if they're doing a painting of a rose, they're being driven by something that says a statement needs to be made about this. It's a frustration that you feel that somebody hasn't made that statement yet. I think 24:00that's where originality comes in. So when I [finish] a piece, the first thing I do, I ask myself, "What was I wanting to say?" Then you say okay, "Did I say it?" And if it passes that question you say, "Was it worth saying?"

The thrust of my work [is a frustration of our many cultures promoting separate but equal politics]. We're all of the same tribe, just different clans. My lineage is proof of that. I'm a mix of so many different cultures, yet as an artist I stand alone in the fact that I don't belong to any of them in my mind. I think as an artist that's where, when you become an artist that's the line 25:00that you actually cross. I think you're going to get more than you as for on this one, that's where I think the Indian art world itself is hitting a crossroads now. I think that it's our generation who has helped bring it on. Sadly for some people, they may not like the concept of it, but for me I think we're the perfect generation.

Me and a good friend, Merlin Little Thunder, had a conversation about the fact that we are the generation that actually has ties to the elders, what we call the Old Timers, who actually live a lot of what we are trying to portray. We have brief glimpses of it, but it's not that solid ground and footing a tribal environment. Those days, in my belief, are pretty much gone in the fact that 26:00we're removed from actually living a day-in day-out existence of that tribal identity. We still have ceremonies, but we're not in that environment. I think we're at that crossroads now where we want to tell the young ones, okay it's time to go beyond the buffalo hunt. I don't paint the buffalo hunts, I've never been on one, will never be on one. I think we're to the point now to step beyond that and I think that's where the Oklahoma artists have always pushed the envelope and hopefully we will continue to do that.

Little Thunder: That's a timely comment for me because I was going to talk about the fact that a lot of your images are drawn mostly from the nineteenth or early twentieth century. It seems that you don't do, for example, historical depictions from the '50s on. Why do you like painting subjects and props from 27:00these earlier periods?

Taylor: They're the perfect vehicle for the psychological environment that I wanted to frame. All I'm doing is building doors with these paintings and if I do it right, decorate it, you'll open the door and you're going to go some place that I don't even get to go. But that's what art is, it's not that flat image you look at, it's where it takes you. For where I wanted to take you, all I want to do is set the atmosphere of where you're going. You're going to end up figuring out the details and the environment is more of a mystical--a time when we saw the world as being a little bit bigger than ourselves. Now in this twenty-first century, and actually through the twentieth century, information 28:00comes at us so fast that we have lost a lot of the awe of life and the fragility and sacredness of it because of information being always at our fingertips. Information does not always give the full scope of what we're looking at or what we're trying to understand.

Little Thunder: I'd like to talk about sometimes you have actual historical figures and other figures in your paintings seem to be more symbolic or like prototypes, like the shaman figure, for example. You sort of touched on this, but I want to ask again, how much story or narrative is important to your work?

Taylor: I think it's the whole work. I've told people before if I could get by just putting a circle on the canvas and make you understand that's the Creator and it's about humility being in front of the Creator, if I could get by and if 29:00I could sell that, I'd probably do that. It doesn't work. You have to have a little more window dressing than that, usually. In fact, with what we were previously talking about is that using the figures of that basically historical time frame, of when we still had that setting of mysticism, that imagery seems to invoke that in people. If I were to put a doctor with a stethoscope, or scalpel, it would make you think of a doctor or possibly somebody of knowledge that it's going to do something for you, but it doesn't give you the awe in that feeling of something different, something really special taking place.

So if you give them the concept of what we think of when we say the word shaman, or if you say medicine man, you don't even picture somebody with a stethoscope. People automatically revert back to this. And that's not just American culture, 30:00it's any culture, they'll go back to that almost frozen in time imagery of what shamans look like. When we want to invoke that concept, we also have to remember, why did the shamans incorporate all the utilitar[ian] things that they used? It wasn't because that shaman thought that that feather when he touched you on the head was really going to cure you, but if he made you think that it was really going to be beneficial, he had access now to your thoughts to maybe help. That's what we do as artists, I think. We paint those feathers and things to bring you into that, where you're receptive to what we're wanting to say and for me that's what those vehicles are.

Little Thunder: Are you ever influenced by topical issues or by current politics, whether it's common society politics or tribal politics?

Taylor: Yes, to a point. I don't like to beat a dead horse. You say what you have to say and move on. The most recent thing I did that was along those lines was an anti-war series. That was actually started from our first Gulf War and culminated with our last one. I'm lucky that that was kept intact by Arkansas University, they have the whole collection. I don't need to visit that again, simply for one reason. Give another ten years, there'll be another war. There'll be another reason for somebody to say war is bad. I don't need to keep saying it. I know it is. We all do. As an artist I think you have a statement to say then you move on. In the Indian art world, I think that's one of the jobs some of us older ones have now is getting some of our younger ones past that point of 32:00political commentary. If it's going to be political commentary, let's make it contemporary. Let's don't fight the wars of the nineteenth century.

Little Thunder: Following your conversation here, just kind of changing order because you're touching on a lot of things that I was hoping you would touch on. There are certain things in your paintings that an observer notices right away, like there is an emphasis on spiritual and physical transformation or metamorphosis or symbolic reminders of our mortality as human beings and ceremonies of various types. Can you talk about these themes?

Taylor: My main theme is that we're all one tribe, the same tribe, just different clans. We tend to forget that, when we get caught up in a lot of the politics. You asked me about getting into contemporary or political views of 33:00things that are always reoccurring. We have to have a main philosophical vent to our work. I think every artist has it. The one thing I want to point out is the fragility of life. A Blackfoot chief once said it best, reflecting on human life, "life is but a firefly in the night." We tend to forget that the world is so much bigger than us. If there is anything my grandfather taught me it is to see with the eyes of an eagle, but live your life as the mouse. The eagle sees the big picture, sees everything, but the mouse always sees everything bigger than itself and lives with humility and is also the most ferocious creature we 34:00have on the North American continent, as far as being a warrior and fighter. He's ferocious, and so I always thought that was a good analogy and with that in mind, you have to tell people, life is short. No matter who your God is, precious time is always ticking away and when spent in futility of war is in such disagreement and in pettiness, it's a sad thing. Stop and take time to smell the roses. Well there's a lot to that, I think. I think one of the jobs of the artist is either to paint that rose that you want to stop and look at or paint the doorway that takes you someplace where that rose is at. That's what I decided that I wanted to do.

Little Thunder: Symbolism is an important element in your work, can you talk a 35:00bit about your symbolic vocabulary, how you choose the symbols you use?

Taylor: I think every artist is a symbolist. That everything we put on canvas is meant to represent-- We do everything with smoke and mirrors. At least the three dimensional people actually create something. If it's curved it's curved and you can physically touch it. As painters, what we have to do is we have to give the illusion of that curve. Because of that, we're always using that concept of smoke and mirrors that lets us know that we're on solid footing. Because of that, everything we use is a symbol. For me, like I said, in approaching something, I always want to get into a viewer's head. You think, "Well what is it, how am I actually going to make them open this door, go somewhat to this area that I want them to go?" When you get technical that's composition of the canvas, but before you even get to composition you have to think, what will 36:00actually get them there?

One thing that I've always discovered is, there are certain things that we have that are unique to the human individual. And symbols is one of those that are identified across the world. One of the things my grandfather said to me, one of the last things he said to me, besides trying to tell me when I was going to the service to come home safe, but he also said to always remember, because he said, "You'll travel other places in the world in your life, and everybody understands a smile and a butterfly." That's one reason butterflies are prevalent [in my work]. I have a lot of collectors ask me sometimes about butterflies. That's my grandfather, but also after that, after deep thought of that, giving this long winded answer to your question is that, what really triggers people's thoughts, and why does a butterfly trigger our thoughts? What is the representation of the 37:00butterfly? And then you start looking, do a little research, you find that artists throughout history have used the butterfly, and as always represents or boils down to is an act of faith. So one thing we all have in common is we have faith. Regardless of what's your faith or religion, each faith has their own symbols and that's where I decided I'd start educating myself: this symbol represents this in this tribe, over here this symbol, a different symbol, but it represents the same thing. So I started deciding if I want people to understand what I'm saying, juxtapose the symbols to each other and make them understand, they equate. We're the same people, just different ways of expressing it. That's where the whole concept of my symbology came from.

Little Thunder: I think there's probably already lots of overlap and in a way you sort of answered this. I know that props, which always have a symbolic 38:00meaning in your paintings, are an important part of your painting. I was wondering how much thought or time you give to finding exactly the right prop or perhaps the right scrap for the right prop?

Taylor: That's part of the major undertaking of every piece. It's also the fear of every piece. That's why it's my job to try to figure these things out I don't want to use the butterfly in every painting. I have to find something else that equates because if an artist gives nothing but a narrative in their work and we speak with the same voice throughout our life, [there's] the idea that if you say the same thing over and over it becomes just noise. As a painter, you 39:00sometimes do it by changing your palette with your colors. For me, it's trying to find that new symbol, a new way of tweaking somebody, taking them someplace that they've never been before or seeing something in a different view. I spend a lot of time, I always say research, it can be day dreaming, it can be reading, going through museums and staring at canvases saying, "What do you need to say what I want you to say?" The easy route would be to use the symbol that you use over and over and we're back to that as the same voice and so you want to give new words constantly. So it's very important and I think it is that way for any artist whether it's just used in a different way, we just use different tools. Instead of putting a feather or an annulet, they're more worried about the color or the composition. It's the same thing.

Little Thunder: Talk about your friendships a bit with other artists and how they have played a role in your career and your life.

Taylor: It's been a major role in a lot of ways. The first artist that really decided, my uncle, Wallace Hughes, and then Pat Gordon and Herb Robb but the first artist that I considered my contemporary was when I was working with Linda Greever at the Art Market in Tulsa. There was an artist by the name of Gerald Stone. Gerald and I--

Little Thunder: And it was Willard Stone's son?

Taylor: No, Gerald--

Little Thunder: Oh, this is a different Gerald.

Taylor: Yeah, Gerald is actually Ben Harjo's cousin. Gerald was a pen and ink man. He had been trained at the Santa Fe school and that's one of his paintings there. He painted in that style, but he preferred pen and inks. During the 41:00course of this showing at Linda's, it seemed like me and Gerald were positioned by each other quite often, and we struck up a friendship and Gerald would critique my work. He would tell me what I was doing wrong and a lot of it for laughs, but he also was the one who kept telling me to not listen to some of the naysayers at the time. In fact, at that time the gallery wasn't happy with the direction I was wanting to take my work because the other work was selling. They said, "Well why do that?" and that was at the time Gerald started telling me I needed to meet another lady who had a gallery in Oklahoma City by the name of Doris Littrell. I was with Linda for a couple of years, and lo and behold, during one of Linda's shows, I got elbowed by Gerald standing next to me and he 42:00goes, "That's who you need to meet," and Doris Littrell walked through the front doors. That was the first time I met her and it was about a year later that I ventured and met with Doris and that was the new gallery.

Through Doris' gallery, I got to be a lot closer with a lot of other artists. I got to know Merlin Little Thunder, Virginia Stroud, both of whom became friends and influences, unbeknownst to them in a lot of ways. Our style is so totally different, but you talk to the artists and you can tell there's craftsmen. This is another topic I'd like to touch on a little bit about, as far as Indian art world, but there's craft, then there's painters and then there's artists. I've always been more intrigued-- I've always admired that they place them on high pedestals, the craft. Master craftsmen, for some reason in this country, all of 43:00a sudden got a bad rap and especially in the Indian art world. We took the word craft and made it something we thought was a backhanded compliment, but master craftsmen, I've known a lot of them and we see a lot of them. Their technical abilities are beyond reproach, they're just magnificent. Then there's the artists and those are the ones that I started wanting to become friends with and that was Merlin, Virginia, Ben Harjo, Gerald Stone. I can't say enough good things about Gerald. The year and a half, two years I was around Gerald, the man really pointed me in a lot of ways and helped me through a lot of things. It's that move towards that, in those friendships with those people, that has meant a lot, a big difference to me.

And then with stepping out, when I started moving outside of the state meeting 44:00artists that were outside of the Indian art world and talking with them, that was a major coup for me in a lot of ways. Frank Howell was one of them, who taught me in a weekend in Fort Worth, Texas, in a stockyards hotel, taught me how to do some things to this day I use. Whereas, if you had a lot of established artists, you ask them how to do something, it's like you asked for their first born at that time. They guard their little secrets and that is because of the Indian art world, it's actually a smaller world than a lot of people realize. You get to know everybody and everybody starts thinking they have a little hook and that's in the arts. You think you have something that you're known for and you don't want somebody else using it. I discovered that true artists don't worry about that.

Little Thunder: How about relationships with collectors? I know they're complex 45:00and complicated, but sometimes they actually turn into types of friendship where you're actually interacting outside of art. How important have those been to you over the years?

Taylor: I think they're the necessity for any successful artist. I think that the galleries and collectors, the galleries groom for them. You get a base of collectors through a gallery that you will never get any other way. They get to know you in a different way. Through that, friendships are struck that complicate business to a degree because some of these collectors become such good friends, you hear the "you never try to sell me anything," because it is awkward, nobody wants to sell a friend, then again, sometimes you don't want the friend to ask about a piece because you'll have to sell it to them at a discount. (Laughter) But it's imperative. It's those friendships and those 46:00collectors-- I always say collectors are frustrated artists in their own right and their art is the way they build their collection. Through that, their pallet becomes not just the artist but how the artist approaches things and their view of the world and through that you can't help but garner friendships because when you have people of like minds, a lot of collectors discover that they became interested in you because of the way you view the world.

I try to tell the young ones as a craftsman, which we have to become before you ever become an artist, you have to learn a craft, you will have a following that will admire you for just the way you put something down. Artists are not paid for that, artists are paid for their view of the world, the lens that they see 47:00the world. It's just like the craftsman will paint the flower the way the flower looks, the artist will paint it the way it smells or feels and that's the difference. Collectors know the difference.

Little Thunder: In 1980, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act was passed and basically in addition to protecting from pots made in Japan that were labeled Cherokee pots or whatever, Cherokee pot that wasn't a traditional pot, it required the artists that claim a particular tribal affiliation provide proof of enrollment, CDID, or be certified by their tribe. Do you remember how this affected some of the galleries or individual artists?

Taylor: (Laughs) Yes.

Little Thunder: Here in Oklahoma that was a pretty major thing.

Taylor: It was a firestorm. It really was. It was something that I think that I 48:00can argue both sides of. It both helped the industry and hurt the industry. It helped in the fact that it made people stop and realize what they were actually putting out as far as subject matter, content, and quality. So that was a help. Where it hurt was where you're presenting that you're selling a bloodline versus art. It's a fine line and that's where we start running into the problem now, especially now, in that we're back to what I was talking about as far as I don't paint buffalo hunts because there aren't buffalo hunts. We have a collector base who wants that, who wants that romantic view of a timeframe that people have frozen in this country from 1850 to 1890 and that has all of a sudden become the 49:00definitive Indian experience, which is great if you're going to do a historical piece, really research and do it correctly. There are a lot of people who do that very well. If you're painting the way you view the world and to make it a piece of art to be relevant in my view, fifty years after it's executed, is it relevant to any point in time that's taking place? Anything contemporary? A buffalo hunt would not be relevant. Now it would be historically relevant, but how many people have already painted it? That's where we get to the artist as wanting to move beyond that. If you're going to paint the buffalo hunt, it's going to look different. It's not going to be that 1850s look.

That law made a lot of people afraid to step outside of what was considered 50:00Indian. It started, I think, making a lot of artists pull back from what they were doing. Then the new movement in the '90s started really pushing the envelope again and I give credit to the northern tribes for that, more Canadian than American, deciding that they wanted to be known as artists. They didn't want somebody coming just for the Indian experience, they want somebody to get an Indian view, but also well executed, something that would stand the test of time. We learned our craft and if we want to present ourselves in a tribal viewpoint we have to have a grounding of what that tribal viewpoint originally was. So I give credit to that concept of it. If you're going to be involved in this industry, know a little bit of what you're talking about. Once you go 51:00beyond that, if you're going to have a tribal group and say I've known, we've all known a lot of artists who paint strictly a tribal affiliation work. I admire a lot of people who do that, but I also have a problem with the fact that if they have to be approved by the elders of that tribe of what they are actually putting out, then we're saying, 'Okay. We're not giving the artists free thought. We're going to bow to this concept of we want to protect something,' which I understand that, the protection, but you can't be protecting something you're trying to market at the same time. I just have a problem with that. As artists, I think we're observers. We're not a member of anything. I think the artist in us will always say we observe and we're going to document 52:00what we observe or how we feel or see it.

I admire those who edit for reasons that I understand. Those people who do the tribal affiliations, I understand that concept of it, but now we have a group of the Cherokee who are doing a preservation, they're purifying different things. They're deciding what's Cherokee and what's not. It's from such a convoluted, tunnel vision view that they have frozen what the word Cherokee actually means. I think to be any tribal group, it never stops you from having free thought. There's not a group now-- I always tell everybody I have an ancestor who was a Blackfoot that somewhere met an ancestor that was, oh say, Osage. They didn't talk the same language, but they could communicate and as soon as they communicated, they were no longer truly just Blackfoot or just Osage because any time you have two cultural groups meet, they're never the same after that. You 53:00borrow automatically from each other because if you don't, you die. The society dies. The originality of the bloodline for the tribes was to kill the tribes out because if you go by bloodline strictly, with blood quantum, eventually you either have so many birth defects because it becomes so incestuous that the tribe dies, or it becomes watered down. There's no tribal affiliation because there's not the bloodline quantum that has to be met. The tribes bought into that and that's why this law is prevalent. It was a missed chance of people trying to control something that they really can't control. They should've tried to control it in the way they marketed things versus the way that it is actually viewed.

Sad to say at the time that that law was brought in, probably your most accurate 54:00painters [of Indians] were non-Indian. Most of the non-Indians were so concerned about historical work that they had frozen the time frame. They actually did research and tried to put it out there accurately versus a lot of the Native artists at that time was what our elders had taught us, the old timers, who had been masters of knowing what the tourists would buy. They were painting their own view of life because they had lived it, but they knew how to decorate it so that the tourists would buy it. Then they had a group of paintings which was their faith paintings. Whether some of the groups were Native American Church or it may have been whatever ceremony of the tribe, that tribal faith, those were the paintings that were done for the artists from the heart. Those are the paintings that I find are just fascinating. Those are the ones that aren't really frozen in time, thought-wise; they're frozen in time imagery. That's the 55:00imagery I borrow from because it's the faith base that brought that tribe to where it was at that time and they know.

Doc Tate Nevaquaya--a good artist, I'll say friend, he wasn't a good friend because I didn't know him long enough. A lot of us know of his famous outburst. "We lost the war, get over it." We can't live in the past. We use the past to project something good for the future and that's why, as Native artists, we borrow those symbols. We still paint the people running around with feathers in their hair. We still paint that because it's to invoke an environment. If the message is only that this is what took place in the 1850s then it's not going to be relevant and for the young ones we need to push them past that. I think that law sometimes hinders that.

Little Thunder: Are there any other subjects you'd like to cover or comments 56:00you'd like to add to this interview, anything we didn't get a chance to touch upon?

Taylor: Well I'm very honored that you'd give me the time. I can't impress enough, I think that hopefully if this is ever viewed and some time, whatever artist views it, they're talking about a time frame of what we did, me and my contemporaries, what we're doing now, to push beyond being formatted as strictly Indian artists. I joke around, I just had a business card made, and I said I've been a full-time artist for twenty-five years. I've been doing art for thirty-something years. I said I finally had a business card made this year. I said I've been doing it for thirty years so I figure that's what I'm going to do for a living. Jokingly I say that, but I actually originally made a business card when I first started working with Linda Greever. She told me I should get 57:00one and she told me I should have it say, "Indian Artist" and I had it printed up. Before I actually could issue any of those I went to a show at Bishop Kelly [High School]. Fritz Scholder was there, an artist, who was giving an exhibition and a lecture and I watched him paint a painting that he did an exhibition while he did this lecture.

When it was all over I went up and introduced myself to him and talked to him and the one thing he impressed upon me, he had his critics that he would no longer call himself [an Indian artist]. He said, "I would not call myself an Indian artist; I'm an artist. I happen to be Indian, at some points in time I use Indians as my imagery, but not always." He says, "I'm an artist." I threw those Indian Artist cards away. For one reason he definitely impressed me and to 58:00this day I think it's true, as soon as you say Indian art, you devalue your work in the art market by twenty to thirty percent. That's been one of my goals of saying that we are not selling a bloodline, we're selling art, not a craft or blood. I want the young ones to understand that and not to pigeon-hole yourself. You have got to remember the collectors, a base of collectors who want us to stay there and it's a love-hate relationship. They love the idea that they collected a piece of art, got it very cheap, but now it's valued at this dollar amount. They like that concept, but they don't like the idea of paying this value now and at some point in time it may be worth more, maybe not, but that's not why you're supposed to be buying art. You hope as an artist that your value will go up. I find that that's the dichotomy we have going right now and that's 59:00why I think at this point in time we're seeing it. In the Indian art industry, the argument of craft versus art of non-Indians painting Indians, it came up at Indian Market here in 2010. That was one of the political vents of Indian Market in Santa Fe, which the gallery I was in, I got thrown into that, but I try to stay aloof of it. The truth of it is, I think it's time that the Indian world--we have to confront this. We are going to have to put a dividing line and define what is actually craft and what is actually considered art.

Little Thunder: And if it's art it shouldn't require a proof of Indian identity.

Taylor: Right, right there. Craft, you definitely need to show, if you're saying this a Cherokee basket, this is a Kiowa, this is an Arapaho, Cheyenne, then it 60:00better be grounded in that. You better be able to show that's what it is. Just like if you're going to say something's American, somebody's going to throw an American flag in there or something, well you better throw something in there that's of that tribal affiliation to show it. But if it's art, art is free thought. If I was going to say what the definition of art is, I was once told the definition of art is taking, creating something that wasn't there before. Taking something and making something totally new and different. If you do it twice in a row, it doesn't devalue the fact that it may be magnificent looking, but if you're going to do it like manufacturing, it becomes craft. It should not be devalued, that thought, but the original thought, the first one is really truly the one that's going to be worth more than the one that's number 1,000,000 that's being produced by mechanical means or even by hand. With that in mind, 61:00the free thought concept, I think it's free thought, that concept of being tied to no nation, no religion, not bound by anything other than the experience of the individual and the observations of that individual and putting it together. Because you're going to offend somebody and if you're always tribal affiliated, and if you're truly doing art you're going to offend your own tribe off and on. You can't help it because it's a political thing.

I think it's important that we're going to have to do it or the Indian art world itself will shrink. We'll become a smaller industry and we will become that what we jokingly talked about in the '60s, Route 66, heading out to Arizona, and you'll hear more of the drunken Indian stories.

That's why I think it's important that we now try to educate the youth. We escaped it because of our old timers and the elders. All of us grew up hearing in Oklahoma, we heard the collectors talk about the collections that were built on this artist in hard times, they had to sell cheap, or they took advantage of it and they liked to brag--it's almost bragging rights. They don't understand the offense that that really is. Woody Bigbow, another Oklahoma artist, once made the statement, I think there's truth to this, he once told Doris Littrell, who passed this on to me, but Woody looked at her in the eye and [told her] he bought a brand new Cadillac every year and he bought a set of new clothes to wear when he went out all the time because rich people will not buy from a poor man. That was his observation so he presented himself as not a poor Indian.

I think there's something to be said to that if you present yourself as being a victim, which in a lot of the early Native art kind of got twisted that direction, almost as though it was victimized, we're painting from the victim viewpoint, then you're going to get victim prices. We want now the younger artists to not depend on a tribe to basically sponsor them and support them. They can step into the art world, the big art world, not just the Indian art world, the art world and stand on their own and be accepted from the viewpoint of an Indian. Not saying it's Indian, but it's just the viewpoints of the artist who is Indian. That's where we are going to get equality. You can't have separate but equal; that's an oxymoron and for the Indian art world it really is.

I'm very proud that a lot of us here in Oklahoma have works in the Museum of American Indian, the Smithsonian in D.C., but my first question is why were we not just put in the Gallery of American Artists? Why was a separate building, almost a separate entity, created for us? Once again it's separate but equal. Well we have the gallery that's called the Great American Artists and then you have the Gallery of American Indian Artists. The day we will know that we've reached there, the day that we see an Oscar Howe hanging next to a Charlie Russell or a Fredrick Remington, that's when we know that we have actually become mainstream art and that's what I think our job is to try to pave that way now.

The elders, the old timers made it to where we don't have to paint flat traditional. People don't talk about that a lot, but if it wasn't for the Oscar Howes, the Doc Tates, some of these people who stretched those envelopes, who made it possible, we would all still be sitting in booths painting dancers over and over to sell to tourists.

Little Thunder: Thank you, Robert. I think that's a good note to end on. I'm going to keep the tape running while I reposition the camera so that we can look at a couple of these paintings.

Taylor: The title of this piece is Ghost Story. This is one of the paintings, basically, that I've done that's basically a historical piece. It deals with the Ghost Dance movement, a seated figure with the hat, is Wovoka, the Paiute 62:00prophet. There's twelve figures; we're back to the concept of symbology. I found this canvas interesting in that I was trying to figure out a way to encapsulate a whole movement, the largest religious movement among the American tribes, it only lasted two to three years, and try to sum it all up in one canvas and so what I approached it as is a religious movement, so there's twelve figures. They represent the idea of the twelve apostles. Wewoka (this movement started in 1890) was raised by missionaries and he tried to start a new religion by melding Native beliefs with Christianity. I found that that's the true analogy of the clash of cultures of taking what you hope is the best of both and melding to 63:00make a whole new entity and in this case it didn't work. (Laughs)

So what we're talking about here is the idea of Wovoka and the twelve apostles, the idea of Christianity, and the ghost story would be the skeleton figure that's coming out of the hat would be the concept of the Christ figure. What was being promised was basically the Christian rapture and what the outcome was was anything but. That was the whole-- So the story is told, the idea of the figures, all the people of it were pulled in on the North American continent, all the tribes that were bulled into all this, the whole idea of looking for a better way of life and it ending in calamity and it starts with the whole story being told with [what] was promised, which is at the foot of Wovoka, which is the idea of the Second Coming, Communion with the Creator, and doing the sacred dance that would get you there with the reality, which is what was laid at the 64:00tribe's feet, which was Pandora 's Box, and ending in calamity. It's the story of clash of cultures throughout history on every continent. I found a great vehicle for trying to say that we are the same tribe.

Little Thunder: Thanks.

Taylor: The title of this piece is, simply, Complex. This is a good piece, an example of the way I approach my work, actually. I used the shield as a complete vehicle of trying to show people of how we are the same tribe. I repeat that over and over and that's what my work's about. When you see a shield I want people to understand, in the Native mind, what's actually taking place. In other words, it's back to that 'walk a mile in somebody else's shoes.' In this case, the title invokes the idea that it's a simple piece of leather decorated with 65:00feathers and some art work on it, but really what it is to the owner of this is that shield, a simple leather shield becomes a portal. The shield is round to remind him or her that the world is round. Also it's a full circle. It represents the creation, the Creator. The feathers represent the concept of higher thought. That's why the feathers are in the hair, that you're physically of the world, but spiritually and mentally you should always be in the Heavens, always seeking the higher self.

The art work in this case, this is actually a Crow shield, it's called the rotten belly shield. It's in the Smithsonian. It was a famous shield that was owned by the Crow. It was used by the Chief named Rotten Belly. His spirit 66:00helped what was painted on there. Well, at the time in the 1820s when Rotten Belly actually used this shield, it was a thing to remind him of how to act. All bundles, anything. We tend to forget in modern society that all of our accoutrements we now earn by going out and purchasing. We figure that we've actually earned them, that we have the finances to get them, so therefore, we're entitled to them. There was a time in all human history, regardless of the tribe, all their accoutrements were earned through deeds. Those accoutrements were there to remind you of those deeds, so everything becomes a medicine bundle, all the clothes you wear, everything that's attached to you is a medicine bundle to remind you of thought and action throughout your life and the shield was no different. A shield is just the perfect conveyance for me to try to explain to people the complexity that goes into the human mind when we start 67:00using symbols.

Little Thunder: Thank you. [Looking through paintings]

Taylor: This piece is titled, Stump Speech, The Great Relative and the Oracle. This was born from-- I've always admired Albert Einstein in the simple fact that, not that I don't understand his science, he's far beyond me, but his philosophical writings especially after World War II, after the use of the atomic bomb. He wrote a lot of philosophical writings and in one of them during an interview, and I ran across this in a magazine, the interviewer asked Mr. Einstein how it felt that he would be remembered for all these things that he discovered. I was just so impressed, his answer was, the writer said, "Mr. Einstein paused and gazed into the Heavens and then looked at me and said, 'I've 68:00discovered nothing. I've been lucky to be able to see what always has existed.'" And I thought that deserves a painting.

So that's why, that and also in this article they had a photograph of him. A lot of people know he was adopted by the Hopi Indians. He was given the name "the Great Relative" because of his theory of relativity and in this photograph you see some Hopi standing around him. It is rather funny looking, but he's in full gray flannel suit with a full headdress and there's his wife dressed to the nines in New York whatever, and they're standing there surrounded by these Hopis and it just says "the Great Relative." Because of that, this painting came of that. So I put Albert Einstein in the back and with his own words saying he was lucky enough to see what existed, I used the tribal members to give the idea of what was going on. When you look at the figures, one figure, when you look at 69:00his tunic, it has the nuclear symbol on it. That was the idea of the learning of the atom and he's also brandishing a weapon because as Einstein had been afraid of, that was going to be the use of their new discovery. That's something that all of them who worked on it were always saddened by the fact. What we have here, what they really wanted to come around to was the idea of peace, so I put the pipe in there, which is the old [type] you can't get much more. What's the word I'm looking for, saying a peace pipe, there was never such a thing, but it gets the point across. But here's the oracle, the hawk. Right here, the prairie falcon represents the oracle and when you look, it's the stump speech because he's on the stump and when you realize he has his medicine pouch with him, but on the stump, carved in it, is e=mc^2. As though Einstein has audience with the oracle and that's where he learned it.

I like the concept of, my uncle once told me, he said, "You'll never discover a 70:00new color, you'll never discover a new brush stroke, it's just how you put them together." That's what I think that basically this whole painting is about and so that's what it is about-- it was a fun piece to execute.

Little Thunder: Thank you, Robert, and that is such a great story, too.

------- End of interview -------