American Pictographic Images

Descripción

Alexander Acevedo, owner of the Alexander Gallery, organized the show, called ''American Pictographic Images: Historical Works on Paper by the Plains Indians,'' after he acquired ''Frank Henderson's Drawing Book,'' a rare volume from 1882 that was richly illustrated by a young Arapaho with 87 drawings - eight times the number of the only other known collection of Arapaho sketches. Most of the book's elaborate pencil-and-ink images were drawn by Henderson, but several other unidentified hands are also evident. Frank Henderson’s goal was to preserving the Arapaho history in pictographic form – the only common method among the tribes of the Great Plains. He mailed his ledger to the woman to whom he addressed the note, Martha K. Underwood, the friend he had met three years earlier in Carlisle. She bequeathed the drawing book to a grandniece, Josephine Underwood Ritter, and it descended in her family to the person from whom Mr. Acevedo bought it last year in 1987. Each illustrated page was photographed and reproduced in the 200-page volume, the cover of which duplicates the dark-red marbleized covers of the ledger book from which the drawings came. A text and captions, written by Karen Daniels Petersen, a self-trained Plains-Indian historian of MN, tells the story of Frank Henderson and translates the images he drew. She studied original Indian documents and newspapers to write of the period to flesh out what little was known by the previous owners of this young Arapaho artist and his life.