Allan Houser's "Peaceful Serenity" is Installed on Campus

Hood Quarterly, winter 2008

On October 7, 2007, President James Wright, the Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth College, and the Hood Museum of Art joined guests for the unveiling of an Allan Houser (1914–1994) sculpture, Peaceful Serenity (1992), in front of the Sherman House. This bronze-plated sculpture was recently acquired by the Hood Museum of Art through the generosity of Mary Alice Kean Raynolds and David R. W. Raynolds '49.

Allan Houser, the first Chiricahua Apache child in his family born out of captivity in the twentieth century, is regarded as one of the century's most important Native American artists. He played a pivotal role in the development of Native American modern and contemporary art while teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe from 1962 until his retirement in 1975. He came to Dartmouth College as artist-in-residence in 1979 and in the last two decades of his life produced almost one thousand realistic and abstract sculptures in stone, wood, and bronze. He emerged in his later career as a major international figure with solo exhibitions held around the world. Houser's unique style fused Native American themes with streamlined modernist sensibilities in which both positive and negative space evoke action, emotion, and relationship, as evident in Peaceful Serenity, an abstract representation of a mother and her children.

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Written January 01, 2008