“This is one of my
favorite paintings because of the combination of the location and the
subject,” says James Bama. “I had the chance to attend two different
ceremonies this holy man performed. He’s a Crow Indian and a member of
the Whistling Water Clan. The Crow are the only plains tribe with a clan
system. I think there are about ten different clans in the tribe and the
Whistling Water Clan is the largest. That makes him a very important
person in Crow society and an impressive subject to paint.The Holy City
is a lava formation about eight miles from my house. It is in the
Bighorn National Forest, which leads into Yellowstone National Park. The
same volcanic activity that created Yellowstone’s landscape formed
these. They are very dramatic. Putting the two together made a great
deal of sense to me because they are both such moving subjects. At first
take, one would think that they represent two very different kinds of
inspiration, but the more you think about it, the more you realize they
actually belong together.”
For James Bama, moving to Wyoming
from New York City proved to be, perhaps, one of the finest
career choices he ever made.“I paint people,” says Jim.
“When I first moved out here, folks were still alive that
lived here before Wyoming was even a state. The frontier was
still alive. I would go to pow-wows, rodeos, the
reservations and even rendezvous to seek these people out.
No one was focusing then on painting real people as I did.”
Though Lloyd
Chavez is a Mountain Ute, he poses here with traditional Shoshone Indian
accoutrements. Artist James Bama found him to be a particularly striking
model and painted him four times over the years, here with a sparrow
hawk tied in his hair, a seashell necklace draped across his neck and a
deerskin quiver slung across his back.
The animal hide
stretched behind Chavez is covered in paintings depicting Indian dances,
a buffalo hunt and a captured American flag. In the absence of a written
language, such paintings recorded events in the life of an individual or
family. Sometimes the paintings were done in calendar style, visually
recounting the highlights of each passing year. The paintings often
decorated a warrior’s tepee, so that all who passed could recognize the
great deeds of the warrior within.
James Bama has derived a great deal of joy from the
friendships he has developed with many of the Native
American subjects of his portraits. Years ago, he
discovered that on a personal level, they are often
very different from the confrontational image they
often project. For example, Wes Studi, a
full-blooded Cherokee, established an impressive
screen-acting career with his intense portrayals of
a Pawnee war-party leader in Dances with Wolves and as the vengeful Magua in
The Last of the Mohicans,
yet Bama found him genial and obliging. During their
visits to the Bama home, Studi and his children
often spent happy hours playing basketball with the
artist and his son. The cultural gap was bridged as
two fathers enjoyed time with their children.
More than any other animal, the buffalo embodies the
rugged tenacity required to survive on the frontier. The day Bama encountered
this buffalo, the snow was fourteen inches deep and the animal’s coat and hooves
were crusted with ice, but still the animal ventured on. This evocative winter
scene follows in the footsteps of the immensely successful Chuck Wagon in the
Snow; Old Saddle in the Snow and Old Sod House.
This boy is one of four Arapaho brothers who danced
at a festival. From the badges on his shirt (hand-made from snapshots of his
family) to the unique markings on his face, the young dancer is a perfect
example of Native American youth today. Young Indian Dancer is a natural partner
to Indian Boy at Crow Fair, Bama’s last Small Work, which featured another of
the four dancing brothers.
To create the scene that would become
Heading for the High Ground, artist James Bama called upon his friend Jim
Williams. Williams, says Bama, is a “real modern-day mountain man. He used
to trap and he lived in the Southwest in a cave. He had an old-fashioned
porcelain bathtub and all that you would expect. He’s a terrific guy.” With
Williams signed on to model for the painting, they traveled to nearby
Rimrock Dude Ranch to borrow a horse for the day.
Clifton DeSerca, a Sioux, lives and works
in the modern world but has strong ties to the last days of the free-roaming
horseback Native American of the plains. His great-grandfather was Black
Elk, a Sioux holy man whose autobiography is considered one of the most
important pieces of Native American literature. As a young man, Black Elk
participated in the battle of the Little Big Horn. In his older years, he
told his story to John G. Neihardt who translated it into the classic Black
Elk Speaks. DeSerca serves his people by being involved in a reservation
outreach program working with alcoholics. He is portrayed here wearing a
Sioux headdress and a historic shirt from the trading-post period.
