T.C. Cannon

T.C. Cannon (1946–1978), born Tommy Wayne Cannon in Lawton, Oklahoma, of Caddo/Kiowa heritage, became one of the defining figures of the Native American art renaissance of the 1970s during a career of astonishing creativity that was cut tragically short when he died in a car accident in Santa Fe at 31. In fewer than fifteen years of sustained production he left behind a body of work that permanently changed what Indigenous American art could look like and what it could say. Cannon attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where he studied under Fritz Scholder and absorbed both the lessons of contemporary painting and Scholder's fierce insistence that Indigenous artists had the right to engage the full language of modern art on their own terms. Cannon took that insistence further - his paintings are more formally adventurous, more politically charged, and more personally vulnerable than Scholder's, combining Pop Art, expressionism, and Plains Indian pictorial traditions into something that had no real precedent. His most celebrated images are a series of confrontations between the art-historical past and the Indigenous present: a Crow chief posed in front of Van Gogh's "Wheatfield with Crows," surveying the viewer with quiet authority; a warrior reclining in a wicker chair, wearing platform shoes, surrounded by Plains-culture objects that the white collector's world had turned into artifacts. These works are funny and devastating in equal measure - they expose the way Indigenous people had been turned into aesthetic objects by a culture that could not imagine them as contemporary human beings, and they do so with a formal brilliance that earns them a place in the history of American art regardless of their subject. He also served in the Vietnam War, an experience that shaped his work in ways that critics are still exploring. His paintings are held in the Smithsonian Institution, the Heard Museum, the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, and major collections across the country.