Charles Banks Wilson: The Artist as Historian
The art of Charles Banks Wilson, the man artist Thomas Hart Benton
claimed is "America’s finest artist historian," is being featured during
a two-month-long exhibition that opened in mid-October at The
Ashby-Hodge Gallery of American Art at Central Methodist College in
Fayette.
"We feel without qualification that the works of no artist of this or
any age excel those of Charles Banks Wilson," stated Oklahoma Today
magazine in its Winter 1968-69 issue which carried an article about
Wilson’s well-known portraits of the famous Indian Sequoyah, humorist
Will Rogers, Oklahoma politician Robert S. Kerr and legendary athlete
Jim Thorpe.
Titled "The Artist as Historian," the exhibition opened on Oct. 18 at
the Ashby-Hodge Gallery and will run through Dec. 10. Charles Banks
Wilson was present for the Fifth Annual Gala Celebration of Art on Oct.
17 at Central Methodist College and at a special reception in his honor
the opening day of the exhibition. More than 70 of Wilson’s works are
being shown.Gallery hours during the exhibition are from 1:30 p.m. to
4:30 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and from 2:30 p.m. to
4:30 p.m. on Sundays except for Thanksgiving week.
Special showing for groups can be arranged by contacting Dr. Joseph E.
Geist, curator of the Ashby-Hodge Gallery, at (660) 248-6304 or (660)
248-6324.
Wilson was born in 1918 in Springdale, Ark. He was only six months old
when his family moved to Miami, Oklahoma, an area at the time referred
to as "Indian Territory," even though Oklahoma had gained statehood
eleven years earlier. Wilson displayed an early interest in art and
pursued drawing and painting as a pastime, occasionally painting posters
for the local theater. Following graduation from high school in 1936,
Wilson entered the Art Institute of Chicago. When fellow students
learned he was from "the Indian Territory," they wanted to know all
about the tribes living in Oklahoma. This inspired Wilson to draw
Indians and western subjects from memory at the Institute and later from
real life when he returned home during summer breaks from art school.
Although the American Regionalist movement predated Wilson by a few
years, he notes that it played an important role in his decision to
return to his childhood hometown of Miami, Oklahoma, in 1939 to work as
an artist. In the years since, Wilson has become Oklahoma’s most famous
artist, and his life’s work is closely associated with the cultural
history of the state.
Painter, printmaker, magazine and book illustrator, teacher, lecturer
and historian, Wilson’s work has been shown in more than 200 exhibitions
in the United States and throughout the world. Works of his hang in
prestigious institutions such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the
Corcoran Gallery, Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, D.C. His drawings have been used to illustrate Oklahoma
school textbooks.
Writers on art have said the paintings by Wilson "breathe the spirit of
the Southwest." His mural "The Trapper’s Bride" in Jackson Lake Lodge,
Wyoming, commissioned by the late John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1955, has
been ranked among the finest records of the far West’s fur trade.
Wilson also painted the life portrait of Thomas Gilcrease, who
established Tulsa’s famed Gilcrease Museum, where 55 of Wilson’s works
are now part of the permanent collection. Other famous subjects painted
by Wilson include artist Thomas Hart Benton, who was a close personal
friend, and former U.S. Speaker of the House, Carl Albert, whose
portrait was the first to hang in the National Portrait Gallery in
Washington, D.C., and later in the U.S. Capitol’s Speakers’ Gallery.
Wilson is perhaps best known for his pictures of contemporary Indian
life, a project that has engaged him since the early 1930s. It includes
the "The Little Indians" portfolio and a body of 148 works in a series
titled "Last of the Purebloods." The latter project took him more than
40 years and was motivated by Wilson’s desire to document native peoples
who were rapidly being changed physically in their looks and socially
through the mixing of bloodlines and other societal pressures of the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. Says Wilson of this four-decade
effort, "Sometimes Indians came to my studio, but more often I went to
them, drawing wherever they could be found: in their homes, in
hospitals, bars, back porches, tents, along rivers, in jails or
churches, or during [Indian] ceremonies."
Honored by the U.S. State Department as well as the International
Institute of Arts and Letters in Geneva, Switzerland, Wilson received
the first Governor’s Art Award and the D.S.C. from the University of
Oklahoma. He is a member of the Oklahoma Hall of Fame and recipient of
the Western Heritage Award from the Cowboy Hall of Fame. Wilson
currently lives in Fayetteville, Ark., where he continues his work as an
artist.
