FAIRFIELD, CONN.- The Fairfield University Art Museum is presenting a new exhibition, Picturing History: Ledger Drawings of the Plains Indians on view from Wednesday, September 27, 2017, through Wednesday, December 20, 2017, in the museum’s Bellarmine Hall Galleries on the campus of Fairfield University.

The exhibition features over 50 drawings by artists from the Plains Indian peoples (Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho and others dwelling in the Western United States and Canada), who produced an extraordinarily rich and distinctive body of drawings chronicling battles, rituals, and winsome if sometimes jarring events of everyday life. In their later phase, the subject matter shifts to focus on the forced captivity of Native Americans and the suppression of indigenous traditions and practices. Known as Ledger Drawings because they were done on the pages of commercially produced account books, these striking images, many bearing pictographic signatures, are executed in ink, graphite, and colored pencil and watercolor. Some favor flat, stylized forms and a stark economy of means, while others show a lyrical predilection for rhythmic movement, minute descriptive and narrative detail, and dense, mosaic-like surface patterns. What each share is their makers’ acute powers of observation and ambition to record and describe recognizable people, places, things and events—to eloquently picture and record history as it transpired.

At the time they were made Ledger Drawings were appreciated by (and in many cases produced for) non-Native audiences. Today, however, they are virtually unknown other than to a small group of specialists and cognoscenti, and with rare exceptions they have been studied foremost as anthropological and ethnographic documents rather than as artistic creations. Yet the graphic media and materials, as well as the function and absorbing subject matter align these works with the centuries-long European tradition of drawing “stories” taken from the Bible, history, mythology, political and military deeds, or the simple routines of domestic life. Following European models, the depiction of these kinds of subjects became part of artistic practice on the other side of the Atlantic, the American continent, providing a more immediate context for the evocative and descriptive images produced by Plains Indians artists, which merge indigenous and non-native pictorial traditions and techniques. Featuring some fifty Ledger Drawings, Picturing History presents these works as graphic masterpieces warranting a place in the long and rich history of drawing.