Mid-America All-Indian Museum switches mission to honor Blackbear Bosin

By Amy Geiszler-Jones Eagle correspondent

Updated June 21, 2020 8:23 AM

A campaign is underway to bring the works of renowned Kiowa-Comanche artist Blackbear Bosin — who designed Wichita’s iconic Keeper of the Plains — back to his adopted city.

As part of that campaign, Wichita’s Mid-America All-Indian Museum, originally founded in 1976 as an intertribal cultural and education center and provider of social services, will officially be turned into a museum focused primarily on Bosin’s original artworks.

“We want to be the guardian of those pieces,” said April Scott, executive director since 2005.

In late 2019, the facility officially made a name change, swapping out center for museum, Scott said. Several months earlier, in June 2019, it started its two-year campaign called “Bring the Bosins Home” to add to its current collection of Bosin works.

The museum had planned a public launch of the campaign earlier this month, but the event was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In June 2021 —to celebrate the late Bosin’s 100th birthday on June 5 —the museum will showcase the works collected during the campaign and “turn the museum over to Bosin artwork,” according to Scott.

“He deserves to be the mainstay of the Indian museum and any recognition we can give him,” said Jerry Martin, a retired anthropologist, ethnographic art collector and former museum director.

An earlier attempt

Martin was the center’s museum director between 1989 and 1997 and spent another three years, until 2000, as its executive director before joining the Wichita State faculty and becoming the curator of WSU’s anthropology museum.

As a kid, Martin said, he remembers his father, Bowman, who was also a painter, getting together with Bosin to paint. He also remembers visiting Bosin in his studios and being struck in particular by two print reproductions of Bosin’s work, one of which was “Torches of Soul Seekers.”

As Martin took stock of the museum’s holdings, he realized the museum at the All-Indian center that Bosin helped found had very little of the artist’s work.

“I said, ‘This is wrong. He’s one of the most well-known and nationally known artists from Wichita who is a Native American.’”

Wanting to right that wrong, Martin started working on an early version of a Bosin repository project and finding a way to maintain Bosin’s legacy.

“We were trying to do much the same thing as this,” he said of the current campaign.

As part of that early attempt, Bosin’s stepson, David Simmonds, who lives in Newton, donated about a dozen paintings, several cartoons and some personal artifacts.

Simmonds said he remembers the group working to preserve Bosin’s legacy and works.

“It was a good group, but we couldn’t get traction and it eventually fizzled out,” Simmonds said.

One of the things that fizzled was a fundraising campaign to acquire the original “Torches of the Soul Seekers” painting when Martin spotted it for sale in a Wichita art gallery in 1995.

“I knew the painting from the prints, and I said, ‘We have to have it,’” Martin said.

The work, completed in 1957, depicts a handful of Native Americans — four seated and one standing upright with arms outstretched — looking toward the aurora borealis. According to Native American lore, the northern lights are the spirits of departed loved ones coming through the darkness and communicating with the living.

When the museum failed to raise the money to buy the painting, Martin decided to purchase it himself, with plans to leave it to the museum as part of his estate.

“It was not cheap,” Martin said, about the painting’s price tag, which he declined to reveal.

Also, during Martin’s tenure, two outdoor gardens were created in Bosin’s honor, he said.

One features a tile reproduction of Bosin’s acclaimed dramatic painting, “Prairie Fire,” which was published in “National Geographic” magazine and had won first place in the 1953 Philbrook competition. The annual contest was run by the noted Native American art museum of the same name in Tulsa between 1946 to 1979.

Bring the Bosins Home

Much of the gallery space in the Mid-America All-Indian Museum, 650 N. Seneca, is already devoted to sharing Bosin’s artwork that the museum has accumulated through the years. Twenty-five paintings and 14 framed cartoons are on display, along with some other artifacts, like Bosin’s pipe. A short documentary made in 2013 plays on a loop.

Scott said using the experiences and artwork of Blackbear Bosin is an ideal way for the museum to showcase Native American life. It’s also helping give focus to the museum, rather than trying to tell multiple stories of various tribes and nations.

“There are 576 nations so it would be like giving a tour of Europe,” Scott said.

Bosin was born in Oklahoma in 1921 and named Tsate Kongia — the Kiowa name for black bear — in honor of his great-grandfather. He went to St. Patrick’s Mission School in Anadarko where he was exposed to the work of the Kiowa Five — a group of inspirational Kiowa artists — and “walked in two worlds,” as Scott tells it.

In Wichita, he worked for Boeing Aircraft, at McConnell Air Force Base, Western Lithograph and created movie posters for a chain of Wichita theaters. Through his art, which was exhibited at the National Gallery, the Smithsonian and elsewhere, he created a deep appreciation for his native culture and customs.

“He wanted to save the iconography of the culture — the headdresses, the paraphernalia — and what better way to preserve that than to have an artist represent that,” Martin said.

He often wrote poems to accompany his major paintings.

Bosin died in 1980, at age 59.

The Bosin Society

Among the Bosin pieces on display at the museum is a watercolor that, according to its description, is believed to be the oldest surviving work created by Bosin. It will likely stand out to visitors expecting to see Bosin’s familiar and dramatic Native American figures.

It depicts Aiea Heights, Hawaii.

Bosin, a Marine on his way to serve in the Pacific theater during World War II, was hospitalized for rheumatic fever at a naval hospital in Aiea Heights. The piece was one of several he created while recovering. He held his first one-man show at the hospital.

The museum also displays the last large mural made by Bosin, the acrylic on canvas “From Whence All Life.” The piece had been commissioned by the Farm Credit Bank of Wichita for its building and unveiled in 1972. It took Bosin nearly a year to create the piece because of a horizontal blind spot he developed after open-heart surgery. The mural was donated to the City of Wichita in 2014 and moved to the museum, which has displayed it since 2015.

The museum also is finally displaying one of the three 10-foot corten steel replicas made of the much larger Keeper of the Plains structure displayed in Wichita since 1974 at the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers.

Bosin had given the replica to another Wichita artist, Charles Sanderson, who had kept the piece in his garden. It never was displayed upright because it had no base, according to Scott. When Ruth Sanderson, his widow, donated it to the museum in 1994, the museum couldn’t afford a base to display it, so it sat in storage. Last year, a donor paid for a base to be made and the statue was unveiled during a private donors event for the “Bring the Bosins Home” campaign.

“We brought the first Bosin home,” said Scott of that unveiling.

Another work that has finally made its way home is “Torches of the Soul Seekers.” Rather than making the museum wait to receive the painting after his death, Martin became an early donor to the current campaign.

“I think it’s one of his masterpieces, and I thought after 25 years in my house, it should be enjoyed by the public,” Martin said.

Since “Bring the Bosins Home” started, the museum has received four additional original works, including “Buffalo Hunt.”

As part of the campaign, the museum has also created a donor group called the Bosin Society to help it collect and preserve original works of Bosin’s art. Membership levels start at $1,000.