City to accept donated mural by Blackbear Bosin

The Mid-America All-Indian Center will soon be home to the last large mural painted by Kiowa artist Blackbear Bosin.

The acrylic mural on canvas, entitled “From Whence All Life,” was commissioned by Farm Credit Bank and displayed in 1972, according to city documents.

Bosin is most famous for creating the Keeper of the Plains statue at the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers.

Last fall, the owner of the Farm Credit Bank building – CoBank out of Colorado – offered to donate the art to the city.

It will be put on permanent loan to the Mid-America All-Indian Center at the end of the month, with an unveiling scheduled for March 13.

The center owns the most complete collection of Bosin’s work, said John D’Angelo, director of arts and cultural services for the city.

“We thought it was most appropriate for it to live over there on permanent loan so everyone in Wichita can enjoy it,” D’Angelo said.

“Most people are familiar with the sculpture, but if you look at his paintings, you see a progression of him as an artist and what he was trying to represent. It has a lot of Indian culture and symbols of Mother Earth and relates that to Kansas, and respect and reverence for the universe as a whole.”

The painting “reflects the passion of the artist for a complete and beautiful way of life and thought now almost totally extinguished. It also reflects his great reverence for a Creation, timeless and immortal, maintaining its own inherent divine qualities though now transformed and degraded,” according to city documents.

The center of the mural depicts the embodiment of Mother Earth and the Sun.

“To the artist, these entities are reciprocal as, in his words, ‘The energy of the sun would have no reason for being if the Earth did not exist to receive it, and, in return, the Earth would be nothing without the Sun,’” city documents say.

On the right, a figure represents the “Great Life Giver, often referred to in the white man’s language as the Great Spirit, who gave the tribes of the Plains all the good things which they had. The best of his gifts was the buffalo which was everything to the Indian: food, clothing, shelter and medicine.”

On the left side of the mural, there are two figures representing Father Sky and Mother Earth. They are bound together by the Rainbow Guardian, represented by a ribbon.

The four elements – fire, earth, air and water – also are depicted in the mural.

An independent appraisal in November valued the mural at $185,000, according to city documents.

This story was originally published February 7, 2015 at 3:53 PM with the headline "City to accept donated mural by Blackbear Bosin."