Neil Parsons:
My name is Neil Parsons, and I'm enrolled Blackfeet. I was one of the earlier faculty members at IAIA. Lloyd Kiva came out to Montana to my ranch to interview me to come to work there at IAIA, and so I did, and I had a wonderful experience there.
I decided to teach there because I've always been interested in my Native American heritage and art, and here was a chance, you know, to go and experience some Native students and artists from other Indian locations, Native American locations in the United States, and so it was a good opportunity. I jumped at it. It was amazing. It was an amazing experience.
I used to go across Cerrillos Road every day with Allan Houser to have coffee in the coffee shop there. Yeah, and then Allan Houser had no problem whatsoever bringing Native American imagery out of his students, you know, because he did that kind of imagery in his sculptures himself, and he was an amazing person.
But what I do recall is how things began to change after that, after Fritz came there, and how things sort of turned into a more non-traditional kinds of imagery. Earlier, I guess I mentioned him once, maybe not. His early work was very abstract. You can see that it's inspired by Native American imagery.
He used a lot of buckskin colors, and even though it was very abstract, and it wasn't actual pictorial beadwork in any other sense, it was just abstract art springing from his feelings and his background.
Donald Montileaux I did know quite well, and he was a Plains Indian artist, and his paintings sometimes became very large and hard-edged. I might back that up by saying that his paintings were more inspired by my artwork because I was doing large geometric kinds of Plains beadwork imagery at that time.
This was actually quite a small painting. It came after I was experimenting with making backgrounds or painting supports, I guess you might call it, canvases that reflected scraped hides. And so, I think that may be a good way of describing this painting.
The bright color areas at the bottom were something that I discovered that were a good contrast to these large buckskin-looking backgrounds. It seemed like they were very talented and they were actually sent there from their homes in their home tribes because they were artistically inclined and having early artistic talent. Be it even drawing or something at home, you know, they were sent there because they were realized as having talent and a desire to become artists.
Yeah, I was drawn to a hard-edged abstraction which sort of sprang out of Plains Indian beadwork. How was I introduced to Abstract Expressionism? Yes, that's a good question because I was introduced to Abstract Expressionism where I went to school at University of Montana State University in Bozeman.
At that time, it was Montana State College, and most of my instructors there were very much into the New York School in the New York Abstract Expressionist movement. My work has always been, as we can see by both of those paintings, has always been horizontally inspired, and I think that horizontal inspiration comes from having been brought up on the Plains because the Plains are horizontal.
Even before 1950, there was abstraction and there always has been abstraction in Plains Indian art, and teaching at IAIA only added fuel to the fire, pretty much, you know.
