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Mary Adair

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Mary Adair
Born1936 (age 87–88)
Sequoyah County, Oklahoma
NationalityAmerican, Cherokee Nation
Other namesMary Adair, Mary Adair Horsechief, Mary HorseChief
Occupation(s)educator, painter
Years active1958–present

Mary Adair (formerly known as Mary Adair Horsechief, born 1936) is a Cherokee Nation educator and painter. After completing her education, she first taught school and then worked in youth programs. She served as the director of the Murrow Indian Children's Home at Bacone College and directed for the Cherokee Nation Jobs Corp Center before becoming the art instructor at Sequoyah High School in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

Simultaneously, Adair began a career as a professional artist in 1967, winning numerous art prizes and exhibiting mainly in the western part of the United States. Among the places where her work has been shown are the Cherokee Heritage Center of Park Hill, Oklahoma; the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona; the Museum of the Cherokee Indian at Cherokee, North Carolina; and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has pieces in the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma, as well as other public collections. Julie Pearson-Little Thunder interviewed Adair in 2011 as part of Oklahoma State University's Oklahoma Native Artists Oral History Project

Early life

Mary Adair was born in 1936 in Sequoyah County, Oklahoma[1] to Velma and Corrigan Adair.[2] Adair's family can be traced back to Gahoga, a Cherokee woman, [3] (sometimes known as Nancy Lightfoot)[4] who married John Adair, a Scotsman in South Carolina in the 18th century. Her great-great-great-grandfather Walter was jailed by Georgia settlers seeking to have the Cherokee removed from the state and died before the Trail of Tears march. Both her great-grandfather and her grandfather, Oscar Adair, were judges for the Cherokee Nation.[5]

After graduating from Sallisaw High School, Adair went on to further her education at Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and graduated with her B.A. from[2] Northeastern Oklahoma State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma in 1957.[6] On May 26, 1958, in Tucson, Arizona, she married Sam Horsechief,[2] a Pawnee craftsman,[1] with whom she would have three children who became artists, Sam HorseChief Jr., Mary HorseChief Henderson, and Daniel HorseChief.[7][4]

Career

In 1958, Horsechief began her teaching career in the Tulsa Public School System,[2] continuing her graduate studies at the University of Tulsa[6] and would complete her master's degree in education at Northeastern.[4] The couple moved to Dallas, Texas in 1959, but returned to Oklahoma City, before settling in Muskogee, Oklahoma around 1965.[8][9] There, she worked as a director of the Head Start Program before becoming the director of the Murrow Indian Children's Home.[1][6] In the late 1970s, Horsechief worked for the Cherokee Nation, directing the Jobs Corps Center for a decade.[6] Returning to teaching, she served as the art instructor at Sequoyah High School in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.[1][10]

Horsechief began her professional art career in 1967[4] and used the professional name Mary Adair Horsechief until her children became active as artists when she began using Mary Adair.[1][4] Her subject matter typically focuses on Native American people, as they go about their daily lives or participate in ceremonies and she often portrays children. She has exhibited at the 'Trail of Tears Art Show and Cherokee Homecoming in Park Hill, the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, the Museum of the Cherokee Indian of Cherokee, North Carolina, the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the Red Cloud Indian Art Show in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, among others.[4]

In 1972, Adair won a first-place award at the Five Civilized Tribes annual competitive art show and was featured with David E. Williams (Kiowa/Tonkawa/Kiowa-Apache) in a two-person exhibition and lecture held at the Goddard Center in Ardmore, Oklahoma.[11] That year, she was one of four artists including Doc Tate Nevaquaya (Comanche), Leonard Riddles (aka Black Moon, Comanche) and Johnson Scott (Seminole), who exhibited at the University of Oklahoma.[12] She repeated the win at the Five Civilized Tribes art show following year with a first-place award as a Cherokee artist.[13]

In 1976, Adair, along with Sharron Ahtone Harjo (Kiowa), Ruthe Blalock Jones (Delaware/Shawnee/Peoria), Virginia Stroud (Keetoowah Band Cherokee/Muscogee Creek), Carrie Wahnee (aka Water Girl) and Mary Bresser Young (Choctaw), were featured in an all-women's exhibition hosted at the Stovall Museum in Norman, Oklahoma.[14] In 1977, she was awarded the Special Indian Heritage Award by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum.[15] Adair again joined Stroud, Harjo, Jones, as well as Joan Brown (Cherokee descent), Valjean McCarty Hessing (Choctaw), and Jane McCarty Mauldin (Choctaw) in the Daughters of the Earth exhibition, curated by Doris Littrell, which toured from 1985 to 1988 throughout the United States and Europe.[16][17] Many of these same women participated with Adair in the Mothers and Descendants exhibition hosted at the Kirkpatrick Center of Oklahoma City in 1987.[18]

Adair was one of the artists interviewed in 2011 for the Oklahoma State University's Oklahoma Native Artists Oral History Project.[19] In 2015, she worked on a collaborative project with her children Sam, Mary, and Daniel, for the expansion of the Wilma Mankiller Health Center in Stilwell, Oklahoma. The piece called The Origins of Strawberries, featured paintings and text combining panels to tell the traditional Cherokee story.[7][20] Her works were included in the Women of the Five Civilized Tribes exhibition hosted by the museum in Muskogee in 2019.[21] Besides having works in the permanent collections of the Five Civilized Tribes Museum,[22] her works are located in other museums, libraries, and private collections.[4]

References

Citations

  1. ^ a b c d e Broder 2013, p. 265.
  2. ^ a b c d The Stilwell Democrat-Journal 1958, p. 5.
  3. ^ Hewitson 2010, pp. 277–278.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g Campbell 1993, p. 39.
  5. ^ Hewitson 2010, p. 278.
  6. ^ a b c d Anderson & Verble 1980, p. 76.
  7. ^ a b Chavez 2015.
  8. ^ The Stilwell Democrat-Journal 1959, p. 4.
  9. ^ The Stilwell Democrat-Journal 1962, p. 4.
  10. ^ First American Art Magazine 2017.
  11. ^ The Daily Ardmoreite 1972, p. 4.
  12. ^ The Daily Oklahoman 1972, p. 11.
  13. ^ The Indian Journal 1973, p. 17.
  14. ^ The Daily Oklahoman 1976, p. 16.
  15. ^ The Daily Oklahoman 1977, p. 202.
  16. ^ Carter 1985, p. 4.
  17. ^ Price 1985.
  18. ^ The Daily Oklahoman 1987, p. 98.
  19. ^ Edmon Low Library 2011.
  20. ^ Anadisgoi Magazine 2015, p. 10.
  21. ^ Spaulding 2019.
  22. ^ Johnson 1972, p. 42.

Bibliography

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