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November 21, 2009 - August 22, 2010
Allan Houser: Tradition to Abstraction

The Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona will present a major retrospective of Allan Houser's paintings, watercolors, book illustrations, drawings, and sculpture as a tandem exhibition with that of the Desert Botanical Gardens.  The Heard Museum exhibition will draw from the extensive collection of Allan Houser artworks (41) in their permanent collection, but will be augmented by 37 works on paper as well as wood, steel, and bronze sculpture on loan from the Allan Houser archives.

Allan Houser first exhibited at the Heard Museum in 1948 while the earliest dated work in their collection is a tempera painting from 1952 titled "Indian Retreat".  In succeeding years they have acuired through purchases and gifts the most extensive institutional collection of Allan Houser's work.  Trademark sculptures such as "Earth Song" which sings over the museum's central courtyard, "Heading Home" which has graced the original  museum courtyard, and the classic unique steel creations "Buffalo Dancer" and "Navajo" are renowned as some of the Heard collection's major works .

On loan from the Allan Houser Archives will be exquisite and rare works on paper done by Allan Houser in the 1950's while he was an instructor at the Intermountain School in Brigham City, Utah.  These include 8 watercolor paintings and 11 tempera paintings and pen and ink drawings done as book illustrations.  These illustrations are among over 150 such works in the Allan Houser archives which originally graced the pages of 7 different children's books published between 1954  and 1962.

"Goats in Landscape", watercolor, circa 1958, 16" X 21"		book illustration from "Blue Canyon Horse", 1954, 31 1/2" X 21 1/2"

The exhibition shows the explorations and evolving styles of Allan Houser over the course of his 60-year career.  Exemplary drawings and sculpture of his later figure studies as well as abstract forms relate his perspective and reference to international influences and modernist sculptors whose aesthetics he absorbed.

Works in the exhibition will be on display in the Lovena Ohl Gallery and throughout the museum's public and courtyard spaces.