page_title: Silver Horn
section_title: Art work
hierarchical_section_title: Silver Horn / Art work
caption_attribution_description: English: Ledger painting on muslin by Kiowa artist Silver Horn (1860-1940), ca. 1880, Oklahoma History Center
context_page_description: Silver Horn or Haungooah was a Kiowa ledger artist from Oklahoma.
context_section_description: He was mostly known for his skills in working with different mediums and materials such as graphite, colored pencil, crayon, pen and ink, and water color on hide, muslin and paper. He produced over a thousand illustrations and works of art between 1870 and 1920. He developed and created very keen visuals of Kiowa culture, from traditional images, warfare, and coup counting to depictions of the sun dance, early Peyote religion, and daily life. Silver Horn had witnessed traumatic changes as the Kiowa people went from a nomadic, buffalo-hunting culture to reservation life and forced assimilation into white society. The traumatic changes were depicted in his artwork.
  The depictions that Silver Horn would render were visionary images that were represented in abstract form on shields and events of the years past as a record in the pictorial calendar. Many tribes of the Plains area used pictorial art to maintain a calendar as means of recording happenings as well as to illustrate stories. Silver Horn developed a complex calendar system with events recorded for summer and winter of each year and most calendars had very simple pictures that helped calendar keepers remember the name of each year. His drawings of warfare depicted events of the past as well as more recent conflicts, while his images of ceremonies included rituals that were beginning at that time. He also created illustrations of myths and other oral traditions such as supernatural figures.
caption: Detail of ledger painting on muslin by Silver Horn, ca. 1880, Oklahoma History Center
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