Standing Bear at Paha Sapa

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Exhibited in Inner Light: The Art of Tom Gilleon at Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West in Scottsdale, AZ and the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, MT. Standing Bear was a Ponca chief, born in 1829, and became a civil rights leader who successfully argued in U.S. District Court in Omaha in 1879 that Native Americans are "persons within the meaning of the law" and have the right of habeas corpus. This landmark decision made him the first Native American to be judicially granted civil rights under American law. In this painting, Tom Gilleon chose to depict Standing Bear against the dramatic and abstract backdrop of Paha Sapa, the Sioux name for the Black Hills of South Dakota. Standing Bear at Paha Sapa was featured in Maynard Dixon’s American West, a comprehensive art book by Dr. Mark Sublette about Maynard Dixon, the first modernist in Western art, and other modernists in Western art like Tom Gilleon.