Ledger Art: Looking Between the Lines

From the September-October 2011 Issue of Native Peoples magazine
Article by Gussie Fauntleroy

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Just as 19th-century drawings by Terrance Guardipee’s Blackfeet ancestors reflected their experience of the world, Guardipee also begins with a strong connection to his people’s age-old ways and then incorporates a 21st-century sensibility, artistic training and innovation to create his own distinctive version of contemporary ledger art.

Notably, the 43-year-old internationally acclaimed artist was among the first to significantly expand the concept of drawing over existing text on a single page from a ledger book. Starting with antique maps of his home state of Montana, where he grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation, Guardipee creates a layered collage with other types of antique documents, including war ration coupons, sheet music, train tickets and bank checks. Once the collage is arranged and affixed to the map, he uses Prismacolor to add swift-riding warriors, tipis, authentic Blackfeet designs and other vibrantly colored imagery on top.

 ”Black Horse Society” 

With a lifelong interest in drawing, Guardipee studied two dimensional art at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. In the late 1990s, while living in the Seattle area (where he still resides), he met an artist who encouraged him to apply his skills to a contemporary version of ledger art. It was an ideal fit, especially once Guardipee decided he could best honor his ancestors’ legacy by making the art form his own. “I thought about what the old-time people would have access to,” he relates. “On the maps I showed where the tribe is originally from. It connected me, my homeland, the drawings and my tribe.”

Guardipee’s ledger work has earned numerous honors over the years, including first-place awards and Best of Division at Santa Fe Indian Market. His work is in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, and the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana.

While Guardipee’s ledger art reflects the transformation that has taken place in his homeland over time, it also reinforces what has not changed. “Even though there are all these changes on the maps, like highways and the evolution of my homeland, my art tells people that we’re still here,” he asserts. “We still have our culture and belief systems intact.”

Guardipee will show at the 2011 Santa Fe Indian Market. He is represented by Catherine Black Horse at blackhorsestudio1@yahoo.com.

Too see the full text of the article, please follow the link to the Native Peoples magazine.