Today, IronShell’s dining room serves as her studio. It’s where the contemporary artist and designer creates ledger art — narrative drawing or painting on antique paper from discarded record-keeping books. 

IronShell, who is Sicangu and Oglala Lakota of the Titowan Band of the Oceti Sakowin, said there are “a lot of layers” to her artwork, which she makes with colored pencils, acrylic paint, watercolor markers and gold leafing pen. Each of her pieces tells a story. 

“I’m fighting against a mentality where people think we don’t exist,” IronShell said of Native Americans.

IronShell, who moved to Sioux City during the pandemic, is one of five Native American artists whose work is being celebrated in a “New Artist Showcase” Friday at Gallery 103 and 3 Rivers Art Gallery in the Ho-Chunk Centre. The works of IronShell, Henry Payer, Ed Encinas, Ernest Ricehill and Savannah Anderson, join those of Tani Russell, another local Native American artist whose photography and encaustic artwork has been displayed at Gallery 103 for a couple of years. Both galleries are seeking to increase the diversity of artists being spotlighted. 

“It’s inspired by the fact that there are five new artists in our shared galleries; and it’s exciting, because the five new artists are all Native American artists,” Terri Parish McGaffin, a Gallery 103 artist, said of the showcase. “This is a way for us to acknowledge Native American Heritage Month, but also feature their artwork, which is unique.”

IronShell said she draws inspiration from the works of the late Oscar Howe, who was a renowned Yanktonai Dakota painter and longtime University of South Dakota professor. 

“A lot of his pieces were very breaking the mold in being contemporary with that cubist-type of movement. With my pieces, I’m using the lines of the paper, the grid of the ledger paper to create those different blocks or squares,” IronShell explained. 

In “Born of a Star” IronShell tells the origin story of her people with geometric shapes and dentalium shells, which were associated with wealth and used as a popular dress embellishment, as well as a source of trade on the prairie.

“Our DNA has those star particles. We come from the stars. We’re a star nation. We come from a cave. So, after the moon smashed into the earth, we were microorganisms and, then, eventually, we come out,” she said. “But as human beings we came out of a cave; and they say that’s in Minneapolis.”

IronShell said she was thinking about the issue of abortion while creating “The Portal is Opening, Thamni.” The Lakota word for womb is “thamni.”

“At first, it didn’t start out as a womb. I had initially done these circles. These circles are really prominent in the design,” IronShell said as she stood by the framed ledger artwork, which hung on a wall just inside the main entrance of Gallery 103. “The womb, they call this a portal to another world.” 

Art as an escape 

Plains Indian men traditionally painted winter counts, pictorial calendars or histories, on bison hides. IronShell likened the images they painted to a mnemonic device that “triggers your memory to tell a story.”

However, in the late 1800s, the Plains Indians were forced to use ledger books as their canvases, instead of the hides, amid a mass slaughter of bison herds by white settlers. By the close of the 19th century, bison had been hunted almost to extinction.

“When these (ledger) papers were being made in the 1800s, there was a lot of illegalization of our people. We couldn’t sing. We couldn’t dance. We couldn’t do our ceremonies. We couldn’t even wear our clothes,” IronShell said. “A big part of why we switched from the hides to the paper was also because of the extermination of the buffalo. The United States government sent out the ammunition and everything. One dead buffalo, they said, was like one dead Indian. If you kill a buffalo, you kill an Indian. So, now, we don’t have any hides. We have to use canvas and the ledger paper.”

Most of the ledger paper IronShell uses in her artwork comes from old businesses. Finding it can be difficult and the books are often costly, but IronShell has had success locating it at antique shops and, sometimes, on eBay. 

“The quality of the papers are just so much thicker. They actually have those cotton fibers and linen fibers. The color of the colored pencils are supposed to come out more vibrant,” she said. 

IronShell has her eye on stacks of ledger books containing Sioux City Police Department logins. She said she could make “really awesome designs” by utilizing the stamps on the pages. The books also lead her to think about how law enforcement treated Native Americans back in in the 1800s. The Sioux City Police Department was founded in 1857.

“It’s really interesting to think, what was the timeframe? What were Indians doing? And, then, now, how do I thrive?” said IronShell, who said she wants to “reclaim” that era. “I touched all those police ledger books, because that was like counting coup.”

Ledger art is “prisoner of war art,” according to IronShell. She said reservations are considered “prisoner of war camps.” Since IronShell is still linked with the reservation, she said she is “still a prisoner of war,” citing the ongoing erasure of Native Americans — monetary sanctions, persistent stereotypes and underrepresentation in society. 

“I do art as my escape from all those issues. At the end of the day, I can’t solve all those issues. We can just talk about it. But you have something pretty on your wall that makes you feel good,” she said. 

Meet the other new artists 

Savannah Berlyn Anderson (Ricehill), a Winnebago Tribal member, grew up on Omaha Indian Reservation. Her passion for photography was kindled at age 11, when her father gifted her her very first camera. 

“I am dedicated to capturing meaningful photographs that possess the power to transform lives,” she said. “Whether I’m documenting the untold stories of my tribe, preserving the ephemeral beauty of nature, or striving to make a difference through my lens, I am driven by the belief that photography has the ability to shape perceptions, influence hearts, and spark meaningful conversations.”

Ed Encinas, of the Omaha Nation, is a ledger artist, muralist, craftsman and traditional Hethuska dancer. He teaches high school art and beginning band at UmoNhoN Nation Public School.

Encinas takes the ledger art form in new directions with paintings on old checks, sheet music and other pages from history. These documents, which are often of local origin, lead to conversations about our common history.

Henry Payer is a Ho-Chunk artist who works primarily with collage and mixed media. 

Payer’s bold and contemporary narrative compositions utilize Indigenous cartographic methods with traditional aspects of spatial representation and symbolism, while appropriating European modernist models of cubism, spatial distortion and collage. Each work offers a visual narrative of symbols and appropriated voices from American consumer society that reconfigures history, references the altered landscape or the identity of a portrait.

Ernest Ricehill is a curator, exhibit designer and photographer. He curated exhibitions at the Sioux City Art Center, showcasing his meticulous attention to detail and innovative exhibit design. In the 80s, Ricehill was considered the only Native American art curator.

Ricehill ventured into photography, capturing the essence of the urban Native American experience in his project, “Moccasins On Pavement – The Urban Indian Experience: A Denver Portrait Photographic Exhibit” at the Denver Natural History Museum.

What: New Artist Showcase — meet the artists and celebrate Native American Heritage Month

When: 5 p.m. Friday

Where: Gallery 103 and 3 Rivers Art Gallery in the Ho-Chunk Centre, 600 Fourth St.