Buffalo, Blood, and Blue Lines: The Fight to Keep Plains History on the Page
#nativeamericanheritagemonth
Across the Northern and Southern Plains, painted hides once wrapped the body, the tipi, and the camp circle in histories of war, kinship, ceremony, and land. Buffalo robes, tipi covers, painted shirts, and parfleches formed a mobile archive that moved with people, herd animals, and seasonal rounds. Winter counts, kept on hides by designated historians among Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota communities, indexed years of drought, epidemic, and celestial events such as the famous Leonid meteor storm of 1833 remembered as the year the stars fell.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, that archive came under systematic attack. As U.S. military campaigns and market hunting devastated buffalo herds, reservation policy confined Plains nations to shrinking land bases, while forts, agencies, and mission schools attempted to reorganize Native life around rations and wage labor. Yet the visual record did not end. Plains artists turned to new supports; ruled ledger paper, military forms, and government stationery, salvaged from army posts, agencies, and traders’ stores. Ledger art, as this practice is now known, continued the narrative, mnemonic, and ceremonial functions of earlier hide painting, but did so on the very papers that recorded conquest.
Before paper, Plains narrative art circulated on hides, rock faces, cloth, and wood. Berlo’s Plains Indian Drawings 1865–1935 and Hansen’s Memory and Vision document numerous buffalo robes and tipi covers painted with spiraling friezes of horse raids, battles, and ceremonial dances. Winter counts like the Lone Dog Nakota count or the Battiste Good Lakota count condense years of events into ringed pictographs on hide, each image keyed to oral explanation by a keeper.
These works are not illustrations for text; they are texts. As Greene and Thornton emphasize for Lakota winter counts, the images and the keeper’s spoken narrative form a single historical medium. Similarly, war shirts and story robes could be read within the circle of the camp. Their curved surfaces and radial layouts are calibrated to the body and to multi-perspectival viewing in motion.
With the rapid decline of buffalo in the 1870s, hides became scarce, and new materials entered Indigenous hands; ruled account books from merchants, surplus ledgers from quartermasters, military forms, letterhead, and blank sketchbooks. The Texas Beyond History overview notes that ledger paper was often recycled from accounting books and military records, acquired as gifts, pay, trade, or salvage.(texasbeyondhistory.net) At Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, Captain Richard Henry Pratt actively supplied ledger books and colored pencils to Cheyenne and Kiowa prisoners, encouraging drawing as a supposedly civilizing practice.
Artists adapted quickly. Compositionally, many early ledger drawings replicate robe conventions; continuous sequences of riders and combatants, figures in strict profile, and minimal ground lines. The Old White Woman Ledger at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum, for example, includes Cheyenne scenes of horse raids and camp life that could easily translate back to hide. Ledger art is thus best understood as a media transfer of existing visual systems, not a sudden adoption of Euro-American drawing.
The substitution of ledgers for hides materializes the shift from subsistence economies centered on buffalo to ration-based economies governed by U.S. paperwork. Hides carried spiritual and practical meanings. They came from animals central to food, shelter, ceremony, and cosmology. Women’s work of tanning and quillwork, documented by Anderson for the Arapaho and by Hansen for multiple nations, made hide painting part of an interdependent gendered labor system.(University of Washington Press)
Ledger paper had different origins. The National Museum of American History’s Keeping History: Plains Indian Ledger Drawings exhibition stresses that many books were obsolete account ledgers, freight registers, or ration books, whose columns, headings, and entries remain legible beneath the drawings.(National Museum of American History) Sitting Bull’s MS 1929-a war deeds drawings, for instance, were made on the blank backs of printed roster sheets for the 31st U.S. Infantry and an army contractor’s order from Fort Totten, Dakota Territory.
When Plains artists draw horses, warriors, and coups across this bureaucratic infrastructure, they literally overwrite the army’s own recordkeeping. The result is a palimpsest in which the ledger’s columns of pay and rations are visually subordinated to Indigenous narratives of battle, ceremony, and kinship. Texas Beyond History underlines that, unlike hide painting tied to buffalo hunts and mobile camps, much ledger art was produced in reservations, agencies, and prisons, using the very tools of a foreign culture (pencils, crayons, and paper) that had arrived as part of conquest.
This material history is not incidental. It indexes the state project of converting land, animals, and Native labor into quantifiable units on paper. Ledger art hijacks that system. When Red Horse’s Battle of the Little Bighorn series appears on ledger paper now held in the National Anthropological Archives and Cantor Arts Center, it turns the medium of military administration into a vehicle for Lakota-centered history.
Both hide paintings and ledger drawings are saturated with warfare, but the narrative scope and tone shift over time. On shirts, robes, and tipi covers, artists often depict individual coups, touching a live enemy, stealing a horse, capturing a weapon, as discrete vignettes, arranged around the body or shelter. Hansen notes that war honors encoded on shirts and bonnets served as mnemonic prompts for the wearer’s oral recounting of exploits.
Ledger art continues and refines this tradition. Red Horse’s forty-two drawings of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, commissioned by physician Charles McChesney in 1881, carefully map troop movements, casualties, and terrain. As Ellen Caldwell emphasizes, these images present a Lakota view of Custer’s defeat that counters later romanticized narratives of heroic last stands.
Amos Bad Heart Bull’s extensive pictographic history of the Oglala, begun in the 1890s, offers another example of narrative expansion. His drawings encompass historic battles, sacred ceremonies, daily ranching life, treaty negotiations, and interactions with U.S. officials. This ledger-based history makes clear that war is only one dimension of a broader social and ceremonial order.
Fort Marion and prison drawings add a further layer. Bear’s Heart’s sketchbook, now in the National Museum of American History and Minneapolis Institute of Art, juxtaposes buffalo hunts and pre-reservation encampments with scenes of railcars, steamships, coastal forts, barracks, and guard drills.(collections.artsmia.org) Spotted Hawk’s Miles City Jail ledger, drawn in 1897, similarly mixes battle memories with images of prisoners, bars, and courthouse architecture.
In these narratives, the continuity lies in the insistence that Plains peoples, not the U.S. military, are the primary historians of these events. The change lies in the broadened subject matter: captivity, travel, and carceral routine become as historically charged as horse raids and hand-to-hand combat.
Plains visual culture has long been structured by complementary gendered practices. Women’s quillwork and beadwork on dresses, bags, and parfleches carry complex symbolic systems of color and geometry tied to kinship and spiritual power. Men, more often, painted shields, shirts, tipi liners, and war robes with figural narratives of hunting, war, and vision experiences. Berlo and Phillips emphasize, however, that such divisions were neither absolute nor universal, and that women also participated in narrative arts through appliqué, painted parfleches, and winter counts in some communities.
The earliest corpus of ledger drawings, especially from Fort Marion, overwhelmingly reflects male imprisonment and patronage that sought images of warriors and battles. Szabo’s Art from Fort Marion and related reviews show that most identified Fort Marion artists, Bear’s Heart, Making Medicine, Howling Wolf, Zotom, Etahdleuh Doanmoe,.were men, with the exception of a handful of unidentified or less well-documented contributors. That male skew reflects the military’s decision to incarcerate selected warriors, not the full spectrum of Plains society.
Yet women’s narrative voices were present. Some winter counts, such as those collected at the Smithsonian, were maintained in kin groups where women played central roles as keepers and interpreters. Later, individual women such as Annie Little Warrior produced ledger drawings that depict both combat and domestic life from a Hunkpapa Lakota perspective, although much of this work remains under-acknowledged in the literature.
In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, gendered authorship becomes a deliberate site of intervention. Richard Pearce’s Women and Ledger Art and Jennifer Tone-Pah-Hote’s review in Museum Anthropology survey the work of Sharron Ahtone Harjo, Colleen Cutschall, Linda Haukaas, and Dolores Purdy, all of whom explicitly frame their practice as grounded in women’s experiences and responsibilities.(jstor.org) Haukaas, for example, uses antique ledger pages to visualize Lakota boarding school histories, while Ahtone Harjo commemmorates Kiowa dances and family lineages. In their hands, ledger art becomes a means to recenter women’s roles in historical narration, care work, ceremony, and political activism.
Ledger art’s close association with incarceration is both a constraint and a source of creative intensity. Following the Red River War of 1874–75, seventy-two Southern Plains prisoners, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Caddo, were transported in chains from Fort Sill to Fort Marion.(Dallas News) Pratt used the fort as a laboratory for his program of forced assimilation, later summarized in his notorious call to kill the Indian and save the man.
Within that regime, drawing was encouraged as both recreation and commodity production. Prisoners were given access to ledger books, pencil, ink, and crayon; their images were sold to tourists and used in Pratt’s fundraising appeals. Bear’s Heart’s locomotives and paddlewheel steamers, Zotom’s classroom and drill scenes, and Howling Wolf’s courtship and hunting images record both remembered pre-incarceration life and the novel sights of Florida’s coastal environment.
Szabo’s Imprisoned Art, Complex Patronage and Art from Fort Marion analyze how these works negotiate both surveillance and agency. While Pratt appears as patron and censor, the artists also use their sketchbooks to record their own movements, to note indignities, and to memorialize fellow prisoners. The Spotted Hawk Ledger, produced in Miles City Jail, similarly documents incarceration on county rather than federal terms, inscribing Northern Cheyenne perspectives into local legal history.(plainsledgerart.org)
Captivity drawings therefore function as both testimonial and tactical. They offer visual evidence of imprisonment and forced migration, but they also turn prison time into a space for re-articulating identity, kinship, and historical memory under intense constraint.
The movement from ceremonial object to collectible commodity is one of the most fraught transitions in Plains art history. Robes, shirts, and winter counts once circulated primarily within kin and ritual networks: given as diplomatic gifts, worn in dances and councils, and activated through song and story. Hansen’s work on giveaway practices underscores how such objects embodied obligations and relationships rather than serving as aesthetic items for strangers.
By contrast, many ledger drawings were made with sale or exchange to outsiders in mind. Fort Marion prisoners sold individual drawings and books to tourists; archival records track sketchbooks given or sold to visitors such as Sophia Negley or officers like William Tecumseh Sherman and Bishop Whipple. Texas Beyond History notes that traders and soldiers on the Plains likewise bought drawings, sometimes commissioning scenes of particular battles or hunts.(texasbeyondhistory.net)
In the early twentieth century, collectors such as Mark Lansburgh assembled large ledgers from reservation and antique markets; these are now central holdings at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum and elsewhere. At the same time, tourist markets in places like Santa Fe, Denver, and the Black Hills created demand for easily portable Plains works on paper.
This shift to commodification is double-edged. It exposes ledger artists to objectification and misinterpretation; yet it also allows them to circulate their narratives widely and to gain material support under conditions of economic dispossession. As Ellen Caldwell suggests, ledger drawings operate as counter-narratives even when produced under market pressures, offering Plains perspectives in the very spaces (galleries, parlors, museums) where Native people were often absent.
Ledger art is famous for its horses; elongated, stylized, and often depicted at full gallop. These horses are not simply decorative; they signify wealth, mobility, and martial prowess. Greene’s analysis of Cheyenne ledgers shows that recurring conventions in horse depiction communicate gender, ownership, and victory.(National Museum of Natural History)
What distinguishes many late nineteenth-century ledgers, however, is the juxtaposition of horses with modern technologies: locomotives, rail lines, telegraph poles, steamboats, and masonry forts. Bear’s Heart’s locomotives and paddlewheelers at Fort Marion, for example, record the prisoners’ first experience of mechanized transport during their forced journey east. Texas Beyond History highlights similar scenes of trains and telegraph lines in anonymous ledgers held at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory.
The Lansburgh Collection at Dartmouth includes numerous images of travelers in railcars and steamboats, as well as cavalry troops moving along graded roads, revealing how Plains artists registered new infrastructures on the land. In these pages, modernity appears not as a Euro-American monopoly but as a contested field where Native and non-Native actors move through shared spaces under unequal conditions.
By placing horses and trains in the same pictorial frame, ledger artists disallow simplistic periodizations that would confine Native people to a timeless premodern past. They show, instead, a complex coevalness. Warriors riding alongside steam technology, reading its dangers and possibilities from within their own cosmologies.
Clothing and bodily adornment have long been key sites of visual meaning in Plains cultures. Hansen’s Memory and Vision reproduces numerous war shirts, dresses, and bonnets whose quillwork and beadwork encode society memberships, vision experiences, and familial ties.
Ledger artists carry this emphasis on regalia into paper. In Amos Bad Heart Bull’s pictographic history, careful attention to warbonnets, trailer lengths, shield designs, and horse gear allows viewers familiar with Lakota sign systems to identify individuals, societies, and honors. Sitting Bull’s war deeds drawings similarly highlight his distinctive hair style, buffalo-horn bonnet, shield motifs, and later, medal and uniform pieces acquired through diplomatic encounters.
At Fort Marion, Bear’s Heart and Zotom depict fellow prisoners wearing hybrid outfits; military jackets over breechcloths, or Euro-American trousers combined with blankets and beaded accessories. These combinations visualize the tensions of imposed dress codes and the creative ways Native people asserted identity within them.
Regalia in ledger art therefore works as self-fashioning in a double sense. It reaffirms continuity with warrior societies and ceremonial roles, and it comments on the layered, sometimes contradictory identities imposed by confinement, mission schooling, and imperial diplomacy.
U.S. archives of the Plains wars (military reports, treaties, maps) present events from the vantage of the state. Ledger books offer a different record, authored by combatants, witnesses, and survivors from Plains nations themselves. Ellen Caldwell aptly describes ledger drawings as American counter-narratives that challenge romanticized Western myths.(JSTOR Daily)
The Plains Indian Ledger Art Digital Project (PILA) plays a key role in reassembling these counter-archives. It catalogues digitized ledgers from Fort Marion, Spotted Hawk’s Miles City Jail book, and numerous agency and reservation contexts, with detailed provenance and tribal attributions. Similarly, the Hood Museum’s Mark Lansburgh Collection, the Smithsonian’s Keeping History project, and the NMAI’s Unbound exhibition curate ledger books as coherent narratives rather than as isolated pages.
When we follow a ledger cover to cover, such as Bear’s Heart’s 1876 drawing book, or Sitting Bull’s partially disbound autobiography, we can observe how artists weave together episodes of war, ceremony, travel, and confinement into extended arguments about causality and justice. These books document treaty violations, forced marches, and massacres as much as coups and hunts; they record station stops, guard routines, and imprisonments typically absent from official reports.
In this sense, ledger books are not supplementary illustrations to an existing archive; they are archives in their own right, structured by Indigenous temporalities and spatial logics, and increasingly recognized as such in both studies and museum practice.
Formally, the move from hide to ledger paper entails significant changes in support, tools, and compositional options, but Plains artists adapt these shifts in ways that preserve key visual priorities. Greene’s landmark study on Cheyenne ledger art uses quantitative analysis to show that in a corpus of 1,300 drawings, roughly forty percent of action runs from right to left, echoing the direction of narrative flow on robes draped over the left shoulder.
On curved hides, artists often arrange scenes in circular or spiral patterns that work with the surface’s irregular contours. On ledger paper, they inherit a flat, rectangular field overprinted with horizontal lines and vertical columns. Many artists integrate these grids rather than ignoring them, aligning riders along ruled lines or using columns as implied ground lines and boundaries.
Color also changes materially. Mineral and vegetal pigments on hide give way to graphite, ink, watercolor, and commercially available crayons. Collections at the Hood and NMAI demonstrate how artists use new, intense aniline reds, blues, and greens to highlight horses, clothing, and warbonnets, while often leaving backgrounds uncolored to emphasize movement and relational positioning.
Despite exposure to Euro-American drawing instruction, including rudimentary shading and horizon lines in some mission school contexts, ledger artists largely maintain a non-illusionistic graphic style; figures in flat profile, stylized yet highly legible gestures, and an emphasis on relational syntax (who acts upon whom, from which side) over volumetric modeling. This formal continuity underscores the point that ledger art is not a naive imitation of European art but an Indigenous graphic system adaptable across media.
Ledger art intersects with mission and government schooling in complex ways. Fort Marion’s assimilation program directly preceded Pratt’s founding of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where he sought to extend his model of military discipline, English literacy, and Christianization. Several ledger artists, including Zotom, later attended Carlisle, linking prison drawing to institutionalized education.
At Carlisle and similar schools, penmanship, linear perspective, and Euro-American art exercises became part of the curriculum. Research on Carlisle’s art and artifacts, including work on instructor Angel De Cora, shows that Native students were taught to combine tribal motifs with Western media, even as the larger institution sought to suppress Native languages and ceremonies.
Some ledger drawings clearly show this influence. Increased use of horizon lines, rudimentary shading, or string-of-beads composition along a ground. In Zotom’s sketchbook, images of classrooms, blackboards, and students at desks appear alongside warriors and horses, visualizing an imposed literacy regime.
At the same time, Plains artists appropriate writing itself. Sitting Bull’s war deeds drawings often incorporate Lakota captions; Amos Bad Heart Bull sometimes inscribes names and brief notes in Lakota syllabics and Roman letters. These hybrid pages blur any simple divide between supposedly oral, visual Native cultures and literate colonial ones, demonstrating that Plains people actively experimented with alphabetic and pictorial mark-making on their own terms.
For much of the twentieth century, museums and collectors treated ledger drawings as salvage evidence of a vanishing way of life, often decontextualizing and misattributing the works. Sitting Bull’s ledger book, for instance, was partially disbound by the Bureau of American Ethnology so sheets could be laminated and stored according to conservation priorities that overwrote the integrity of the original codex. Many ledger books were renamed after non-Native owners or donors rather than artists or communities.
Szabo’s studies of Fort Marion materials and Howling Wolf’s drawings document this history of complex patronage, where ethnographic collecting, tourist markets, and individual patronage intersect. Berlo’s Plains Indian Drawings and Berlo and Phillips’s Native North American Art played important roles in reclassifying ledger drawings as art with Indigenous authorship, not anonymous ethnographic specimens.
Repatriation frameworks such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) have primarily addressed human remains, funerary objects, and sacred items, but they have also prompted broader institutional reconsideration of the ethics of holding war shirts, ceremonial hides, and winter counts acquired under colonial conditions. Consultation processes at museums like the Peabody and Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture involve tribal representatives in reinterpreting and sometimes reclaiming objects related to Plains narrative traditions.
Digital repatriation complements these efforts. Projects such as the Lone Dog winter count teaching poster, the Hood’s online lansburgh collection, and PILA’s open access platform make high-resolution images and curatorial data available to Plains communities and scholars worldwide, facilitating tribally driven reinterpretation and education even when physical objects remain in non-Native institutions.
The contemporary revival of ledger art is profoundly shaped by women artists who use the medium to address gendered experiences of colonialism, survivance, and community care. Pearce’s Women and Ledger Art focuses on Sharron Ahtone Harjo (Kiowa), Colleen Cutschall (Oglala Lakota), Linda Haukaas (Sicangu Lakota), and Dolores Purdy Corcoran (Caddo/Winnebago), arguing that their work both honors and revises nineteenth-century ledger conventions.
Ahtone Harjo, for example, paints Kiowa dance and family scenes on antique ledger pages, emphasizing women’s roles in preparing regalia, organizing social dances, and sustaining language and ceremonial knowledge. Haukaas often addresses the boarding school era and domestic spaces, visualizing intergenerational trauma and resilience through figures of grandmothers and children. Cutschall and Purdy incorporate humor, animal personae, and pop-cultural references to critique stereotypes and to celebrate Indigenous women’s creativity in urban and reservation settings.
Beyond Pearce’s four, a wider circle of women and two-spirit artists work with ledger paper and related supports; among them contemporary practitioners in the NMAI’s Unbound exhibition and in regional shows across the Plains, who use ledger-like formats to depict protest camps, missing and murdered Indigenous women, and land defense movements. Their interventions demonstrate that ledger art is not a closed historical genre but a living feminist and decolonial practice.
Male and nonbinary contemporaries also push the medium in new directions that speak to mapping and survivance. Artists such as Chris Pappan (Kaw/Osage/Cheyenne River Lakota), Terrance Guardipee (Blackfeet), and Terran Last Gun (Piikani) employ ledger and map papers to explore themes of urban Indigenous identity, counter-mapping, and Blackfoot star knowledge. Their work intersects with women’s ledger art in building a broader field of contemporary narrative practice grounded in Plains histories and futurities.
Plains narrative art has always involved sophisticated spatial thinking. Winter counts, though organized chronologically, often spiral around hides in ways that suggest cyclical time and spatial relationships among camps and events. Some historic robes and shirts function as maps, representing rivers, trails, and enemy or allied camps; examples in Berlo’s and Hansen’s studies depict complex battlefields and hunting territories.
Ledger drawings continue this cartographic impulse. The Lansburgh Collection includes multi-page sequences of scouts traveling across stylized landscapes, marking rivers, buttes, and agency buildings. Bear’s Heart and Zotom depict routes from the southern Plains to Florida, recording specific transfer points; wagon trains, rail stations, steamboat ports, and finally the harbor at St. Augustine.
Sitting Bull’s ledger drawings of war deeds, made on the backs of roster sheets and army orders, implicitly map the contested lands around Fort Totten and beyond. They show raids, defenses, and movements across a terrain simultaneously being surveyed and divided by U.S. authorities.
Contemporary artists extend this cartographic function through what scholars and curators have termed counter-mapping. Pappan layers historic survey maps with portraits and inscriptions that reassert Indigenous presence in Chicago; Guardipee collages vintage maps with Blackfeet figures to reclaim routes and territories; Last Gun creates abstract geometric compositions on ledger paper that he describes as star maps connecting Piikani narratives to celestial and terrestrial coordinates.
These practices underline that ledger art is not only about time and event, but also about place. By drawing battles, journeys, and ceremonial sites on colonial paper, Plains artists inscribe Indigenous geographies onto and against the cartographic surfaces that underwrote allotment, rail lines, and resource extraction.
Returning to Vizenor’s language of survivance, we can see ledger art as an exemplary survivant practice. It emerges at the intersection of catastrophic violence (buffalo slaughter, war, incarceration, land theft) and creative continuity. Ledger drawings document forced migrations and prison regimes, yet they refuse narratives of disappearance; they insist on ongoing presence, relation, and imagination.
Exhibitions such as Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains, curated by Emil Her Many Horses at the National Museum of the American Indian, stage this continuity by juxtaposing historic hides, muslins, and ledgers with contemporary works. The result is a visual conversation across generations in which artists claim ledger paper, map fragments, checks, and digital printouts as fields for Indigenous story.
From robe to ruled page, from winter count to digital database, Plains narrative art has adapted materials and platforms without relinquishing its role as a vehicle for history, law, and cosmology. The shift from hide to ledger paper marks both colonial violence,.he destruction of buffalo and imposition of bureaucratic regimes, and Indigenous ingenuity, as artists turn those same bureaucratic materials into counter-archives and maps of survivance. Contemporary women’s ledger art, counter-mapping practices, and institutional collaborations around repatriation all testify that this is not a closed chapter but a living, evolving field.
Ledger art thus stands not as an epilogue to the Plains wars but as a continuing assertion. We record our own histories, we map our own lands, and our stories remain active on the page.
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Szabo, Joyce M. Imprisoned Art, Complex Patronage: Plains Drawings by Howling Wolf and Zotom at the Autry National Center. Autry National Center and UCLA Fowler Museum, 2010.
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Terrance Guardipee. Terrance Guardipee Blackfeet Ledger Artist: A Fusion of Tradition and Innovation. Profile article. https://alannalgreen.substack.com/p/terrance-guardipee-blackfeet-ledger
Texas Beyond History. Ledger Art spotlight. Texas Archeological Research Laboratory, University of Texas at Austin. https://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/spotlights/ledgerart/ledger-art.html
Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains. National Museum of the American Indian, online exhibition materials and teacher resources. https://americanindian.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/item?id=1005
Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. University of Nebraska Press, 1999. https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9780803296213/manifest-manners
Zotom. Zotom Sketchbook. Fort Marion and Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Plains Indian Ledger Art Digital Project and Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center. https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/additional-resources/zotom-sketchbook-plains-indian-ledger-art-project
HI. This is an exquisite article. MARKUS RAY here. Been painting for 50 years. Cleveland Institute of Art and Tyler School of Art my alma maters. MFA from Tyler '82 www.markusray.com My articles on ART here: https://markusray.com/art-look/ Write me if you care to: markus@markusray.com Keep up the good work with your ART PASSION.