Give Me a Sign

In American Sign Language, that is!

Deaf Awareness Week, which begins today, honors the heritage and culture of those with hearing loss.

Joseph Henry Sharp suffered a childhood hearing loss, but that challenge did not keep him from succeeding as an artist. He studied at Cincinnati's McMicken School of Design and became a teacher at the Cincinnati Art Academy. Although he traveled and studied in Europe, Sharp is best known for his Western subjects, particularly Native Americans.

Sharp first traveled to southeastern Montana, home of the Northern Plains Indian tribes—the Crow, Cheyenne, Sioux, and Blackfoot—in 1889. The dress and hairstyles of these Blackfoot men, as well as the ceremony's accessories, reflect the artist's customary attentiveness to documentary detail. Using smoke as a cleansing agent to prepare magic fetishes, this solemn trio is engrossed in the therapeutic ritual's quiet drama.

This painting is part of our traveling exhibition, Lure of the West: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, opening at Huntington Library, Art Collection & Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, on October 2nd.

Source: Merry Foresta. Lure of the West: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured: Joseph Henry Sharp, 1859–1953, Making Sweet Grass Medicine, Blackfoot Ceremony, about 1920, oil, 30 x 36 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Victor Justice Evans.