Long before the AMAM was founded, many individual works of art and entire collections were given to Oberlin College to support its educational goals. In 1904, Helen Finney Cox (OC 1846) gave the Oberlin fifty-seven ledger drawings by the 19th-century Plains Indian warrior-artist Howling Wolf. Six of these works are on view in the exhibition “A Museum for Oberlin” currently display in the museum’s second floor Ripin Print Gallery. This exhibition focuses on major milestones in the development of the AMAM collection, and over the next few weeks we will highlight works from this show.
Called “ledger” drawings because they were made on ledger paper used by accountants, Howling Wolf’s drawings offer a powerful visual record of the life of the artist’s Southern Cheyenne people, as well as an autobiographic documentation of his heroic deeds.
