Dolores Purdy | Breaking Boundaries

Dolores Purdy’s use of bold colors and patterns gives a contemporary twist to traditional ledger art.

By Norman Kolpas

AT FIRST glance, a ledger drawing by Dolores Purdy may seem a natural descendant of the Native American art form first developed by Great Plains tribes in the later decades of the 19th century. That’s when Native Americans, exiled to reservations and deprived of the buffalo hides and natural pigments with which they traditionally depicted triumphant acts, began recording the events of their lives with black ink, colored pencils and watercolors on the paper pages of ledger books.

Yet, a Purdy creation like Y’ALL SEEN HARRY? gives ledger art an entirely present-day, wryly feminist spin that subtly deflates masculine bravura. Sure, she renders the trio of bison pursued by spear-wielding Native Americans on horseback using the mostly two-dimensional, almost symbolic approach seen in the works of Purdy’s forebears, with a simplified setting of Plains covered in merry tufts of green grass, backed by rolling tree-dotted hills. But that’s where the similarities end. A closer look reveals that one of the heads is turned directly toward the viewer with an expression of blank puzzlement, as is the face of the horse ridden by the rider behind him. Only then might an art lover of discernment and curiosity realize that a fourth horse—whose head, neck and shoulders are entering the composition from the right—has reins flying wildly above his head, free of guiding hands. Harry, it seems, has fallen off his steed. “I do have fun with it,” she laughs.

And the colors! Purdy decidedly does not deploy the muted tones of almost a century and a half ago. She renders one of her horses in light azure, and the three figures wear shirts in shades of hot pink, turquoise blue and sherbet orange. Add the overall brio of her composition, and it can seem at times as if she has breathed into the medium her own fresh, delightfully irreverent spirit. “Well, I do refer to it as ‘ledger-like,” she says, emphasizing that last word. “I’ve just taken it up a twist and made it my own.”

Purdy has long followed her own distinctive path, both in her art and in her life. A member the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, she was also “an Air Force brat,” born at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and moving with her family to wherever her father was stationed. “I went to 10 different grade schools just from kindergarten to sixth grade,” she says. “It was very difficult to make friends, and I spent a lot of time by myself or with my younger sister, Mary. But Mom was really good at making sure we had crayons and paper and would proudly display our work.” She was also an avid reader, and loved to illustrate the stories, “imagining what a scene would look like.” Her family also regularly visited their “giant extended family” back in Oklahoma, where she marveled at the ceremonial dances they attended.

In high school, Purdy was introduced to painting with watercolors, falling in love with the flow of the paint and the way colors blended on the paper. “It just gives you a sense of peace and quiet.” After graduating, however, she chose a more practical path, taking prerequisite courses for nursing during two years at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, before marrying and having two children. During those years, painting in watercolors continued to bring her solace. She says, “It was my creative outlet. I just really enjoyed the whole experimentation of mixing the colors and seeing what would happen. And, you know, you just get better and better.”

Around 1997, after Purdy’s youngest child had gone off to college, a gallery owner in Topeka saw her watercolors of animals and other subjects and offered to show them. “And it went very well,” she says matter-of-factly of her becoming a professional artist. Then, in 2007, while researching her family’s genealogy on Ancestry.com, she came across a reference to a book on the ledger art done at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, by 26 Cheyenne, Comanche and Kiowa peoples who were imprisoned there in the mid-1870s after fighting to defend their homelands and the last free herd of buffalo. Though none of those prisoners were her own ancestors, she recalls, “It was a moment of revelation. I became so interested in it that I continued to do as much research as I could.” Eventually, she contacted and gained the mentorship—and friendship—of ledger art scholars, including Ross Frank, Ph.D., of the Ethnic Studies Department at UC San Diego. “We’re very good friends now,” she says.

Soon, Purdy embarked on creating her own ledger art. She found an old receipt book in a Topeka antiques mall and, at first, tried her favorite medium of watercolors. “I was just playing around with it,” she says. “At first I tried watercolors, but the paper was so thin it buckled.” She switched to the colored pencils like those who were before her had used. But she had a whole box of Prismacolors at her disposal, whereas the original ledger artists “could do an entire scene with three or four colors,” using whatever they’d been given. Quickly, she “realized that what I was doing did not look like the old traditional pieces, which was fine, because I didn’t want to copy them. I wanted to have my own style.”

That style evolved through several key influences. As a child of the 1960s, she says, “I love retro pop art, the whole Peter Max, psychedelic thing. And it worked perfectly for what I was doing with ledger art.” Purdy has long been a fan of art deco and the Asian influences that inspired it, “and I love the colors of Asian textiles, too.” She diligently developed an approach to layering colored pencils on paper in ways that conjure the almost aqueous translucency of the watercolors she has long loved. “I learned so much about color theory just by playing and experimenting with watercolor,” she says of her efforts to achieve that kind of “stained-glass effect.”

All that hard work quickly reaped well-deserved rewards. Soon after moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2010, Purdy was accepted for the first time as an exhibitor in that year’s SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market, where she won a first-place prize, which in turn attracted galleries that wanted to represent her. And in 2013, her work was featured in the book Women and Ledger Art: Four Contemporary Native American Artists by Richard Pearce, now a professor emeritus at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Purdy has gone on to write extensively on ledger art and to lecture on it at such illustrious venues as the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

That institution also holds her work in its collection, as do other eminent venues including the White House; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas; the Tweed Museum in Duluth, Minnesota; UC San Diego; the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire; and Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. “Even the Tribal Chief of the Caddo Nation loved my work so much he bought a piece,” she adds. “He likes the whole idea of the humor.”

Simultaneously buoyed by such approbation and still forging new paths entirely her own, Purdy continues to create contemporary ledger art suffused with colorful, and sometimes sassy, joy. In its exuberant humanity, her ledger drawings become art to which anyone can relate, regardless of their heritage.

CADDO SISTERS, for example, portrays three siblings arrayed in the most cheerfully colored and patterned outfits amidst a profusion of flowers. WEDDING DAY celebrates a man and his bride embracing while joined by matching robes in shades of orange, purple, blue, turquoise and red, surrounded by a shower of bright purple blossoms. And COASTAL CRUISIN’ shows a quartet of young Native Americans—three on motorcycles, one behind the wheel of a pickup—literally heading coast to coast across a vintage map of the United States.

“I’m changing boundaries and trying to get people to understand that Native people are people, too,” Purdy says. “Women love to dress up in fancy clothes. And men love to ride their horses or their motorcycles and be macho. I’m just trying to be more inclusive with everyone.”

Norman Kolpas is a Los Angeles-based freelancer who writes for Mountain Living and Colorado Homes & Lifestyles as well as Southwest Art.

contact information
dolorespurdy.com

representation
The Howell Gallery, Oklahoma City, OK, howellgallery.com.
Red Cloud Indian Arts, St. Petersburg, FL, redcloudindianarts.com.
Raven Makes Gallery, Sisters, OR, ravenmakesgallery.com.
Heard Museum/Collectors Corner, Phoenix, AZ, heardmuseumshop.com.
Morning Star Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, morningstargallery.com.
Agua Caliente Cultural Museum Gallery, Palm Springs, CA, accmuseum.org.

upcoming shows
All Things Accounted For, Ledger Art, group show, Red Cloud Indian Arts, January 20.
Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market, March 2-3.
Spring Group Show, The Howell Gallery, TBD.
Santa Fe Indian Market, Santa Fe, NM, August 16-17.

This story appeared in the December 2023/January 2024 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.