¡Colores!; One Who Stands In the Sun: The Art of T. C. Cannon

KNME-TV (Television station : Albuquerque, N.M.) · May 24, 1994

This ¡Colores! looks at the life and art of influential Native American painter T. C. Cannon who died tragically in an auto accident just as he was becoming known as one of America's leading painters. Included are his writings and paintings, along with interviews of family, friends and teachers. In the late 1960's and the 1970's, T.C. Cannon a Caddo/Kiowa Indian from Oklahoma emerged as one of America's leading painters. In April of 1972, he and Fritz Scholder, his teacher from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, were featured in a two-man show called, Two American Painters at the Smithsonian Institution. This show signaled a dramatic and irrevocable change in the direction of American Indian Art. Cannon's work and life was one of being immersed in the culture around him and drawing on that culture as a source of inspiration for his painting. He was not self-conscious about his American Indian background. He did not feel compelled to paint traditional Kiowa/Caddo imagery. He painted the world he lived in, saying: "I dream of a great breadth of Indian art to develop that ranges through the whole region of our past, present and future... something that doesn't lack the ultimate power that we possess. I am tired of cartoon paintings, of Bambi-like deer reproduced over and over. From the poisons and passions of technology arises a great force with which we must deal as present-day painters. We are not prophets--we are potters, painters and sculptors dealing with and living in the later twentieth century!" (1975). Guests: Walter Cannon, Ishkoten Dougi (Student, Institute of American Indian Arts), Ben Shorty (Student, Institute of American Indian Arts), Lloyd New (President Emeritus, Institute of American Indian Arts), Doug Hyde (Class of 1966), Bob Harcourt (Mentor/Placement Director), Michael Lord (Guitar Instructor, Institute of American Indian Arts), Charles Dailey (Director Emeritus, Institute of American Indian Arts), Kirby Feathers, Barbara Warner, Manuelita Lovato.