B. 1946-1978 - T.C. Cannon -Innovator, commentator, poet, painter, musician, lover, friend, warrior, cowboy, Indian, American; artist T.C. Cannon was all of these and more. Born in an Oklahoma Indian hospital to a Caddo-French-Choctaw mother and Kiowa-Scotch-Irish father near the Kiowa ancestral sacred lands in the Wichita Mountains, Tommy Wayne "T.C." Cannon embodied the contradictory nature of life as a Native American in America from the moment he entered the world. T.C. was a minority in a mostly Anglo school and community in Oklahoma. When he went to the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe from 1964 to 1966.
In a sense, T.C.'s canon was a modern-day ledger book hearkening back to an earlier medium of Native American artistic expression. Cannon's contemporary ledger books also represented the meeting place between the artist's public and private lives. He sketched or wrote down ideas and images so as not to lose their immediacy, so arguably many of these works were for his eyes only. On the other hand, many of these sketches fostered larger, more important and complex works designed for exposure to a wider audience. In the end, one man's private musings told a public story.
This is why T.C.'s work still resonates more than twenty years after his death; the imagery is still fresh because it is personal. His work is a documentary of his life as an Indian, an American, and an artist in the 1960's and 1970's. Art is not separate from life in his world, it is his life and we see that with his notebooks, his personal canon. He translated his feelings to the page using both words and images, unafraid to expose his soul. He stands in the sun still.
