Untutored, brilliant Native artists of hide paintings,
[INADUDIBLE] and also those brilliant ledger art paintings.
First in Fort Marion, Florida, where so many distinguished
native political resistance groups were
sent as political prisoners were introduced
to colored pencils, and government ledger books,
and to draw.
You see in all those drawings of visionary art,
not a representation of culture, of visionary art.
The horses are soaring, and there
are multiple colors, what kind of representation is that?
A visionary representation.
Of course, they become very valuable now.
And at the same time, these untutored visionary artists
were drawing multiple colored horses soaring in space,
Marc Chagall was painting and drawing
figures soaring in space at about the same time.
He did it in Vitebsk on the Pale of Settlement in Russia.
The political prisoners at Fort Marion
did it to sell to tourists on the weekend.
Franz Marc a German painter, I thought at first,
he might have been inspired by Native visionary painters
because their work was shown in Paris
in the early part of the 1900s, not so.
Marc Chagall said he was inspired by Franz--
I'm sorry, Franz Marc, who was inspired by Marc Chagall.
Marc Chagall was untutored, this was a visionary art.
And throughout his life, he painted by vision,
not by representation.
This painting comes out of the "Blue horses."
I'm sorry, this painting, this poem.
Painted horses, prison riders by morning,
blue in the canyon's green and brown, Western posts
forever mounted in ledger art.
Migrant traders wait in silence.
Common wares, tin and China.
By manners parasols and shoots, and by resistance, the colors
fade.
Prison riders crowned by museums, all the world curators
envy the race, primitive art and Native liberty.
Ledger mounts blue horses ride again
with Franz Marc, Chagall, Kandinsky, and Quick-to-See,
Jaune Quick-to-See.