Clara Williams Archilta (September 26, 1912–30 September 1994), was a

Kiowa Kiowa ( ) or Cáuigú () people are a Native Americans in the United States, Native American tribe and an Indigenous people of the Great Plains of the United States. They migrated southward from western Montana into the Rocky Mountains in Colora ...

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

Tonkawa The Tonkawa are a Native American tribe from Oklahoma and Texas. Their Tonkawa language, now extinct language, extinct, is a linguistic isolate. Today, Tonkawa people are enrolled in the Federally recognized tribes, federally recognized Tonkawa ...

painter and

beadwork Beadwork is the art or craft of attaching beads to one another by stringing them onto a thread or thin wire with a sewing or beading needle or sewing them to cloth. Beads are produced in a diverse range of materials, shapes, and sizes, and vary ...

er from Oklahoma. A self-taught artist with no formal art training, Archilta is known for her

watercolor painting Watercolor (American English) or watercolour (Commonwealth English; see spelling differences), also ''aquarelle'' (; from Italian diminutive of Latin 'water'), is a painting method"Watercolor may be as old as art itself, going back to the S ...

and her pictorial beadwork.

Personal life

Clara Williams was born in

Tonkawa, Oklahoma Tonkawa is a city in Kay County, Oklahoma, Kay County, Oklahoma, United States, along the Salt Fork Arkansas River. The population was 3,015 as of the 2020 United States census. History Named after the Tonkawa tribe, the city of Tonkawa was foun ...

. Her parents were David Williams (

) and Helen Tseeltsesah-Sunrise (Kiowa/Apache). Clara attended Boone School in

Apache, Oklahoma Apache is a town in Caddo County, Oklahoma, United States. The population was 1,444 at the 2010 census. History Before opening the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation on August 1, 1901, for unrestricted settlement by non-Indians, Land Lot ...

, followed by two years at the U.S. Chilocco Indian School, through the eighth grade. She married Ward Archilta and had six children between 1930 and 1949.

Art career

Her husband died in 1956, and Archilta began to paint the following year as a means to support her family. Despite a severely injured arm, she soon began to sell her work and make a name for herself. She was the first woman to exhibit a collection of paintings at the American Indian Exposition (

Anadarko, Oklahoma Anadarko is a city in and the county seat of Caddo County, Oklahoma, United States. The city is 50 miles (80.5 km) southwest of Oklahoma City. The population was 5,745 at the 2020 census. History Anadarko got its name when its post offic ...

). She also exhibited work at the

Philbrook Museum of Art Philbrook Museum of Art is an art museum with expansive formal gardens located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The museum, which opened in 1939, is located in a former 1920s villa, "Villa Philbrook", the home of Oklahoma oil pioneer Waite Phillips and his ...

. Her work has been in the collection of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Anadarko. Archilta was also the head woman dancer for the Apache Blackfeet Society. In the late 1950s, she painted a rare version of the Kiowa-Apache Blackfeet Dance. In the painting, the Manatidie dancers are depicted in an earlier version of the dance which was no longer performed after the early 20th century.

Death

She died in 1994 at the age of 82 in Apache, Oklahoma. Her funeral was held at the Apache Tribal Complex in Anadarko. She was buried at Memory Lane Cemetery.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Archilta, Clara 1912 births 1994 deaths 20th-century Native American artists 20th-century American women painters 20th-century American painters 20th-century indigenous painters of the Americas Kiowa women artists Apache people Tonkawa people Native American women painters Native American painters Native American beadworkers American beadworkers Painters from Oklahoma Native American people from Oklahoma Women beadworkers People from Kay County, Oklahoma People from Caddo County, Oklahoma Kiowa painters