Wall of Art West Franklin High School Ks Art

American painter

Franklin Gritts, as well known as Oau Nah Jusah, or They Have Returned, (August 8, 1915 – November 8, 1996) was a Cherokee creative person best known for his contributions to the "Gold Era" of Native American art, both equally a instructor and an artist.

During World War II, he served on the USSFranklin(CV-13), the about damaged ship in the history of the U.S. Navy to return to port. He survived a devastating assail on March 19, 1945, simply suffered injuries, earning the Majestic Center.

Later in life, he worked every bit the art managing director for the Sporting News, the "Bible of Baseball game."

Early life [edit]

Franklin Gritts at the historic period of five years

Gritts was born in Vian, Oklahoma, in 1915. His father, George Gritts, a full-claret Cherokee whose name is on the Dawes Roll, was a traditionalist and attended Cherokee religious ceremonies in the Cookson Hills . His female parent was Rachel Gritts (née Duck), a full-blood Cherokee who is also listed in the Dawes Roll. George'due south male parent, Anderson (A.W.) Gritts, was an officer of the Eastern Emigrant and Western Cherokee Association and supported lobbying efforts in Washington D.C. for the Cherokees regarding land and oil rights early on in the 20th century. This clan was a divergent of the Original Keetoowah Society, a religious and cultural traditionist group with roots going back to the 1850s. The Eastern Emigrant and Western Cherokee Association held one of its meetings at George Gritts' farm over several days in August 1920, with people arriving on foot, horseback, in wagons, and a few in cars. They gear up a camp in his fields. Gritts' first memory is of this effect as he thought all these people had come up for his fifth birthday on August 8.

Rachel and George were not eager to send their but child to school in Vian, as they had lost several children through miscarriages and early childhood death. They kept Gritts at home until he was eight years old. Schoolhouse authorities finally insisted that he nourish schoolhouse and his parents reluctantly agreed. Although he could speak niggling English and was older than the other first-graders, he loved schoolhouse from the beginning. Thanks to capable and caring teachers, he was able to catch up with his age grouping after a couple of years. The bulk of the students were non-Indian just they quickly made friends with the shy newcomer. Gritts showed an early on talent for art and this ability added to his popularity. By the time he reached high school, Gritts was active in sports and had bridged the gap between his abode and his school life.

College [edit]

Senior class Vian Loftier School (Gritts is fourth from left, back row)

When Gritts was a loftier school senior, officials from the Agency of Indian Affairs interviewed him and offered to recommend him to Bacone College, at that time a Baptist inferior college for qualified Indian students located in nearby Muskogee, Oklahoma. He readily accepted and spent ii years at Bacone Higher, where Indian art was an important role of the curriculum. He advanced so well in his artwork and other studies that the Bureau of Indian Affairs offered him a loan to attend the University of Oklahoma at Norman, Oklahoma. This was a big bound to contemplate, from being function of a modest, comfy college close to home to tackling the huge and overwhelming land academy. He did not hesitate, yet, because he realized what a great opportunity it was. The country was in the grip of the Great Depression and money was very scarce, almost not-existent in rural Oklahoma. He could never take aspired to enroll at the university without the government loan and the encouragement of the recruiters from the Indian Service.

The dean of the School of Fine Arts at the university, Dr. O. B. Jacobson, was a Swedish human being who appreciated Indian art and valued his students of Indian descent. Nevertheless, he held them to the high standards of the Fine Arts curriculum and granted them no special concessions. He encouraged them to develop their Indian art as an contained consignment. Thus, Gritts took portrait painting, figure painting, art appreciation and other facets of fine art as well as the required general courses.

Teaching [edit]

Upon his graduation, Gritts was offered a education position at the Fort Sill Indian School in Anadarko, Oklahoma. Later on a year there, he transferred to Haskell Constitute in Lawrence, Kansas, where he taught Indian art in the loftier school and two-twelvemonth postal service-high schoolhouse divisions. This was quite an advancement for Gritts, as Haskell was the premier Indian school in the nation, drawing students from many different tribes and from almost every state. He had small classes and was able to give individual attention to his students. In June 1940, he married Geraldine Monroe whom he had met every bit a student at the University of Oklahoma. Forth with teaching, he too painted murals in various buildings on the campus. He was commissioned to practice an oil portrait of Peter Graves, a noted Chippewa main, to be placed in a Navy ship.

Globe War Ii [edit]

This tranquil office of his career did not last long. The U.s. entered World War II and in 1943 Gritts left sheltered campus life, entered the Navy, and experienced a whole new world. Commencement, he was sent to the great inland training base at Farragut, Idaho, for rigorous bones training and so to Pensacola, Florida, for aerial photography school, a fascinating new field for him, but i that separated him from his Indian art. Never again did he pursue Indian art as a total-time occupation in spite of his recognized talent in this area.

Afterwards Pensacola, he was assigned to the USSFranklin(CV-13), an aircraft carrier operating in the Pacific theater of the war. He boarded ship at Oakland, California, and it slowly fabricated its manner toward the shore of Japan. En route, he took pictures and developed them in the darkroom. He too did occasional artwork such as lettering, illustrations, sign painting and airbrush work.

The USS Franklin served at the Bonin and Mariana Islands; Peleliu; and Leyte. So on March 19, 1945, l miles off the shore of Japan, the ship was preparing for the assail on the Japanese homeland. The deck was covered with fully fueled shipping and the already bombs loaded on them. Of a sudden, a Japanese plane appeared and dropped ii bombs. One bomb struck the flying deck centerline, penetrating to the hangar deck, effecting destruction and igniting fires through the second and third decks, and knocking out the Combat Data Centre and air plot. The second hit aft, trigger-happy through ii decks.

798 sailors and Marines were killed. It was the worst disaster the U.S. Navy had e'er sustained. Miraculously, the send did not sink, although information technology was heavily damaged and thought to be destroyed. Because of its service in the previous "hot spots" and this set on, the crew of the USS Franklin became the most busy coiffure in the history of the Usa Navy.

Gritts was in a passageway near the deck when the ship was hit and was wounded in the left leg and foot past shrapnel. He managed to climb out of a porthole into the sea beneath and was picked up past a life raft of other survivors. They spent a cold night on the raft, globe-trotting away from the stricken ship and, every bit the lord's day set, saw information technology disappear on the horizon, listing desperately. Soon after daylight, they were rescued by a destroyer and Gritts received some basic get-go assistance. He also began his long "hitch-hike" across the Pacific, existence transferred to whatever ship heading home to the Us. Unfortunately, some of these ships were ordered dorsum into the fighting zone and he had to be re-routed when a ship going out of the area appeared.

His transfers from transport to ship on the turbulent seas were accomplished past heavy cablevision anchored on each ship. His stretcher was attached to the cables and he was pulled over the water. Finally arriving in Hawaii, Gritts was able to call dwelling but equally the news of the Franklin disaster was appear, afterward a long period of censorship. In Hawaii, he received his first all-encompassing medical treatment, which revealed that an infection had set in the tibia bone of his left leg, and he had lost a toe on that foot. After a couple of weeks, he prepare sail again, this time on a infirmary ship headed for Oakland, where he was transferred to a infirmary train for Farragut, Idaho, the preparation camp which had been turned into a hospital. He was a patient in this infirmary for more a year, during which fourth dimension the war ended.

Gritts faced more medical handling at the Great Lakes Infirmary in Chicago as the infection in the tibia continued to drain and would non heal. To pass the time during his hospital stay, he developed a style of modern illustration and cartoons for the entertainment of his swain patients. Some of his piece of work was published in service publications.

Upon his recovery and release from Nifty Lakes, he returned to Haskell in 1947. He was released from service on September xix, 1947, afterward it was accounted he had recovered enough from his wounds. The nation was however in the procedure of rebuilding afterward WWII, when home structure and civilian manufacturing had been converted to the production of war materials of all kinds. The waves of returning veterans were existence retrained for civilian life, many of them attending college nether the G.I. Bill.

Return to teaching [edit]

At Haskell, the temper was charged with the excitement of the times. The traditional Academic Department remained much the same, merely the Business and Vocational Departments were responding to the demands of the modernistic world. The Indian students flocking in from around the nation needed to "Learn to Earn."

Gritts could see the need for commercial art training for talented students and transformed his classes appropriately. He did, however, continue to help and encourage serious students of Indian fine art to pursue this interest. He also connected his own passion for photography. With no blueprint to follow, he developed a commercial art curriculum. He spent one summertime at the Art Establish of Chicago and took subsequently-school classes at the University of Kansas to attain country teaching certification. Haskell was upgrading its status to go a fellow member of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.

One of Gritts' students later on the war was Adam Fortunate Hawkeye Nordwall. He said it was a turning signal when Gritts returned subsequently the war and began teaching commercial art. Adam Fortunate Eagle was able to find employment as a commercial creative person with the skills he learned at Haskel. Years later in 1968, Adam Fortunate Hawkeye was named by the FBI as the master organizer of the Indian occupation of Alcatraz afterward it ceased existence used as a prison by the federal regime.

Sporting News [edit]

Afterwards five years at Haskell, Gritts decided to attempt his own hand at commercial art. Housing was tight on campus, where employees were required to alive, and he felt the possibilities inadequate for his growing family unit which would somewhen include a girl, Dara Stillman, and two sons, Bob Gritts and Galen Gritts. He resigned his position and moved his family to St. Louis, Missouri. He answered a newspaper advertisement for the position of fine art director of The Sporting News in 1955.

Established in 1886, The Sporting News was a newspaper distributed nationwide and was the outstanding baseball weekly of enthusiastic fans. Full of baseball news, stories, and statistics, it became known as the "Baseball game Bible." Information technology was still going strong in 1955 and had added a monthly magazine, The Sporting Goods Dealer, a glossy, full-colour trade magazine for sporting goods stores carrying many lucrative ads.

Gritts' work on the paper involved pasting upward articles, photographs and ads for each page, and original artwork on the front page. The weekly deadlines were crucial, but he always managed to get the newspaper out on fourth dimension. He also prepared The Sporting Goods Dealer for publication each calendar month.

He died in November 1996 and is cached at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery.

Legacy [edit]

Among others, Starting time Lady Eleanor Roosevelt bought i of Gritts' paintings. Gritts' art is displayed at the Gilcrease Museum and the Philbrook Museum of Fine art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Information technology is likewise in the collection of at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Academy of Oklahoma, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma Metropolis, and the Muskogee Public Library, Muskogee, Oklahoma.

Gritts painted a large mural on iv walls gracing the archway to the auditorium at Haskell Indian Nations University. His oil painting of the dandy Sequoyah, who invented the Cherokee syllabary, is located there as well. The appreciation of Native American art which Gritts help to establish continues at Haskell to this day. Currently, Haskell Indian Art Market, a festival of 2 days, draws 30,000 people.

He illustrated the back comprehend of Grant Foreman's The Five Civilized Tribes: a Brief History and a Century of Progress, published in 1948. Some of Gritts' work resides in private collections. The Cherokee, A New Truthful Book, by Emilie U. Lepthien, published in 1985, calls Gritts a famous Cherokee.

His 1950, "Stomp Trip the light fantastic" was included in C. Szwedzicki's "The North American Indian Works" which is a drove of 364 images and six texts. Between 1929 and 1952 C. Szwedzicki, a publisher in Nice, French republic, produced half-dozen portfolios of Northward American Indian fine art. The publications were edited by American scholars Oscar Brousse Jacobson, Hartley Burr Alexander and Kenneth Milton Chapman. Many of the images were published equally pochoir prints which are similar in appearance to silk screen prints. These works represent original works by 20th Century American Indian artists.

In 2009, Gritts' Indian Adult female Grinding Corn (1936, Tempera, Courtesy of Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma: Museum purchase, 1937) was on brandish in Cotonou, Republic of benin in West Africa as office of the program Art in Embassies. For 5 decades, Art in Embassies (AIE) has played a leading role in U.Due south. public diplomacy through a focused mission of vital cross-cultural dialogue and understanding through the visual arts and dynamic artist exchange.

External links [edit]

• Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art
• Touring the Cherokee Nation
• The Artists' Bluebook
• Kansas Murals
• Life on the Kaw
• Studies in American Indian
• Haskell Cultural Middle and Museum
• Arthur and Shifra Silberman Art Collection
• Paths to Museums
• Oklahoma Today
• Native American painting ^{[ permanent expressionless link ]}
• Haskell Indian Fine art Market draws 30,000
• Indians in the War, 1945
• USS Franklin
• Fortunate Hawkeye

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Gritts

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