Young artist continues family tradition

MUSKOGEE, Okla. – Not all the facts are clear to him, such as when he first took up clay and molded it into small shapes. But even if 18-year-old Lisan Tiger Blair can’t remember making dinosaurs out of Play-Doh, his mom does.

“The boy was making stuff with Play-Doh before he could talk,” says artist Dana Tiger. “Both my kids, they talked late, they didn’t talk early. They’d say a huge word and they wouldn’t say it again … We were out in the country and they were playing in the streams, hanging out with snakes, bringing snakes into the house. They were just all about nature.”

The renowned Mvskoke, Seminole and Cherokee artist thinks it was that upbringing and inherent talent that helped her son win big at the Oklahoma Regional Scholastic Art Awards. The awards were given at a ceremony on Feb. 8 at the Tulsa Community College Center for Creativity in downtown Tulsa. Tiger Blair won two Gold Key Individual Awards - one each for his clay pieces, Reaching Out and Little Jack. Two other pieces earned the Silver Key Individual Award (Survival) and an Honorable Mention Individual Award (Ravenmocker). He also took a Silver Key Portfolio Award.

Chances are that Tiger Blair will remember this accomplishment – his Gold Key Award-winning pieces will advance him to the national level of competition with other regional key holders for awards and scholarships. The national adjudication will begin in late February, and winners will be announced in March.

He isn’t surprised that his work did well, but we was surprised at how well.

“I didn’t know I’d win silver and gold, and I didn’t even know I got the top five award,” he said.

Along with his key awards, Tiger Blair was named one of five American Vision Award nominees for the sculpture Little Jack.

The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards is a program recognizing creativity among youth all over the country, Canada and U.S. territories. Created in 1923, the awards are given to teens for exceptional artistic and literary talent based on the values of originality, technical skill and the presence of a personal vision or voice. Past recipients include Robert Redford, Richard Avedon, Ken Burns, Andy Warhol, Sylvia Plath, Joyce Carol Oates, Truman Capote and John Lithgow.

Working with 100 regional programs to reach into small towns and communities as well as metropolitan areas, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards received 230,000 original works submitted by teens in 2013. In the Oklahoma Region program alone, more than 1,300 individual entries and 91 art portfolios were adjudicated. The program is open to teens in grades 7-12.

This is Tiger Blair’s first time entering work into the prestigious contest, but he isn’t new to competition, and he certainly isn’t a novice when it comes to art.

As a child, he was either drawing dinosaurs in the margins of his homework or molding them. For one competition, he sculpted an uktena, a horned serpent monster from Cherokee folklore told of in scary stories around camp fires and gatherings. He won third place. In sixth grade, he entered two pieces – a stegosaurus and ceratosaurus – into the International Dinosaur Art Contest and Exhibit at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History in Norman. He took first place for his ceratosaurus, but it almost didn’t happen in spite of his mom’s efforts to help him.

“I drove it (the sculpture) up there in a snow storm to get it entered, made it – this was the worst thing I ever did, I think – and I get to the table and drop it on the floor,” his mother said.

Thanks to some glue and adept hands, the piece was repaired.

“That was his first first (place win),” she said.

“Was it?” he asked.

It wouldn’t be his last.

“We’ve got a box full of ribbons this boy has amassed, and they’re just crammed into a huge box, just stacked full,” Tiger said.

Tiger and her family divide their time between the Tiger Art Gallery in Muskogee and the rural family home east of town in the Cherokee Nation. They do a lot of work at the gallery. She and her son work on their art. Husband and father Donnie Blair, a craftsman, works on his frames and woodwork projects. Daughter Christie Tiger studies at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, N.M. However, the family’s legacy goes beyond their work today.

Tiger is the daughter of celebrated painter and sculptor Jerome Tiger. She learned by studying her father’s work and with the guidance of her uncle, Johnny Tiger Jr. Her grandfather, Johnny Tiger Sr., was also a sculptor and designed patterns for quilts. Her grandmother, Lucinda Tiger, who turns 92 in March, made the quilts.

Already a commissioned artist, Tiger Blair has work in the permanent collection at Muskogee’s Five Civilized Tribes Museum as well as work on display at the Oklahoma Supreme Court gallery. Last summer, he showed work at the National Museum of the American Indian and taught a sculpture class.

Does he feel the pressure or weight of the Tiger family legacy?

 “Not really,” he says, “… it’s inspiring.”

He plans to study art at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah after high school.

 

Lisan Tiger Blair, pictured at the Tiger Art Gallery in Muskogee with his mother, Dana Tiger, won two Gold Key Awards at the Oklahoma Regional Scholastic Art Awards in February.

PHOTO BY KAREN SHADE