Virginia Stroud

Prints by Virginia Stroud

"I paint for my people. Art is a way for our culture to survive...perhaps the only way. More than anything, I want to become an orator, to share with others the oldest of Indian traditions. I want people to look back at my work just like today we're looking back at the ledger drawings and seeing how it was then. I'm working one hundred years in front of those people and saying 'this is how we still do it...we still have our traditions.'"

Ledger art is traditionally a male American Indian pictographic art form, and historically has been characterized as such by researchers. Chronologically its stylistic development belongs to the the Proto-Modern era of the Native American Fine Arts Movement and was a major influence, through trade routes and the patronage of white art collectors, on Modern Indian Art as its elements diffused to the schools of New Mexico, Oklahoma, and the Northwest Coast. Its more explicit expression, however, yielded to the styles that developed in these schools and culminated in the early 1960's during a period of the Movement referred to as the First Generation Modernists. Only recently have the researchers of Ledger art recognized Virginia Stroud as the Native American Woman artist who, as a Second Generation Modernist and a member of the so-called "New Indian Art Movement", revitalized a traditionally male form of art expression with her pictographic images in the late 1960's to the early 1980's.

Stroud has experienced a transitional phase in her stylistic development which progressed from the traditional earthy pictorial images of the early eighties to a more brilliant color schema that focuses on the roles of women and children in Native American culture, centering on the preservation of a lifestyle across generations. This transitional phase strongly coincides with the chronological division of the Second Generation Modernists stage of the Native American Fine Arts Movement, and the Post-modern or Contemporary stage. However one wishes to define this Post-modern stage, Stroud's contemporary work displays a bold sense of color, combining the elements of the prior generations of Modernists, retaining its traditional style.

Virginia Stroud has established herself as a leading contemporary Native American woman artist and has compiled an impressive record in the process, being the recipient of many awards. Full Biography

Montana Spring

Hand pulled original stone lithograph. Image size 29.75" x 20.75"
Ltd. Ed. 100
Arches paper, never framed, mint condition, signed and numbered by the artist
$300.00
Peaceful Interlude