A gem in the heart of the booming Horizons District, Exhibit C Gallery is serving up museum-quality exhibitions and a fresh rotation of contemporary First Americans artwork in a spacious, well-lit gallery space situated between the OKANA Resort and the First Americans Museum. Operated by the Chickasaw Nation, having outgrown its former location in Bricktown, Exhibit C is in the capable hands of Gallery Manager Kristen Gentry, herself a talented artist.
Exhibit C’s newest rotating exhibition, Records and Renderings, centers on 10 different artists who engage, adapt and expand on the historical First American artistic practice known as ledger art. Its origins, in part, were born of the ugly battles between U.S. government forces and the indigenous Southern Plains tribes such as the Cheyenne and Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche and Caddo in the mid-1870s in what would become western Oklahoma.
When dozens of male tribal members were imprisoned after their tribes were coerced onto government reservations, these former warriors were remarkably provided with reams of discarded ledger paper, often bound in thick volumes, and colored pencils, sometimes even watercolor paints, by their captors.
What emerged was an unusual new art form as these Plains tribal men depicted scenes from battles, hunting, important tribal events, and eventually scenes from everyday life. Paper was a new medium for these artists. Their style was flat, dynamic and narrative, rooted in hide paintings which would often appear on dwellings like tipis.
Hundreds of these ledgers were created as early as the 1830s, and the practice continued at Indian boarding schools up to the 1910s. They were often broken up after creation, with individual works being sold off and their collective stories disintegrated.
These days, contemporary First American artists from many tribes produce ledger art with great intentionality and stylistic variation. The vintage paper used is meaningful as an art matrix for materials like graphite, ink and paint to form the images, and furthermore the type of paper selected carries historical and conceptual meanings. Caddo artist Dolores Purdy, for example, works with hymnal pages specifically referencing the influence of Christian missionaries among both native and removed tribes in Oklahoma.
Dylan Cavin’s (Choctaw) work “OK Scissortail” superimposes a captivating image of a life-like scissortail flycatcher in flight against a background of puddled washes in blues and greens over an early map of the state from the Rand McNally Atlas. We can admire this familiar winged resident’s outsized claws, keen vision and unforgettable silhouette as an ancient inhabitant of this land. “The land these records describe is the same land my family occupied for generations,” Cavin explained, “That overlap—between colonial bureaucracy and Indigenous continuity—is where my work lives.”
Dustin Mater’s (Chickasaw) works like the diptych “Splendor & Escape” are vibrant colorful illustrations of tribal life at the time of first European contact, in colored pencil and ink over elegant handwritten ledger pages which the artist allows to bleed through the image.
Candace Shanholtzer (Choctaw) presents realistic colored pencil drawings of full-length profile portraits showing male and female dancers in full regalia over pages from a handwritten ledger. The semitransparent figures seem to materialize above the orderly handwritten columns as if to say, “We are still here and never stopped dancing.”
In a mash-up of ledger art meets mail art, Brent Learned (Cheyenne and Arapaho) stands out for his unprecedented use of dainty White House stationery envelopes which he animates in the traditional flat style. Lokosh (Chickasaw) only came to experimenting with ledger art during the pandemic. “I like the idea of indigenizing things from foreign sources—taking what was once not ours and making it something that reflects who we are as Indigenous people in 2026,” he explained.
George Levi (Cheyenne and Arapaho) holds down the old-school flat style of ledger art he learned from his parents and grandparents. His daughter Halcyon, however, is renewing the practice with scanned ledger pages, three-dimensional rendering and digital inkjet prints as in her “Thunder Bison.” It’s fascinating to see the intergenerational and intertribal interpretations of this rich practice well into this century.
Another original interpretation is the miniature work of Ronnie Morris (Cherokee), who recreates the linear and handwritten character of original ledger pages onto earring discs that he adorns with symbolic feathers or pendants.
There is much to ponder and appreciate in Records and Renderings. The small size of the work invites an intimacy to the layered imagery and tense storytelling. Until the world runs out of paper and colored pencils, ledger art shall continue its lively artistic legacy.
This article appears in Best of OKC Winners.