VALJEAN HESSING

- VALJEAN HESSING -

Choctaw, 1934-2006

Valjean McCarty Hessing was a Choctaw painter whose work became an important contribution to the twentieth-century Native American art movement associated with the Bacone or “flatstyle” tradition. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Hessing received an early scholarship to study at the Philbrook Art Center and later attended Mary Hardin–Baylor College and the University of Tulsa. She returned seriously to painting in the 1960s, working primarily in gouache and watercolor to depict Choctaw history, legends, ceremonies, and everyday life. Her carefully rendered, narrative compositions combined the flat, outlined forms of the Bacone tradition with a strong interest in cultural and historical detail. As a Native woman artist working in a field largely dominated by men, Hessing helped broaden the visibility of women within the Native American painting movement.

Hessing exhibited widely and received significant recognition throughout her career. Her early exhibitions included the Scottsdale National Indian Art Exhibition, the U.S. Department of the Interior Art Exhibition in Washington, D.C., and the Philbrook Indian Annual. She received major awards at the Scottsdale Exhibition and from the Five Civilized Tribes Museum, which named her a Master Artist in 1976. The Heard Museum presented an exhibition of her work with her sister, Jane McCarty Mauldin, in 1972, and the Philbrook mounted a solo exhibition in 1973. Hessing also received the Heard Museum’s Popovi Da Memorial and later participated in exhibitions at the Millicent Rogers Museum and Gilcrease Museum, including the 1995 Native American Invitational and Master’s Exhibition.

Hessing’s paintings are held in the collections of numerous prominent institutions, including the Heard Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art, Southern Plains Indian Museum, Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. The Philbrook holds her Choctaw Removal (c. 1966), while the National Museum of the American Indian collection includes Another Damned Government Paper (1976). Her work was also featured in the 2008 exhibition Valjean McCarty Hessing Honored at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Through her commitment to Choctaw subject matter and the Bacone painting tradition, Hessing helped preserve and advance a distinctive form of Native American art while establishing an important presence for Native women artists of her generation.