Family Pictures

“Sun Dancer,” watercolor by C.A. Sewar

By Olive L. Sullivan

 Part of the reason Angel and I decided to open a storefront for Sullivan Book Arts/Wyrd Hoard Letterpress and Photography is that we were outgrowing our houses. SBA started out in the back bedroom of my parents’ house, partly for me to have somewhere to work, and partly so I would have an excuse to check up on them every day. My dad was battling Alzheimer’s and my mom—well, she was battling my dad.

 When he died, my mom moved in with me and Angel and her family moved into my parents’ house. The bindery stayed, but bits and pieces made their way to my house, and she added more and more.

 One week, we decided to clean out the attic there so she would have somewhere to store her things. See, the house was a repository of history. My parents built in in 1965 when I was 5 years old, and I don’t think they ever threw anything away if it might have a scrap of value. I’m not sure they would qualify as hoarders, but they were certainly thrifty. And the house also contained the legacy of my two grandmothers, Olive K. Sullivan and Helen L. Larson. Olive’s legacy was mostly china and artwork.

 She had been an avid collector of art and artists since her girlhood, when her good friend Laura Gillespie decided she would become a famous artist. Mrs. Gillespie, as we kids knew her, is an example of my grandmother’s approach to collecting. She wasn’t worried about provenance and value so much as the emotional connection to the artist through the artwork. One of Mrs. Gillespie’s pieces is a pastel of the ocean near Galveston. They had lived there at the same time, and in spite of the hurricanes that eventually drove them home to Kansas, they loved the memories. Mrs. Gillespie wrote a note on the back of the pastel saying that my grandmother could pay her the value of the painting when she became famous. I don’t think Mrs. Gillespie ever did become famous, but her work was part of the artistic ambiance of my childhood.

 My grandmother also had a bridge group, not unusual for women her age. What was unusual is that several of the players were also members of a group called the Prairie Printmakers. This group included Birgir Sandzen, whose work can be seen at the Birgir Sandzen Memorial Gallery in Lindsborg, Kansas, as well as at the Pittsburg State University Alumni Center, PSU’s McCray Hall, and the Pittsburg Public Library. Each year the printmakers made a special gift print for Christmas, and my grandmother left several of those behind in our attic.

 C.A. Seward was also a member of the group. Known for his western art, he made prints and painted scenes of Native American life, including this one, Sun Dancer in Full Regalia, which hung in my parents’ bedroom.

 “Sun Dancer” was painted by Seward and given to another of the printmakers, Leo Courtney, who then gave it to my father, Frank Victor Sullivan, as a present for high school graduation in 1940. By then, Dad was a collector of Native American art because of his Explorer Boy Scout troop’s interest in what they called Indian dancing. The Seward painting joined a Hopi Kachin that his Scout master gave him, along with pottery, beadwork, and other artifacts he and my mother collected during their courtship and honeymoon in the Southwest. You can read more about my dad’s interest in Native American art and culture and how it affected my philosophy of life and art in my essay, “Souvenirs for My Father,” in The 105 Meadowlark Reader #2, available at 105 Meadowlark Reader.

 When I opened my Sullivan Book Arts storefront last June, these collections and treasures were heavy on my mind. The gallery would give us a venue for selling some of the art pieces that had intrinsic value, as opposed to purely sentimental interest. Angel claimed some of the less valuable pieces as examples of the printmaking art and hung them in her workroom in the new building. But the Seward painting caught the attention of Barbara Thompson, an expert on the Prairie Printmakers and the granddaughter of C.A. Seward.

 The sale of “Sun Dancer” is the first fruit of my gallery idea, and I love the fact that she is going to donate it to the museum of the University of Oklahoma, which already houses a collection of Seward’s paintings, photographs, and letters from the same period.

 I don’t plan to sell every item from Dad’s collection. Some things, like Dad’s turquoise ring (see my poem “Turquoise Ring” in my book Skiving Down the Bones (LINK), I will always keep and wear and treasure. My brother and children have also chosen their favorites to keep. My oldest son Jacob wants the giant Thunderbird drum head Dad’s Boy Scout troops used for their dances. It still hangs on the great room wall at my parents’ house—it’s too big to put anywhere else.

 But every now and then, the pressure will mount (I have to have room for my hat collection!), and something will have to go. Another piece of our heritage will make its way to the gallery. Though Dad’s collection may not make us rich or give him a lasting legacy in the big world, we have each chosen our favorite talismans to remember him by. The rest, I hope, will find their way to their destinies, just like “Sun Dancer,” which is going home.