Art from Fort Marion

The Silberman Collection

by Joyce M Szabo

During the 1870s, Cheyenne and Kiowa prisoners of war at Fort Marion, Florida, graphically recorded their responses to incarceration in drawings that conveyed both the present reality of imprisonment and nostalgic memories of home. Now a leading authority on American Indian drawings and paintings examines an important collection of these drawings to reveal how art blossomed at Fort Marion.

The Silberman Collection illustrates the artists’ fascination with the world outside the southern plains, their living conditions and survival strategies as prisoners, and their reminiscences of pre-reservation life. Joyce M. Szabo explains the significance of this preeminent collection, which focuses on seven of the prisoner-artists—most notably Zotom and Making Medicine. She also describes how Fort Marion art has been collected since the late 1870s and, in particular, Arthur and Shifra Silberman’s approaches to collecting. The book includes 120 striking color images.

208 pp ~ illustrated — ©2009