"Allan Houser (1914-1994) was born near Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the first Chiricahua Apache born in freedom, his father having been imprisoned in Florida for twenty-seven years as a member of Geronimo's band of recalcitrant Apaches. A great-grandson of Mangas Coloradas, a legendary Chiricahua war-chief, Allan Hauser (originally Haozous) showed an early interest in art and left his father's Oklahoma farm in 1934 for the newly established Painting School at the Santa Fe Indian School. Along with the "Kiowa Five," the artists of the Dorothy Dunn School, as it was commonly known, largely defined the genre of "Traditional Indian Painting, but by 1938 Hauser felt limited by its conventions. He formed his own studio and with the advent of World War II moved to Los Angeles for war work.

In Los Angeles, Hauser encountered the sculpture of Brancusi, Arp, and Henry Moore, and in 1948 he sculpted "Comrade in Mourning," a memorial for the Native American war dead at the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. When the Institute of American Indian Arts was created in Santa Fe in 1962, he chaired the sculpture department, where he influenced a generation of artists and sculptors. Thirteen years later, he "retired" to concentrate on his sculpture, producing almost a thousand works in stone, wood, and bronze, with water being a recurrent theme, among others. By the time of his death in 1994, he and his art had been recognized and awarded throughout the world. A retrospective of his monumental sculptures will be at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City."