Andrew Standing Soldier (19171967) was an Oglala Lakota artist from the United States, known for his depictions of contemporary Native American life. His often-humorous narratives appeared in murals, watercolors, paintings, and book illustrations.
Andrew Standing Soldier was born in 1917 in Hisle, South Dakota, a town on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Standing Soldier attended the Pine Ridge Boarding School and the Oglala Community High School, on the Reservation.[1] Encouraged by his teachers, he began to pursue mural painting during the summer of 1937, under artist Olaf (Olle) Nordmark, who was the federal artist-in-residence on the Reservation.[2] He also studied with Nordmark at the Indian Art Center in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1938. In 1939 Standing Soldier won fourth place in a poster design contest for a national exhibition of Indian art. He received a prize for one of his watercolors depicting Sioux fire starters, exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939 in San Francisco.[3] The exhibition was organized by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board of the US Department of Interior.[4]
Standing Soldier was one of the approximately 10,000 artists employed during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) Federal Art Project.[5] He was commissioned to create murals for several public buildings in Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Idaho. His murals like The Arrival Celebration and The Round-Up for the office in Blackfoot, Idaho depicted contemporary Shoshone-Bannock life. These 1939 murals showed Native American people integrating European-American influences into their lives, which was unusual for WPA murals representing Native Americans.[6] Standing Soldier completed additional public commissions such as the Post Office in Valentine, Nebraska. His mural for the High School Library in Fort Yates, North Dakota, the town that is the tribal headquarters for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, was commissioned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and depicted the legend of Standing Rock.[7]
While living on Pine Ridge Reservation, Standing Soldier continued to paint in watercolor. His also illustrated many children's primer books for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. These books, intended for use in Reservation schools, were either written in English, like The Slim Butte Raccoon,[8] or with English and a native language, such as Siouan or Navajo, like 1942's Singing Sioux Cowboy.[9]
In 1938 Standing Soldier married Lima Brown. In 1961 Standing Soldier, and his family moved to Gordon, Nebraska, where he met and became friends with Douglas Borman. He set up a studio in the showroom of Borman's auto dealership, where much of his work was purchased by Borman and displayed. Census records show Standing Soldier had several children, including Paul, Philip, Joseph, Mary, Peter, and Andrew Jr.[10] Andrew Standing Soldier died in 1967 in Omaha, Nebraska.