2006 Honored Artist

Harry Jackson

"My God, it means everything to me," he said.

Born April 18, 1924, in Chicago to an "unbelievable" family, Jackson fled his perilous upbringing at age fourteen for the cowboy life he had seen in a LIFE magazine photo essay of Meeteetse's Pitchfork Ranch by Charles Belden.

"The cow people, all the bovine people, but mostly the cowboys, the bed-rock cowboys, they helped me save my life—without question," Jackson says. "This is where I was finally born. My soul is here in Cody Country."

Jackson traces the influence of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center to his first year in Cody Country when he got to know Edward Grigware, an acclaimed painter and board member of the original Buffalo Bill Museum. "He got me the job of putting up the flag, and pulling it down, and cleaning up around the old log museum," Jackson said.

Down along the trail of his extraordinary life, Jackson served the Marine Corps in World War II, won an appointment as an official combat artist, and then moved to New York where he befriended Jackson Pollock and delved into Abstract Expressionism. His break with that movement in 1954 to study the European masters, dismayed the critics.

"When I was studying in Europe, I was looking at life-sized portraits of noblemen and kings and I said to myself, 'the cowboy is absolutely one hundred percent noble—as noble as any of those people—and I'm going to portray cowboys like that."

Back in Cody, community leader Effie Shaw asked the artist if he could paint a "big cowboy," and Jackson proceeded to create The Trail Driver in 1956, using his lifelong friend and fellow cowboy Cal Todd as his model. Jackson's donation of the seven-foot oil on canvas made it his first piece in the Historical Center's collection.

The influence of the Coe family, including Shaw's daughter Peg—the driving force behind the Historical Center—and her husband Henry deepened in the late 1950s when he befriended Henry's brother, the Hon. Robert Coe, a career diplomat and U.S. ambassador to Denmark. On behalf of the Coe Foundation, Robert Coe commissioned Jackson to create two heroic sequential paintings, Stampede (1960-66) and Range Burial (1960-63), now prominently displayed in the Whitney Gallery of Western Art.

The Historical Center also features Jackson's 1980 ten-foot Sacagawea Monumental Bronze. His 2006 entry in the Buffalo Bill Art Show, Sacajawea Modified II, painted, reveals the latest curve in the "full circle" of his evolution from abstract painting to realism and innovative combinations of both in his painted sculpture.

"The art world has never been able to fence me in," Jackson says. "They either treat me as a cowboy artist or an abstract expressionist and they say there's no way you can meld those polar opposites. It drives them nuts because they can't cookie-cutter me. It's taken me well into my eighty-second year for them to begin to say, 'We've got to accept this s.o.b. on his terms. He won't deal on our terms.' I guess, you ride your horse, and I'll ride mine."