John Hitchcock is a Wisconsin-based artist and musician of Comanche, Kiowa, and Northern European descent. Raised in Oklahoma on Comanche tribal lands, he draws on his personal history to create prints, drawings, and sculptures that fuse energetic abstraction with layered allusions to indigenous cultures. His exhibition is comprised of a new body of work that calls attention to the integral role of the horse among Native tribes of the Great Plains.   

The reverence the Plains Nations had for their horses is evident in the way they adorned them with painted symbols, beads harnesses and saddlecloths, and elaborately decorated masks. Hitchcock utilizes these traditional artistic expressions as a starting point for his decidedly contemporary adaptations of Indigenous horse masks, in addition to mixed media works on paper, and screenprinted trade and army blankets. The artist's material choices reflect culturally specific references. Cascading ribbons recall shawl fringe and ribbon shirts worn as powwow dance garments; vibrant sequences of dots allude to family beadwork stitched by Hitchcock's grandmother; Naugahyde fabric offers a modern alternative to buffalo hide; and army blankets serve as a haunting reminder of the smallpox-contaminated blankets that were used as a tool of genocide against Native people.

The depth of referential content is matched by the visual abundance of the artist's colorful mark-making, a celebratory aesthetic that speaks to Native American resilience and survival. "The artworks for Horse Songs were created to honor, remember, and respect the Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne people and their horses," states Hitchcock. "I wanted to revisit our history and untold tribal stories as a way to open up a doorway for others to learn about a lesser known but extremely vibrant horse culture."