Born on the family farm near in Apache, Oklahoma, Allan Houser became one of the Southwest's most famous and financially successful twentieth-century sculptors, known for his abstract Indian subjects. In his book, Masters of American Sculptors, Donald Martin Reynolds referred to Houser, who was Chiricahua Apache, as the "patriarch of American Indian sculptors. . . .Through his prodigious output and a generation of students and followers, Houser has been a formidable force in shaping contemporary Indian sculpture". (205). In 1993, the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, opened a sculpture garden in his honor.

With close ties to Arizona, Houser was the grandson of the chief who served as Geroni...