Clifton DeSerca, a Sioux, lives and works in the modern world but has strong ties to the last days of the free-roaming horseback Native American of the plains. His great-grandfather was Black Elk, a Sioux holy man whose autobiography is considered one of the most important pieces of Native American literature. As a young man, Black Elk participated in the battle of the Little Big Horn. In his older years, he told his story to John G. Neihardt who translated it into the classic Black Elk Speaks. DeSerca serves his people by being involved in a reservation outreach program working with alcoholics. He is portrayed here wearing a Sioux headdress and a historic shirt from the trading-post period.

For James Bama, moving to Wyoming from New York City proved to be, perhaps, one of the finest career choices he ever made.“I paint people,” says Jim. “When I first moved out here, folks were still alive that lived here before Wyoming was even a state. The frontier was still alive. I would go to pow-wows, rodeos, the reservations and even rendezvous to seek these people out. No one was focusing then on painting real people as I did.”

Buffalo Bill is obviously a larger than life figure in Cody, WY and this painting is the result of re-enactor Charlie Evans from North Platte, NE appearing in a 4th of July parade. “Charlie was coming down the street and there was a group of children in front of me. He had stopped to say hello to them and they were just thrilled. The original Buffalo Bill probably did the exact thing on the same street 100 years before.”

Ask James Bama why he went into Western art and he will tell you quite plainly: he didn’t. “Norman Rockwell lived in New England and so he painted small town scenes and harbors. I happen to live out West, so I paint the Indians, ranchers and landscapes I see.” Bama’s portraits of today’s denizens of the West are thoroughly modern, but their occupations, dress and spirit echo those of their predecessors centuries ago.

More than any other animal, the buffalo embodies the rugged tenacity required to survive on the frontier.The day Bama encountered this buffalo, the snow was fourteen inches deep and the animal’s coat and hooves were crusted with ice, but still the animal ventured on.

James Bama met Henry Bright Wings during a medicine ceremony performed in the tepee of a Crow medicine man in Wyola, Montana. He was then 68. Bama liked his classic face, which he thought would have been appropriate on a buffalo nickel. When Bright Wings visited Old Trail Town in Cody, Wyoming several years later, Bama dressed him in historical costume including a pre-1900 headdress and a very old buffalo robe from the Old Trail Town Museum in Cody.

In earlier times the right to wear a headdress had to be earned, usually in battle. Today even women and children sometimes wear a showy nontraditional war bonnet for pow-wow dance parades and celebrations. Many men feel that their age is entitlement enough, but others will not wear a headdress because they do not consider it their proper. Bama met a Pine Ridge Reservation Indian who would not pose in a headdress even though he was 45 years old and certainly looked venerable enough.

During the Indian Wars of the post-Civil War years, Bright Wings’ people, the Crows, frequently allied themselves with the military against such traditional enemies as the Sioux and the Cheyenne. Crow scouts rode to their deaths with Custer.

To create the scene that would become Heading for Higher Ground, artist James Bama called upon his friend Jim Williams. Williams, says Bama, is a “real modern-day mountain man. He used to trap and he lived in the Southwest in a cave. He had an old-fashioned porcelain bathtub and all that you would expect. He’s a terrific guy.” With Williams signed on to model for the painting, they traveled to nearby Rimrock Dude Ranch to borrow a horse for the day.

James Bama’s portraits of the denizens of the Southwest are renowned for their touching combination of Old West valor and modern reality. With Heading for Higher Ground, Bama hearkens back to both a legendary time, and a time that could have been only yesterday.

Though Lloyd Chavez is a Mountain Ute, he poses here with traditional Shoshone Indian accoutrements. Artist James Bama found him to be a particularly striking model and painted him four times over the years, here with a sparrow hawk tied in his hair, a seashell necklace draped across his neck and a deerskin quiver slung across his back.

The animal hide stretched behind Chavez is covered in paintings depicting Indian dances, a buffalo hunt and a captured American flag. In the absence of a written language, such paintings recorded events in the life of an individual or family. Sometimes the paintings were done in calendar style, visually recounting the highlights of each passing year. The paintings often decorated a warrior’s tepee, so that all who passed could recognize the great deeds of the warrior within.

James Bama has derived a great deal of joy from the friendships he has developed with many of the Native American subjects of his portraits. Years ago, he discovered that on a personal level, they are often very different from the confrontational image they often project. For example, Wes Studi, a full-blooded Cherokee, established an impressive screen-acting career with his intense portrayals of a Pawnee war-party leader in Dances with Wolves and as the vengeful Magua in The Last of the Mohicans, yet Bama found him genial and obliging. During their visits to the Bama home, Studi and his children often spent happy hours playing basketball with the artist and his son. The cultural gap was bridgedas two fathers enjoyed time with their children.

Every rodeo begins with a grand entry as the contestants and other riders follow the flag bearers in a serpentine course across the arena. At a junior rodeo in Cody, artist James Bama spotted Kenny Claybaugh waiting for the grand entry and was struck by the colorful combination of the yellow slicker, American flag and the dark glasses. Regarded as one of the sport’s top pickup men, Claybaugh worked the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas, Nevada, among many others. It is the pickup man’s duty to rescue a rider from a pitching bronc after the required seconds have elapsed and the horn is blown to signal a completed ride. It is a highly responsible task demanding skill and nerve, as a misstep can result in a rider’s falling and perhaps being trampled or slammed against an ungiving fence.The pickup horse must also be well trained so that it does not fear moving in close to the bronc’s flying hoofs and does not shy away as pickup man and bronc rider reach for one another.