♪♪ >>In 1936, a Washington State College fine arts professor, Worth Griffin, and his young colleague, Clyfford Still, went on a road trip through the scablands of Eastern Washington.

They crossed the mighty Columbia River and entered remote tribal land looking for a place to establish a summer art colony.

A place where artists would live and work among Native people, painting portraits of tribal leaders and their descendants.

( JEFF CREIGHTON) This is a real movement going on in the '30s with these colonies.

They were spreading all over like wildfire.

>>The small town of Nespelem, Washington, seemed the perfect location.

( MICHAEL HOLLOMAN)Nespelem was a long ways away from the rest of the world.

There was a big separation between the Native world and the Non-Native world.

>>It was the headquarters of the Colville Confederated Tribes; home to 12 tribes of Plateau Indians: including Chief Joseph's band of Nez Perce, Chief Moses' Sinkiuse, the Sanpoil, Nespelem, Okanogan, and Palouse.

Tribes that were rapidly diminishing in the 1930s and many feared were disappearing altogether.

( CREIGHTON )There were many who believed that the indigenous folks up there weren't going to be around much longer.

It was the whole idea of capturing these individuals for posterity, and that was their thinking at the time.

>>In 1937, Worth Griffin and Clyfford Still co-founded WSC's Nespelem Art Colony.

Over the course of four summers, artists painted hundreds of portraits and landscapes, recording a part of history that was largely unknown, helping to preserve Native American life and legendary leaders.

♪♪ Washington State College, now WSU, was founded in 1890 in Pullman, Washington.

Located on the Palouse in the heart of wheat country, WSC was a land-grant institution, focused primarily on agriculture and science.

Not exactly the center of the art world.

But that began to change.

In 1924, WSC President E.O.

Holland hired Worth Griffin, to run its fledgling Fine Arts Department.

(ANNA-MARIA SHANNON) We've always considered him kind of the father of the Fine Arts Department and the Museum of Art >>Worth D. Griffin was born in Sheridan, Indiana in 1892.

He'd studied commercial and fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago, and had worked at numerous magazines as an illustrator.

(train whistles) When Worth Griffin arrived in Pullman in 1924, WSC's Fine Art department was barely four years old.

There was only one other full time faculty member.

The struggling Fine Arts Department was stuck away in the basement of the old Science building.

The space was cramped, the lighting poor with few resources found in an art school at the time.

But, Griffin made the best of what he had.

They had this little department but there wasn't anybody who knew what to do with it, and they wanted it to grow into a Department of Fine Arts, so that's what he did.

>>Worth Griffin, like other American Artists during the Great Depression of the 1930s, had turned their backs on European Art.

Americana was now the popular subject.

(CREIGHTON) So there was a lot of turning their back on mainly art that came out of Paris, all of isms, realism, cubism, what have you, and focusing on their own backyard.

>>An art movement called the American Scene had moved to the forefront, which focused on anything American.

(HARDESTY) There was a real kind of emphasis on the portrayal of the everyday American, the everyday scene, ordinary people going about their lives.

Looking at the American Heartland as a way to kind of bolster reassurance during kind of a dark time, through the depression.

>>During the Great Depression, Federal programs were enacted to put people back to work, including artists.

(FAILING) To talk to students about this time they really can't quite believe it because it's a time when the federal government was paying artists to make art.

That visual artists were considered to be workers that were as important as other workers across the country.

( SHANNON) And there was this wonderful movement to support artists, and photographers and painters and craftsmen to get out there and explore their different creative functionalities and they did that on mass.

Art colonies blossomed across the country.

( CREIGHTON) This was a real movement going on in the '30s going on with these colonies, they were spreading all over like wildfire.

>>Their main goal was to capture the history and condition of the American people.

♪♪ In the 1930s, Worth Griffin seemed to be on the road as much as at the helm of the art department.

He'd traveled to Mexico, painting portraits and gathering artifacts to bolster a WSC permanent collection.

( SHANNON) So much of what he and President Holland wanted to do was to be able to bring great works of art together in a museum.

>>In 1935, the college commissioned Griffin to produce a series of portraits of Northwest pioneers known as the 'Empire Builders'.

( SHANNON) They were business men, bankers, large family farm holders, newspaper men.

>>Griffin traveled to offices, hotel rooms, and private clubs, often turning living rooms into art studios, to capture in oils such noted individuals as Frank T. Post, President of Washington Water Power Company, and Felix Warren, one of the last Oregon Trail stagecoach drivers.

(FITZSIMMONS) These older pioneers were disappearing, they were dying, and they would soon all be gone, and the things, how they looked and the things that they stood for would disappear with them.

( SHANNON) The 50 we have in our collection is just a small portion of what he actually created.

So I'm sure there's still some portraits out there, somebody's got something hanging over their fireplace, of grandpa, that was painted by Worth Griffin.

>>Griffin's work was bringing a new level of prestige to WSC's Fine Arts Department.

(Voice of Pres.

Holland) Dear Professor Griffin: Last Monday night I called Mr. George W. Dodds, managing Editor of the Spokesman-Review.

Mr. Dodds will be able to sit for his portrait Saturday morning, November 6, at nine o'clock.

Very sincerely yours, E.O.

Holland, President >>The WSC president extended Griffin's commission to include portraits of prominent Native Americans of the Inland Northwest.

(KATHLEEN FITZSIMMONS) He particularly wanted to paint the older natives, some of them were up in their 80s.

The Indians of that era lived a different type of life than the ones that were coming up.

Tuesday, June 16, 1936.

Consent was given upon the promise of a photo later.

So out to a cow-shed behind the home where we rigged up a bench and set to work.

Our model looked like and sat like Mandarin until about 2 o'clock, when he walked out on us to visit his fish trap.

I had finished a pencil note and a pastel sketch but Griff was caught at a critical point in his oil.

He finished it from memory however and we followed the little boy to his fish trap.

( SHANNON) ...well he would set up in a cow barn.

Wherever he could paint, he would paint.

( CREIGHTON) He seemed to have a great sensitivity for all of this.

I don't think Clifford Still, he appreciated it, but not in the same way that Worth Griffin did.

He wouldn't have spent all these years out in the middle of nowhere, chasing people down, and having them sit.

I mean he painted in pastures, he had people sit on horseback.

He had kind of a need to document this.

(KATHLEEN FITZSIMMONS) He would ask them questions and he'd get them talking about their life and the things that they'd done and the things that they'd seen.

And he enjoyed their stories and what they had done and seen and what had happened to them.

♪ flute plays ♪ >>Yellow Wolf, the noted Nez Perce Warrior, sat for Griffin during one of Griff's solo journey's through Indian country.

Yellow Wolf considered the war on his people to be unjust.

The Nez Perce tribes were not unified, he said, and that just because some of them had signed the thief treaty did not mean they spoke for everyone.

Robert Johnson posed in his everyday clothing for Griffin.

Johnson was but nine years old during the 1877 Nez Perce war.

This portrait of Agnus Andrews as a young teenager was painted by Griffin's in 1936.

Agnus was a descendant of Chief Joseph.

(PATRICIA FAILING) He made an effort to make sure that all his drawings were identified.

I mean he really thought about the individuality of the people that he was portraying and you know, little personality portraits in his diary of people.

So they weren't just types to him.

They weren't just one universal kind of field.

He really thought of these people as very distinct individuals.

>>In 1935, Griffin completed nearly fifty portraits of Native Americans across the Columbia Plateau, from Umatilla and the Snake River Valley area, north to the Colville Confederated Tribes in and around Nespelem.

(Hardestty) Beautiful Earrings, maybe shell, what do you think?

Today, the Empire Builders and Native American portraits are archived at WSU's Museum of Fine Art.

( SHANNON) Their real significance is the historical nature of the work.

Whether it's a business man or Native American from that time period.

Although Worth in his own words said, he never set out to document history, it ended up becoming that.

>>In 1991, the portraits caught the attention of Michael Holloman, a Colville Native and Art History scholar.

( HOLLOMAN) I walked into the museum and saw the paintings and was quite amazed that there's a series of paintings I knew nothing about.

Fascinated with the people because I knew who some of the people were.

I remember going back to the reservation and talking with my family and asking if they knew about these paintings and they didn't.

That really drew my interest about this series of paintings that were done at a particular time that most people really had not thought about or really no discussion of at all.

And I wanted to know why?

What had taken place?

>>To Holloman, the paintings captured a particular moment in time.

( HOLLOMAN) When we look back today we have a great ability to kind of contextualize them in that era, to recognize, now stepping back, what was happening culturally, what was happening historically, what was happening politically, socially, the transformation.

(voice of Still) Cezanne.

A Study in Evaluation.

By Clyfford E. Still.

1935.

For almost a third of a century Paul Cezanne has been the most influential figure in modern painting.

His letters alone have formed the technical basis of one great modern school.

He casually mentions geometric figures and another school is born.

>>In 1935, a talented young graduate student, Clyfford Still, was finishing his master's thesis on Cezanne.

Worth Griffin, seeing his talent, recruited Still to join his Art Department's faculty.

( SHANNON) He obviously saw potential in this young man.

There was no question that Clyfford Still had incredible skills as a painter.

>>Born in Grandin, North Dakota in 1904, Clyfford E. Still spent his childhood in Bow Island, Alberta and Spokane, Washington.

(PATRICIA FAILING) He grew up and went to school for a number of years of his life intermittently in Spokane, which was a large city at the time.

He was a much more kind of cosmopolitan young man than perhaps people who imagined the west coast as being so far from everything.

He got very interested in works of art by looking at books with reproductions, and then when he was a teenager he started to paint himself.

>>Still attended Spokane University graduating in 1933.

For the next eight years, he taught at Washington State College, while completing his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1935.

His break came in 1936 when he received an invitation to YADDO, an artist's think tank in Saratoga Springs, New York.

(CLIFFORD STILL) YADDO is 700 acres of magnificent woods, lovely lakes, cascades, terraces, All, however, dominated by a great and beautiful mansion where we are cared for like princes.

>>It was there Still got his feet wet with some of the art scene's most noted painters, writers and sculptors.

(STILL) There are 25 artists here but only five of us are painters.

The remainder are composers, writers and sculptors.

A most brilliant company.

I seem to be the only one who hasn't yet a national reputation.

You can well imagine my elation in the trust that has been place in me.

Sincerely yours, Clyfford E. Still.

Saratoga Springs, New York, 1934 >>Clyfford Still would eventually achieve the national reputation he desired.

In the 1940s, Still would become a famous Abstract Expressionist, on the level of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.

But while at WSC, Still's artistic style had not yet transformed into the abstract genre he later became known for.

He was a quiet, complex artist.

An intellectual.

Philosophical.

The artist's paints for himself, Still told his students, It is his own rigorous standard he must meet, not public taste.

♪ guitar (STILL) Dear Dean Kimbrough: During the summer of 1936, while Mr. Griffin and I were painting on the Indian reservations in the State of Washington, we were struck by the abundance of valuable and colorful material that is offered the creative worker.

We came to the conclusion that something should be done to bring this material more forcibly to the attention of the people of the state, and potential artists, in particular, in the way that is not possible in a class room at the state college >>In spring of 1937, the idea of an art colony in Indian country was pitched to the college.

( CREIGHTON) And I remember looking at a piece of correspondence saying, Look, we got to get on the ball and do this, or else somebody's going to come in from out of the region and do it for us.

(STILL) It is our belief that when the artists of the east and middle-west become fully aware of the extent and importance of the material, there will be an influx of painters into eastern Washington.

This has already happened on the Blackfeet and Flathead Indian reservations where the material is far less inspiring.

>>At the time, the people of the Columbia Plateau tribes of the Inland Northwest had largely been overlooked by historian and artists.

( HOLLOMAN) I think what was of interest here was it was of a particular place that maybe didn't always get a lot of attention, the Columbia River Plateau, the people of the Plateau.

♪ >>Nespelem fit the criteria for an Art Colony perfectly.

It was living history in their own backyard.

( CREIGHTON) What better place to do it?

In their minds looking at putting this into the proper context, historical context, there were many who believed that the indigenous folks up there weren't going to be around much longer.

In fact, the reservation would probably be gone within their life time.

So it was important for them to look in their own backyard, and you got this reservation up here with a dozen or more tribes, what better way to capture this history than the reservation.

(FAILING) Worth Griffin was very enthralled with the exotic view of the time of the vanishing people and he was very interesting in the old timers who seemed to be remnant of this past that was disappearing.

>>Griffin and Still were inspired by the thought of what an art colony could mean for the state college, and for Still at least, his career.

(STILL) We sincerely believe that such a project might form the nucleus of what could readily prove to be a vital, creative art movement in eastern Washington comparable to those which have developed in Kansas, Iowa, Texas, Oklahoma and many other places.

( FAILING) Undoubtedly he was inspired by the opportunities that these colonies provided for artists all over the country, and the idea that he and Worth Griffin might, might lead one, and it would be an opportunity for him to also work with other colleagues, and you know, maybe start a little nugget of something that would be significant on a national basis in eastern Washington.

( CREIGHTON) E.O.

Holland went for it and it would only add to the prestige of the art department and the school in general.

♪ native drums ♪ >>Nespelem was, and still is, located on the Colville Confederated Tribes reservation in north-central Washington.

It was originally twice as large as it is today.

The landscape and people are diverse.

To the south is the vast Columbia River canyon, rolling sage brush hills full of boulders the size of automobiles.

To the north are forested mountains and lakes of the Okanogan National Forest.

Indian tribes have inhabited this area for thousands of years.

When the Colville reservation was created in 1872, it was primarily the ancestral lands of the Sanpoil, Nespelem, and their culturally related neighbors.

With-in a few years, the once exiled Chief Joseph's band of Nez Perce, the Snake River Palouse, Moses-Columbia and other tribes were relocated to the reservation.

Today, the Colville Confederated Tribes is made up of 12 Plateau Indian tribes.

(PATRICIA FAILING) There were tribes that had lived in the area for centuries and then tribes that were moved to the reservation by the federal government who weren't part of the native history, and that's difficult enough, but some of them were tribes that had antagonisms with the tribes that were local, and particularly the Nez Perce people who came in.

So there were many histories that got crunched together in the same tribal arena.

>>Judge Jim James was the last hereditary chief on the Colville Reservation.

He was a Sanpoil.

The Nespelem area was his native homeland.

( HOLLOMAN) His relationship with the people was very profound.

My grandmother told me the story where we'd have the 4th of July Pow-Wow and just as the sun was coming up, he'd be on his horse in all his regalia, everything done perfectly, and he would ride around the circle of all the teepees.

She said as a young girl she remember poking her head out and seeing this gorgeous chief who they just all adored looking at her.

His duties were very significant at a cultural level but also ultimately at a political level they looked to him to make important decisions, hence Judge Jim James and so the importance and prominence of having this portrait I think Worth Griffin recognized that very much.

♪♪ (STIll) And so over the hills, on a not too good a road to Nespelem.

Interesting foothill country.

Buttes, sage brush and a gravel horizon from back a ways.

In the valley itself a large cluster of shacks.

Indian land--- deluxe--- without comfort but with atmosphere!

>>In 1937, the road to Nespelem was just a narrow gravel track along the Columbia River.

It was a long way to the rest of the world.

But that was rapidly changing.

♪ dramatic music (News Reel) Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State.

The world's biggest concrete structure.

Behind it is stored water from the mighty Columbia River.

Water to transform a million acres of waste land into productive farms.

>>Only 15 miles from Nespelem, the Grand Coulee Dam was under construction.

When finished, the monolithic dam would furnish an unlimited supply of hydroelectric power to the Northwest.

It also would devastate Salmon runs and a way of life for the Columbia Plateau tribes.

Essentially when they started to build Grand Coulee Dam there was a big separation between the Native world and the Non-Native world.

And now you have a bridge traversing the Columbia River instead of an old ferry that pulled on a cable.

For the first time people that were hired to work at the dam, from all over the United States, are getting a chance to go up to Nespelem, 15 miles away and see Native people >>The Nespelem Art Colony could not have happened at a more dynamic time.

The location was one of contrasts.

Native ancient cultures juxtaposed with the construction of Grand Coulee Dam.

( HOLLOMAN) So that dynamic, what was taking place between Coulee Dam and Nespelem was a real just hot bed of activity.

You have this initial idea of looking at a culture, a very old ancient culture, this kind of nostalgic idea of the Native people that are still there, right next to the construction of one of the most remarkable public works projects that was taking place during that time.

(DAVE FITZSIMMONS) And it just so happened, it was a coincidence that the Grand Coulee Dam was being built at the same time.

So they actually had many possibilities there of making art having to do with the construction of the dam, as well as the Indians and their culture.

Many of Griffins works that ended up with were actually just sketches of Indians doing dances like in a Pow-Wow and a variety of other activities.

You know, riding horses and making camps, cooking and all kinds of things.

And those are now at the Colville Tribal Museum up in Nespelem.

(Still) Interesting spot on bench before general store.

Men and Women in bright shirts and shawls gossip and rest there.

Horses, big drunks, the last-days history are chief topics.

This is a kind of no man's land, neither white nor Indian.

One is accepted 'til proved a rotter, a reversal of the usual custom.

No acquaintance is necessary to eat, dance or fight with your neighbor.

♪♪ >>The first eight week session of the Nespelem Art Colony started in the summer of 1937.

Griffin and Still had decided to admit only 20 artists.

It was by invitation only.

They wanted the best talent they could find.

All colonies wanted the best talent they could possibly get, which really never happened.

They ended up, at Nespelem specifically with, post graduate students, junior high and middle school, high school teachers, and just people that wanted to paint.

>>Griffin reported to Holland that they had, published a folder and sent it to 600 prospective students (CREIGHTON) These flyers went out before each colony year, these flyers went out all over the United States.

So, they did get people from as far as Boston.

>>Most of the students had never been on an Indian reservation before.

(CREIGHTON) So, I think a lot of them figured that, wow, you know we're really going into uncharted territory especially people from the east or Midwest, it was remote for them, some of these students have never laid eyes on an Indian before.

>>Both the students and instructors took up residence in and around Nespelem.

The students ended up living where ever they could find space: above the local drug store, in the old hotel or in vacant cabins across the reservation.

It was an art colony in the true sense of the word, producing a substantial amount of regional art.

(SHANNON) They painted an awful lot.

Very prolific.

Students and instructors put in exhaustive hours each day.

Their weekly schedule was rigorous: Three days on portrait work, two on landscape and weekends at Grand Coulee sketching with pencil and charcoal.

(CREIGHTON)They'd get up in the morning, 5:30, 6:00 in the morning, they had breakfast and then they would paint.

And they would paint, and they would paint.

They'd paint until 5:00 and then they would have dinner and then they would do whatever maintenance they did on their pallets and brushes and what have you, and then they stretched canvases until very very late at night.

And they'd repeat the same thing over and over again.

>>In her first summer, Student Anne Harder completed roughly 25 painting.

Glen West completed nearly 100 over four summers and Ruth Kelsey painted 50 paintings in her summers at the colony.

♪♪ (STILL) Damnable hard to work though, with a dozen kids and several townspeople around one constantly.

Especially hard when the kids got into fights and made the floor boards thump.

But a good day.

>>While painting, the artists drew a local crowd of curious spectators.

(HOLLOMAN) For them to get a chance to see people painting, a different kind of work where people are sitting, people that they might have known, watched out of interest and curiosity.

Not just because they'd never seen it, but they're artists themselves.

They have been doing the beading, they've been doing painting, they've been drawing; they've been doing these things for quite some time.

>>Not everyone on the reservation welcomed the students.

Many Native people kept their distance.

(CREIGHTON) Of course there were some that, would have nothing to do with these white students, these interlopers, you know.

Not a lot, but some.

Cleveland Kamiaken at first was very skeptical but sooner or later came around and became very friendly and invited them into his home.

But once they gelled and I think it took the first session to kind of break the ice.

From that point on they knew each other basically by the time the second session started.

>>Cleveland Kamiakin was the son of Chief Kamiakin, wrote Worth Griffin in his notes.

His mother was a Yakima Indian and his father was a Palouse Indian but related to the Yakimas.

Cleveland Kamiakin does not know his age, but he remembers the battle of White Bird and the various other battles which were fought during the Nez Perce war.

Distant at first, some close friendships did develop between the artists and their subjects.

Student Ruth Kelsey remembers, ( KELSEY JOURNAL) Our good relations with the tribal members was probably because of mutual admiration.

Chief Red Star allowed us to paint his portrait several times.

We would walk past his house on our way to class and often he or some members of his family were outdoors, so we had an opportunity to greet them or stop for a visit.

He and his family became good friends, although all of the Indians I met were friendly.

(CREIGHTON) You know some relationships formed over the course of five years.

You got to know families, some of the students stayed with these families, so it was just this feeling each other out, I mean it worked both ways.

(STILL) Our interpreter, a Yakima speaks the six languages of the district.

Moses, Nez Perce and Yakima being the most common.

Tents and small shacks are scattered here and there throughout the land but one can't think of them as houses.

To the Indian they are stopping places.

He lives outdoors.

♪♪ >>The portrait painting class took place in the school's old gymnasium.

Models could be hard to come by.

Griffin made early morning trips into the surrounding countryside to recruit tribal members to pose for the students.

Models sat for a full day for a reported sum of three to five dollars.

Agnes Andrews remembered sitting for the artists.

So, she described it.

And she had a picture.

They gave this to me.

This was painted way...and she talked about the art colony.

She didn't call it art colony she said those painter that came from WSU.

They came up here and they lived a while, and they had some of us dress up, and so that's what this is.

She said this isn't the only one, there are a number of those, your Grandpas in there.

Waka?

No Kolata.

He's in this.

It wasn't just three or four of us it was a whole group of people.

Yes, she talked about it.

>>The conditions on the reservation were rustic to say the least.

There was no indoor plumbing, limited electricity and no air conditioning.

(SHANNON) Oh my gosh, it must have been so hot.

Sometimes 30 probably 40 students all crammed into this space with easels and paint.

>>Even in those hot conditions, many of the models wore heavy buckskin regalia and Hudson Bay style blankets.

( ANDREWS RED STAR) You know the old people, they were hardy people, very hardy people.

Things that we look at as hardships now, for us, that are really inconveniences, was nothing to them.

They could sit for hours sometimes.

They could handle the heat they could handle the cold.

A lot of this stuff didn't come until I was 30, 40 years old when I became a little bit more conscious of things.

And how important it was to hold on to.

And now I'm trying to do what I can to pass it on to sons and my daughters, eventually to my grandchildren.

But I think it's important, I think it's important for them to see.

This is who they were.

>>Students, like Anne Harder, were moved by the Native people and their culture.

Auntie Ann really had an affinity for Native people, and the history of the Indians, and what they have lived through and she talked about their strong faces.

She was an artist so she really looked at peoples' faces at kind of at a deeper level.

>>Artist Vivian Kidwell was equally impressed.

(KATHLEEN FITZSIMMONS) She said how impressive some of the elderly men were.

Very chief-like you know, in that they were solemn, yet they could go out and find them just laughing and having a wonderful time outside, but they were really solemn when they sat.

(RONALDS) She loved being there for she got a real sense of how the Indians lived.

But it was a challenge to get the right view of who the person really was.

>>In July, the students got to watch the Nespelem Pow-wow.

CREIGHTON) It was something they had never seen before.

You know Pow-Wows today are year-round, all over.

But back in those days I think it was pretty rare for a bunch of white students from the university to be able to not only live up there but maybe take in a little bit more of the culture other than just sitting and painting people.

>>Descendants of the models still lived on the Colville reservation today.

Ernest Brooks' grandfather, George Nanamkin was the grandson of Chief Nanamkin.

(ERNEST BROOKS) Nanamkin is how it was originally said, now they just say Nanamkin.

Nanam means calm, but it means like real calm, because it's like a reduplications.

And Kin is talking about the head and that's how he was named.

Calm Head because in the battles...he was never injured, he was never taken as a prisoner of war.

>>Brooks's grandfather, George Nanamkin would serve as translator.

He would translate into English many of the native tongues.

(BROOKS) Everybody, probably from the Canadian Border all the way down into Oregon and into Montana knew my grandpa George.

He was a polyglot.

He could speak many languages, Nez Perce, Yakima, Palouse, and when people would come in to work at the BIA he would go translate for them.

There was a lot of people that still didn't just speak English, a lot of them still spoke only their languages.

So he would translate for the tribe.

>>Barbara Freidlander Aripa's people are descendants of Chief Moses.

Her great grandmother, Mary Owhi Moses, was the wife of Chief Moses.

It is said she lived to be a 118 years old.

(BARBARA FREIDLANDER ARIPA) She raised my grandma because my grandma's mother was massacred when she was just a little girl.

And Mary raised her.

She was Chief Moses wife, after he brought her here he made her his wife.

She did a lot of beading.

She beaded him seven Indian outfits.

Each day of the week he had a different outfit.

And Mary took care of my grandma and cooked for her, took her berry picking, root digging, made sure she learned all the Indians ways she was taught.

>>Worth Griffin made a note about her regalia: She has in her possession costumes and bead-work which have been given to her by her relatives and which are extremely old and represent some of the finest work of their kind in existence.

In this collection there are various corn-husk bonnets which are very rare, and some of these objects are hundreds of years old.

>>Leroy Williams's father, Charging Hog, was also painted at the colony.

(LEROY WILLIAMS) My father is a full-blooded Nez Perce out of the Chief Joseph band from Wallowa, Oregon.

My grandfather was a Tikahmook, No Leggings.

He took over a chieftainship after Chief Joseph died in 1904.

But my father was born in 1900, Elijah Williams- Charging Hog, up in the town of Nespelem.

They didn't have houses back in 1900, they all had their own teepees they preferred staying in their teepees, so that's where he was born.

He had a younger brother.

He used to tell us stories of both of them as young kids running down to the mouth of the Little Nespelem.

That's where they caught their first salmon.

A lot of these things my father taught us how to go hunting, how to prepare the deer, the elk, the moose, now, now that's what I do with my grandchildren.

I'm lucky to be blessed with five great grandchildren, so I've got a lot of work cut out for me.

♪♪ >>On the weekends, the artists traveled to Grand Coulee Dam to draw the progress of the construction.

It was called the eighth wonder of the world.

(CREIGHTON) On weekends, they would all pile in cars and go down to Grand Coulee Dam when the construction was going on and they would do charcoal work down there.

>>The students, like most people of the time, were caught up in the excitement of the dam's construction and the progress it would bring to the area.

Few thought of the impact the dam would have on the local tribes and their culture.

Native villages, sacred burial grounds and traditional fishing areas, like Kettle Falls, were flooded.

Without fish ladders the Salmon died, taking away the primary food source of the Native people.

The impact was devastating.

(FAILING) It's kind of ironic that all the people who were in the painting colony, a lot of them were interested in Grand Coulee as a subject.

And so their paintings are all quite idealistic and quite celebratory and it's not really clear whether they understood at all what the dam would have meant to the local people.

(GUEST) My Husband was a student of Washington State University, and he had an art professor by the name of Clyfford Still.

Then, as the years went by, he went on and got his doctorate and came back to Washington State.

And the chairman of his department, they owned the painting, they gave it to us as a housewarming.

(APPRAISER) Very generous of them.

Very Nice gift.

(GUEST) Yes it was, very nice indeed.

>>In 2008, a 1937 Clyfford Still oil painting of Grand Coulee Dam appeared on the Antiques Road Show television program.

(SHANNON) I was sitting in my kitchen because I love Antiques Road Show, and it came on and I went, Is that a Clyfford Still?

That's a Clyfford Still.

(APPRAISER) And this painting, as we can see down here, is signed and dated Clyfford '37, and the subject of the painting is?

(GUEST) Grand Coulee during the time they were building the dam.

It's a big dam in the state of Washington.

(APPRAISER) Which of course is near Spokane where he grew up and studied and graduated.

He's best known as one of the founders of the Abstract Impressionist movement.

Dave Fitzsimmons, cousin by marriage to Worth Griffin, also saw the broadcast.

He recognized the similarity between Griffin and Still's work.

(DAVE FITZSIMMONS) I happened to be watching when it came on.

And it just hit me when they showed that picture, they didn't have to say anything else.

I said, My God that looks like Worth Griffin's work, you know.

And then I listened and the lady talked and, yeah, it was WSU and bla bla, you know I never even heard of Clyfford Still at that point.

>>Fitzsimmons had recently inherited a portfolio of Worth Griffin's work.

(DAVE FITZSIMMONS) My mother was cleaning the old house on the farm and it was either take it or throw it away.

And I didn't want these things thrown away, and nobody even knew what was in them.

There was a lot of them that were just folded up in portfolios, and we hadn't looked through them or anything, so.

I brought them home and started looking through them >>Some of the drawings were portraits of people Dave didn't know.

(DAVE FITZSIMMONS) Well there's a wild chance this could be Clyfford Still.

So I googled him and got a picture to come up, and by God, it was him.

I was amazed that it was, but it was.

To my knowledge Worth Griffin is the only other person who's ever allowed to make a portrait of Clyfford Still.

(APPRAISER) Well, I really feel that given the importance of the artist, giving the importance of this painting, I believe this shouldn't be insured for anything less than a half a million dollars (GUEST) Really?

(APPRAISER) Yes.

We have to put that into context.

Bear in mind that a painting painted ten years later in 1947, sold a few years ago for $21 million.

(GUEST) Oh Really?

(SHANNON) When that painting came up for auction,Oh my gosh!

The phone did not stop ringing.

Didn't he teach at WSU?

Wasn't he a student at WSU?

Do we have any of his paintings?

No, we don't-not a single one-not even a drawing.

I always say it started with the Road Show.

(APPRAISER) I have to say, in all my years on the Roadshow, it's probably the most exciting find I've had.

I'm absolutely thrilled you brought it in today.

♪♪ >>The two co-founders of the Nespelem Art Colony, Worth Griffin and Clyfford Still, could not have been more different.

Griffin was fun-loving and friendly.

Still was a more private person, an intellectual.

But it was their view on art that really set them apart.

(CREIGHTON) It was like night and day between Still and Griffin, and their idea of art and what they did with art.

(DAVE FITZSIMMONS) I think it boils down to Worth Griffin felt that art was in the eye of the beholder, and Clyfford Still felt that art was in the eye of the artist >>Still would leave WSC in 1941, going on to become an influential Abstract Expressionist.

(SHANNON) Clyfford never mentions Washington State College or his time here.

He got his Master's Degree here.

He wrote, a wonderful theses about Cezanne.

So it's unusual why, why didn't he speak of it?

Why wasn't there more information about this incredible time that he spent here?

>>The fact that he left little record of his time at WSC is consistent to how Clyfford Still conducted much of his life.

After leaving WSC, he never allowed his art to be exhibited with the works of other artists.

(FAILING) He really felt as though to really comprehend and really appreciate the work of a particular artist you really need to see a body of work where you can understand it as a whole.

His way of thinking about how he wanted his work to be understood, and seen and so on, and the fact that he was so ferocious about it, certainly rightly offended many many people.

>>After Clyfford Still's death in 1980, his will stipulated that his artwork be given to a museum that would show only his work.

(FAILING)He was a very prolific artist, but 94% of his work was in his estate when he died, and this is, you know, astounding.

>>The city of Denver, Colorado took Still up on his offer.

In 2011, the newly built Clyfford Still Museum and Archive was opened.

(FAILING) More than the large majority of Still's expansive work is in the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.

So you can go there and see a range of work that surprises a lot of people because they know more about his mature work, the work that made him famous as an abstract expressionist.

>>One surprise was the work from his time at WSC.

Work, until recently, was largely unknown.

(FAILING) It's kind of a black hole for people.

A black hole that some have assumed meant that he looked back unfavorably on this particular period.

But again I think the evidence of the archives and how much he saved, and how the range of things that he saved, from drawings to teaching notes, to libraries,...lots and lots of records of paintings that don't exist anymore even.

You know that his Pullman years are a critical part of the ensemble of his development that he wanted to have remembered and he wanted to have studied.

♪♪ >>A series of drawings from the Colville Indian Reservation were discovered.

(HOLLOMAN) They're beautiful studies of individuals that capture a particular sensitivity, a quality of personality, a gesture, all the wonderful things that, that you would imagine if you're engaged very closely with the individual that that you're drawing.

(FAILING) There's this one wonderful pastel headdress drawing, and so on, and you flip it over and you see it's on WSC letterhead, you know.

The sensitivity and the concern he had in what he was trying to present when he was looking at the people-very different, it is so different than the work that he had done prior.

It's remarkable.

The beautiful colors, that reflect the shawls and the blankets, the regalia, the beading-they're just bright, beautiful.

They are the complete alternate to black and white photography that presents Native people in a very stark image.

These are vivid, living studies.

That's what I think that he expressed was not a people that were going away, no, I think he's showing a people that still there and will continue to be there.

♪♪ >>The Nespelem Art Colony lasted for four summers resulting in thousands of paintings; most of which, have never been recovered.Like most colonies across the country, the Nespelem Art Colony would fade away in 1941 with the coming of World War II.After the war, Griffin and President Holland were able to create WSU's first Museum of Art.

Griffin's portraits of the Columbia Plateau people would become one of the museum's initial collections.

(ALBERT ANDREWS RED STAR) The pictures to me become part of our story.

Many of the young people nowadays don't remember some of these people; some of them don't even know their connection to them.

So this to me is like a look back, these people were part of your life.

And, I think it's important.

I think it's important for them to see.

This is who they were.

♪♪