Windsor Betts gallery in Santa Fe presents original works by Michael Horse (b. 1949), a Native American jeweler, sculptor, and painter and a leading figure in the contemporary revival of ledger art. He uses the tradition to tell present-day stories. Michael Horse was born near Tucson, Arizona, and has been described in gallery and museum sources as being of Yaqui, Mescalero Apache, and Zuni heritage, with family connections to Zuni Pueblo and the Mescalero Apache Reservation. He moved to Los Angeles at age ten, into one of the largest urban Native communities in the country, and grew up dancing at intertribal powwows. He learned jewelry-making from his uncles, and his mother, a potter and kachina carver, trained him in the flat-style painting associated with Dorothy Dunn's teaching at the Santa Fe Indian School. As a young man he studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where his instructors included Fritz Scholder, Allan Houser, and the jeweler Charles Loloma. He has said he considers himself first and foremost a visual artist. Michael Horse and the Revival of Ledger Art Ledger art originated in the nineteenth century, after Plains tribes were confined to reservations and cut off from the animal hides that had served as painting supports. Artists turned to whatever paper they could find, often the ledger books and accounting sheets kept by soldiers and agency officials, to continue recording their history. Horse encountered historic examples through museum access early in his career, and the discovery reoriented his practice. Rather than replicate historic drawings, he sources his own period documents, maps, marriage certificates, hymnal pages, and ledger sheets as the ground for new compositions, outlining his figures in black and filling them with bold, saturated color. His intent is to use the formal vocabulary of the tradition to speak about history and cultural continuity in the present tense. Jewelry, Painting, and Sculpture Alongside his ledger paintings, Horse has built a long career as a jeweler and sculptor, working primarily in silver and stone, a practice he began as a teenager. His jewelry, exhibited at institutions including the Smithsonian, favors substantial, heavy-gauge silver and gold work, and he is particularly recognized for hand-fabricated katsina pieces. He has also worked as an actor, most visibly in film and television roles portraying Native American characters. He mentors young people, Native and non-Native, and has served on the board of San Francisco's American Indian Film Festival, for which he has designed ledger-art-style posters.