Allan Capron Houser or Haozous (June 30, 1914 – August 22, 1994) was a Chiricahua Apache sculptor, painter, and book illustrator born in Oklahoma.

[4] Dunn's method encouraged working from personal memory, avoiding techniques of perspective or modeling, and stylization of Native iconography.

For the latter, Allan Haozous made hundreds of drawings and canvasses in Santa Fe and was one of Dunn's top students, but he found the program too constricting.

In 1939, Houser began his professional career by showing work at the 1939 New York World's Fair and the Golden Gate International Exposition.

[1] When World War II interrupted Houser's life and career path, he moved his growing family to Los Angeles where he found work in the L.A. shipyards.

Houser worked by day and continued to paint and sculpt by night, making friends among students and faculty at the Pasadena Art Center.

Here, he was first exposed to the streamlined modernist sculptural statements of artists like Jean Arp, Constantin Brâncuși, and the English sculptor Henry Moore.

Haskell, a Native American boarding school, lost many graduates to the war and wanted a sculptural memorial to honor them.

In 1949, Houser received a Guggenheim Fellowship in sculpture and painting, which granted him two years to work on art and still provide for his growing family.

With time, materials, and the family compound in southern Santa Fe County, Houser honed the visual language that was to become his artistic legacy.

The piece honored both the memory of his parents, Sam and Blossom, and commemorates the 70th anniversary of the release of his tribe's prisoners-of-war from Fort Sill.

[citation needed] Houser's work was explored in a series on American Indian artists for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS).

[citation needed] In 1993, Houser was honored by the dedication of the Allan Houser Art Park at the Institute of American Indian Arts,[3] and in 1994, he returned to Washington, DC for the last time to present the United States government the sculpture, May We Have Peace, a gift, he said, "To the people of the United States from the First Peoples."

With over 6,000 images left behind, one can trace the output and varied subjects of an artist who began all of his creations, including paintings and sculptures, with the act of hand to paper.

Beginning in 1940 with simple wood carvings, Houser created his first monumental work in stone in 1949, the iconic piece Comrades in Mourning at the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas.

The sculpture depicting a running horse and a Native male rider is currently placed on one of the shelves in the president's office and was previously exhibited at the National Museum of the American Indian.

[22] Houser's work was part of Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting (2019–21), a survey at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center.