Gordon W. Smith

Gordon William Smith (1920–2010) was an artist and collector of American Indian art and ethnographic materials who lived in and was a native of Fort Worth, Texas.

[3] Born in Fort Worth as the grandson of a pioneer family that had moved to North Texas in the 1870s, Gordon Smith grew up hearing tales of Indians from his grandparents.

In 1925, at the age of five, while on a family vacation in Glacier National Park, Montana, Smith met Two-Guns-White-Calf,[4] a Blackfoot chief who gave him a small black rawhide rattle.

Meeting Two-Guns-White-Calf began a boyhood odyssey through the American West that would lead to an enduring love for the indigenous cultures of North America.

After the war, he obtained an MA in English literature at Columbia University (‘50), where he also studied studio art with noted Italian sculptor Oronzio Maldarelli.

Smith had a unique relationship with several American Indian tribes, as is evidenced by the number of gifts he exchanged with them,” said Dirk Van Tuerenhout, Ph.D., curator of anthropology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

During the 1930s he made many friends among Plains Indians, especially among the Lakota Sioux, including still-living elders who had fought the invading white man in the 19th century, but had by then been moved to reservations.

Between 1962 and 2003, he designed and created more than 800 commissioned works, including stained glass windows, sculptures, and mosaics in churches, office buildings, and private homes in 14 states.

Gordon W. Smith was married, until her death in 1998, to Beverley Taylor Smith,[5] a Fort Worth civic leader, actress, and host in the late 1950s and early 1960s of a local television show, the Ann Alden Show,[21] who was also for many years chairman of the Cliburn Concerts division of the Van Cliburn Foundation.