S
ymbolic Americana, for example,
is the name of an art form she began
creating in the mid-1960s with the help of
her friend Phillip White Hawk (“He was
6’3”, played guitar, very good looking,
stunning, had a voice like an opera singer
— the cameras loved us…”). Phillip was
a slave to lyrics, working sometimes
several hours on the arrangement of three
or four words, knowing that with intention
and care, many layers of meaning could
be wrought into one sentence. For these
two, a complementary social commentary
project that combined Touraine’s oil
paintings with White Hawk’s original
music was inevitable. Sometimes Phillip
would write a song and Rainbow would
paint it; sometimes Rainbow would
paint an image and Phillip would write a
song about it. It was living multi-media.
Over the next few years this creative
practice developed into a collection of
beautiful, humungous, inseparable songs
and paintings, which eventually featured
in our own Spokane, Washington in
1974. It was here that the governor of
Nebraska was so inspired by it that he
invited Symbolic Americana to be the
official birthday present to the nation
for the bicentennial in 1976. So two
years later, White Hawk and Touraine
presented their work, from the heart of
America in Nebraska, as a gift really to
the whole world, symbolically represented
by a “rainbow” of 80 ethnically diverse
children … and their children, and their
children’s children.
We should visit in more detail that
Spokane show, because the event
happened to be the first environmentally
themed World’s Fair — and at that time,
ours was the smallest city to ever host
an Expo. I asked Rainbow what she
remembered of our town, and she said, “I
love Spokane. Washington State is not a
strange place to me, especially Spokane
… What we had was unheard of; people
couldn’t get enough of it. Trust me. It was
incredible…”. The U.S. Pavilion, the most
massive display at the party with 179,250
square feet, was struggling to find an
appropriate and prolific enough Western
artist to represent the theme of the Expo,
as well as the left coast and all its history.
1973 Scottsdale, AZ -Touraine with student and assistant painter Ira Hayes. Special Outfits designed and hand-sown by Touraine
Shown with the painting featured in her one-woman show at the Montana Historical Society, in Helena, Montana.
March | April 2019
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