“The thing about Cedar is she will get away from any class she doesn’t have work in and come in and work. “I’m a pretty fast worker – I constantly work on it until I feel like it’s done.” “I literally was just doing it for fun,” she said. She grew up on the Flathead Reservation, the daughter of photographer Stephen Hunt and Chelsea Brave Rock, an accomplished bead worker.Ĭedar points to a pouch, intricately beaded with a girl astride an appaloosa horse, and says it emerged from a sketch. That was before Cedar learned it was selected for the Congressional Art Award.Ĭedar is a member of the Bloods, a Canadian band of the Blackfeet Nation. One student offered to pay $100 for “Girl on Horse” because their grandfather’s name was on it. “So people find their names in Cedar’s work.” “What’s really cool is so many kids have relatives who have names in these books,” Shelman said. The bound books of attendance records were given to art teacher Caitlin Shelman and the Salish teacher a couple of years ago to use for ledger art. And instead of ledger paper, the backdrop to her painting is a school attendance sheet, dating back to the 1940s. The painting is both sophisticated and unusual, in part because horse and its rider are floating off the page, giving it a three-dimensional quality. Congressman Ryan Zinke, and will hang in the halls of Congress for the coming year.

Her recent painting, “Girl on Horse,” won the Congressional Art Competition for Montana’s First Congressional District, represented by U.S. The high school senior creates ledger art, a form of narrative painting developed by Plains Indians in the late 19th century to depict their history using materials at hand – in this case the paper ledgers used at trading posts to document transactions. She sketches a shape and dabs color on a painting as we talk in the art classroom at St. Cedar Hunt sits on a stool with colored pencils and watercolor paints arrayed on a table before her.

Chelsea field books