Vision of Oh Kho Wah

One of Helen Hardin’s visual abstractions of Tewa ancestral deities and traditional dancers, Vision of Oh Kho Wah directly references Tewa cultural imagery, songs, dances, and religion. The image depicts Hardin’s interpretation of a woman singing and dancing while wearing a blue tablita and turquoise necklace. The woman’s face is painted with "clay or earth" likely referencing the Pueblo summer and winter moieties of traditional seasonal dancers.


Helen Hardin was a major figure of 20th-century modern Native American painting, who, during the 1960s, was one of the first American artists (along with Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, and Andy Warhol) to use industrial-grade acrylic paint in her work. Her images, often made up of multiple layers of metallic paint, shimmer with overlapping translucent geometric forms that rhythmically organize her compositions.