Kids try to picture their personalities with art

Eleni Karagiannis

The St. Louis Art Museum's Rites of Passage program helps kids use art to reflect on changes in their lives. This year, the art forms they used were from the Osage Indians.

That was in keeping with the museum's huge Art of the Osage exhibit now on display.

One device Osage people used was a special circle-art decoration. The Osage often used the circle designs to reflect their unique personality traits.

Thirteen-year-old Eleni Karagiannis' design was quite abstract, with vivid colors. The eighth grader said, "My design signifies my life as being crazy. Mostly that's my personality. I'm wild and outgoing."

Her colorful illustration had a four-part circle surrounded another circle of flames. She said, "In the Bible, the Holy Spirit is shown as fire. My family is really very religious."

Kevin Meier

Thirteen-year-old Kevin Meier made an illustration which featured a drum and drum sticks. "The drum signifies music. I'm very good on the piano," the seventh grader said.

He said he's had piano lessons for five years and his favorite music is ragtime. "I read a good book about Scott Joplin and he kind of inspired me," Kevin said.

Eleven-year-old Kayla Moore' design featured her doing rope skipping with friends. "That was meant to show that I was a nice, happy and loving person," she said.

The sixth grader's circle also showed what looked like a four-legged animal flying the sky. She said, "That started as a mistake. I wanted it to be an angel but I can't draw angels very well. But, it worked out all right."

Heidi Lung of the Art Museum's staff gave the kids an introduction to Osage Indian culture to open the day. She said, "The Osage thought deeply about everything." She urged the kids to do the same with their own lives.

Kayla Moore

The kids also toured the museum's "Art of the Osage" exhibit. That's a big display of various types of Osage Indian art, from paintings to costumes to even war symbols.

David Wolfs Robe also demonstrated the unique two-chambered Indian flute. Wolfs Robe is from St. Genevieve, Mo., where he and his wife run the Earth Tones Gallery.

Wolfs Robe not only plays the flute but builds them. The Indian flute is very different from classical metal flutes most people know. The Indian flute has no reeds or padded levers.

Rather, the Indian flute has open holes. The player covers and uncovers the holes with fingers to make music. Wolfs Robe said the Indian flute is a "very simple instrument."

However, his playing demonstration for the kids didn't sound very simple. He could produce a full mellow tone and, at the same time, add sharp spikes in the sound.

David Wolfs Robe

That flute demonstration was especially interesting to Eleni Karagiannis. She said learning more about Indian music was one of her main objectives during field trip.

For Kevin Meier, one of his main interests was in seeing how the Indians made works of art. He said, "They wouldn't have had markers or anything like that."

Kayla Moore said the field trip will let her "tell my brothers and sisters what I learned about the Indians."

All the kids admitted they didn't know much about the American Indian culture.

Before white settlers came, the Osage Indians controlled a large area of the Midwest. They controlled most of what is now Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas and Oklahoma.

The Osage Indians were the ones French fur-traders did business with when they came up the Mississippi River and founded St. Louis.

Later, the wave of white settlers forced the Indians westward. The Osage were put on a reservation in northern Oklahoma, just south of the Kansas border.

But, unlike other Indian tribes, the Osage bought their land. That turned out to be quite a boon when oil was discovered in Oklahoma. At one time, each Osage was receiving as much as $13,000 a year in oil royalties.

The mixing of Indians and whites started early. For instance, the only Osage Indian killed in World War I fighting was Charles Donovan. He is a direct descendant of August Pierre Chouteau, one of the French founders of St. Louis.

Kids taking part in the Rites of Passage tour learned lots of things about the Indians. But, they also were urged to take time to think about themselves deeply as Indians do.