Five-panel folding floor screen created with gold leaf, acrylic paint and Chinese stone colors: blue and green.

Inspired to explore recreating a real landscape that no longer exists, wanting to re-imagine its pre-Rushmore magnificence and power.

inscription

Clouds aimlessly

arising

above the peaks

Before it was called Six Grandfathers Mountain, it was called Cougar Mountain (Igmu Tanka Paha) because of many cougars or mountain lions living in the vicinity. Then around the early part of 1870, an experience by a Lakota medicine man changed the name to Six Grandfathers because of the six outcrops of the mountain and a dream or a vision.

“The vision was of the six sacred directions: west, east, north, south, above, and below. The directions were said to represent kindness and love, full of years and wisdom, like human grandfathers.”

Long before four of the largest faces on Earth were dynamited into the granite edifice of Mount Rushmore, the Lakota Sioux saw a different set of portraits. Before it was carved into Mount Rushmore, Six Grandfathers was crowned by a skyline of domed granite. The Lakota saw a line of wise protective figures on the domed granite skyline of the sacred mountain they called the Six Grandfathers.

The site was officially renamed after wealthy New York investor Charles Rushmore only in 1930, years after its famous construction project began, but Tĥuŋkášila Šákpe had been an integral part of Lakota identity for generations.