Though Lloyd Chavez is a Mountain Ute, he poses here with traditional Shoshone Indian accoutrements. Artist James Bama found him to be a particularly striking model and painted him four times over the years, here with a sparrow hawk tied in his hair, a seashell necklace draped across his neck and a deerskin quiver slung across his back.

The animal hide stretched behind Chavez is covered in paintings depicting Indian dances, a buffalo hunt and a captured American flag. In the absence of a written language, such paintings recorded events . . .