"Cover Art"

Timothy Tate Nevaquaya is a Comanche and Chickasaw/Choctaw artist, veteran, and minister from Apache, Oklahoma, the son of the late Comanche master artist and flutist Doc Tate Nevaquaya and his wife, Charlotte Foraker-Nevaquaya. Timothy's art career began as a child at the foot of his father's drafting table. His early education included receiving direction from his father in the basic fundamentals of Native American art forms, as well as flute making. These early experiences began his dance with Native American art, Native American flute, and Native American history and culture with a strong emphasis on Comanche history. As a youth, he was witness to some of the greatest Southern Plains and other Native American artists from his father's contemporary circle of friends and colleagues. He has been a part of the reemergence of the Native American flute culture. As a young man, he participated in many of his father's lectures and demonstrations on the flute. At age twelve, he began to compose music on his father's flutes; at fourteen he began making the flutes.

Early in his career, Nevaquaya immersed himself in the history of the Comanche people through independent studies. He began painting in the flat two-dimensional style reminiscent of the Southern Plains artists before him. As time went along he transitioned into a western American realism style. After many years of hard work and devotion to his art, it was in 2007 that he found his signature style, which can be characterized as "an accident on the canvas." This happy mistake is where the door opened up and led to a great revelation in his artwork and thought, which changed the course of his life and his work. After working tirelessly on an Apache Mountain spirit piece at his home studio one night, he smudged the paints on his canvas, which created, "a happy accident." "I remember smacking the canvas with my paintbrush and it was loaded with paint. I became incredibly frustrated, but through this mistake is when that great door opened up. I saw a different and abstract appearance in my work." So began the journey with Nevaquaya's latest style, which is his personal expression of movement and form in contemporary Native American art.

Nevaquaya has performed and shown his work in the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, The Gilcrease Museum of Western Art, The Philbrook Museum, the Oklahoma Governor's Ball, the Oklahoma State Capitol, The University of Oklahoma, The Great Plains Museum, the Southern Plains Museum, the Comanche Museum, and other places. He owns and operates Nevaquaya Fine Arts: A Legacy Gallery in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and makes his home in Apache, Eagletown, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, with his sons.