Chesley Wilson, the Apache artist and storyteller who found success in the Western art world as a model for several of the top painters, died October 4, 2021, in Safford, Arizona. He was 89.
Chesley Wilson during a modeling session. Courtesy Logan Maxwell Hagege.
Born Chesley Goseyun Wilson in 1932 in Bylas, Arizona, Wilson found a home within the arts early in life when he was taught how to make Apache flutes and violins from his grandfather and other close relatives. Though he was briefly sidelined by the Korean War, a conflict he was drafted into by the U.S. Army, Wilson would return to the instruments following his discharge two years later in 1955. After his service, he also learned how to work with silver, though his true passion were the flutes and Apache violins. One example of which is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of the American Indian. Music, storytelling, dance and other art forms would also weave through his life, and by 1992 he was named an Arizona Living Treasure.
It was in the 1980s that Wilson was discovered by artists, most notably by Tucson painter Howard Terpning, whose works were bringing national and international attention to Western art. Much later in his career, in 2012, he was rediscovered by California painter Logan Maxwell Hagege, who took an instant liking to Wilson, his look and his personality.
“He just had such a distinct look, a really classic sort of face. I could do a hundred paintings of that face and never grow tired of it. His face was like a landscape,” Hagege says. “And more than that, he was fun to be with. He was always game for anything. He had ridden horses in his youth, so we would meet in Vermilion Cliffs for modeling sessions. He was always so proud of how good of shape he was in. One of the last times I worked with him he asked if I wanted to race him. That’s the way he was.”
Hagege was initially introduced to Wilson through his niece, LeAnn Murphy, who would also become a model for the painter. “He liked to laugh and he liked to help others. And most of all, he was always willing to share the Apache way, the old way,” Murphy says. “People would invite him from all over to come and play his drum and sing. He knew all the old stories and songs, and everything for him was about preservation of these traditions. He had a special power.”
In addition to his modeling and his own art, Wilson was also an actor who had small parts in recent films such as Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave and in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2015 film The Revenant, in which Wilson plays in a small but pivotal sequence as a Native American elder walking through the aftermath of a battle.
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