From Ashes to Art

By Bernie Hunhoff

Randall Blaze lost his home and art studio to fire, but the Pine Ridge Reservation sculptor is rising from the ashes.

Pine Ridge artist Randall Blaze hurried home from a grocery trip to Rapid City on an April evening in 2020 because he was eager to watch a TV documentary on Ernest Hemingway. Blaze lit a candle and set it on the arm of an upholstered chair. The next thing he knew, the chair was a ball of fire and within minutes the entire house was burning.

Flames were surely visible for many miles around because Blaze’s property sits atop Cuny Table, a mesa on the southern edge of the Badlands. However, nobody was watching. Nobody came to his rescue. The nearest fire truck was an hour away in any direction, and within minutes the entire studio was afire.

In the morning, Blaze surveyed the smoldering rubble. Sculpture tools, brushes, bronze artworks, furniture and business records were all lost. Though the fire didn’t spread across the grassy prairie, it did blacken a cottonwood tree that provided shade to the west side of the house. It was the lone tree on his 100 acres.

Cuny Table was settled by the Cunys, who arrived from Wyoming in 1880. Several of the young men married Native women; 50 years later, more than 100 families called it home. Many were Charles Cuny’s descendants. They had a school, church, dance hall and a few stores.

However, most were forced to leave in 1942 when the U.S. Army appropriated 340,000 acres in the Badlands for a bombing range. Families were given two weeks to pack up and go. Many of the young men joined the military.

Cuny Table and the entire region continued to be a practice range for the U.S. Air Force until 1958, and then was used by the South Dakota Air National Guard until 1974 when tribal leaders began to negotiate with the government for a return of the confiscated property.

Though Blaze was born and raised in Montana, his mother was a Cuny. “It turned out that Mom owned 17-and-a-half acres of trust land,” he says. “She and her family were moved out for the bombing range, and nobody came back. Every time a relative died, the executor of the estate would urge us all to sell, but I always objected.”

Myriad art faces are embedded around Blaze's land on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Blaze joined the Navy and served on a refrigerated cargo ship during the Vietnam War. “One of the nicest things that ever happened to me was the GI bill, which gave me a month of education for every month I served.” He studied art at the University of Montana and was fascinated to learn about a variety of materials from Rudy Autio, a renowned ceramics professor and artist whose work garnered international acclaim.

Early in his career, Blaze devoted his creative energies to making jewelry, but he grew disillusioned by his customers’ lack of appreciation for the art form. “All they saw was a product, and it became all about the money.” Like Autio, he began to experiment with various materials, including bronze, metal and ceramics.

He also began to explore his Lakota roots at Cuny Table and started to buy his relatives’ small holdings; over the course of several years, he acquired 100 acres. Inspired by the solitude and the natural environment, he dreamed of building a studio and home there in the early 1990s, though he didn’t have the resources. Then came a visitor.

“One day my friend Rich Red Owl stopped over and said, ‘I hear you need a studio.’ I told him that I wished I could build one, but I didn’t have the money,” Blaze said, recalling the conversation.

“Do you have $1,500?” Red Owl asked.

“I have about that much,” Blaze said.

“Then let’s get started,” said Red Owl.

Blaze got a lesson in Indian-genuity. Red Owl showed him how to salvage and scavenge for inexpensive building materials, and before long he was moving into a 3,000-square-foot home that became known as the Oglala Art Center.

His career began to grow. He won fellowships at the Smithsonian and the Heard Museum in Phoenix, and his bronzes were featured at exhibitions in Japan, Germany and Australia. He authored a book, Heartdreams and Legends, on the contributions of indigenous artists of the United States and Australia. Seven Council Fires, a nonprofit that exhibits Native arts and crafts, marketed his sculptures worldwide.

Though he traveled the world, Blaze found that he was happiest when creating art at his humble studio. He rented most of his land to neighboring farmers but maintained a buffer of wild grass between his home and the crops. “After seeing what Agent Orange did to some of my friends in Vietnam, I just wanted some space between me and the chemical sprays,” he explains.

When a neighbor’s cattle trampled his yard and damaged some tipis that he had created as mini studios, he started a fence of driftwood to keep out the cows. Soon he assimilated art into the fence. Often, his pieces show faces of figures, perhaps in a spiritual search. Maybe they represent relatives who were driven from Cuny Table generations ago, or ancestors who were killed at Wounded Knee, which is just 20 miles to the east.

Blaze has gained attention in his home state over the past 20 years as a popular participant in the state arts council’s Artists in the Schools program. “I love working with the kids,” he says. “I am always amazed at what they can do.” He often incorporates his trademark faces into his teaching, and sometimes he takes samples of the students’ works back to Cuny Table and finds a place for them in his fence and wild garden.

When the original studio burned in 2020, he wasn’t sure, at the age of 71, that he had the energy or resources to rebuild. His friend Red Owl is now too elderly to help. But other support has arrived. Someone gave him a camper trailer. He salvaged what he could from the old house and became a regular shopper at Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore in Rapid City.

Blaze built a driftwood fence around his Cuny Table home to keep cattle away from the studio. The fence has become part of the art.

“That place is wonderful. But I was paying whatever they asked for windows and doors until my grandson suggested to me that I could dicker with them,” he grinned. “Guess what I paid for this window? It had been there for months, and I told them it wasn’t selling very fast. I got it for $95.”

In 2023 he was awarded a $5,000 fellowship from the South Dakota Arts Council to help fund the next studio. His adult grandchildren came from Utah to help install windows and start a deck.

He recognizes that his style of architecture and the isolation of living on Cuny Table are acquired tastes. He was married and he’s had several lady friends, “but not a lot of women want to live out here where a toilet is a luxury.” Winters are long, even for the solitary artist; he spent the last few at St. Petersburg, Florida, because he hasn’t yet restored electrical service or plumbing.

“You can get stuck out here for six weeks or more in winter,” he says. “The wind blows all the time, and when it snows it can be incredibly beautiful, like waves on the ocean. St. Petersburg has art galleries and studios and people everywhere, but I get lonely there and by spring I’m happy to get back here.”

He likes being visited by badgers, coyotes, bobcats and deer. A sense of quiet permeates the outdoors; he can hear Canada geese approaching in the sky long before he can see them.

While winterizing the studio in preparation for his trip south, he saw that the cottonwood tree that burned in the 2020 fire had sprouted leaves on its bottom branches. “I thought that was dead after the fire,” he said.

The same might have been said about his studio. Though its reincarnation is primitive by Florida standards — by just about any standards — it fits nicely on Cuny Table.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.