May We Have Peace depicts a standing Native American man whose extended arms clasp a peace pipe. The sculpture combines Native American imagery with stylistic influence by modernist sculptors. It was set forth as a numbered edition of eight castings in 1992. Allan Houser had a special casting made in 1994 dedicated “To the American People of the United States from the First Americans” and presented it to then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. It was installed at the Naval Observatory, the official residence of the Vice President. It remained on display there until joining the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in 2001. Additional castings of May We Have Peace include those located in Oklahoma, where Houser was born and raised, Santa Fe, where Houser lived for much of his career, and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. This casting of May We Have Peace and eighteen other Houser sculptures were loaned to Salt Lake City by the Allan Houser Estate in 2002 as part of the Cultural Olympiad, an arts festival that accompanies all Olympic games. Through efforts led by Ms. Karen Edson, Ms. Sharon Newton, and other private donors, Salt Lake City co-purchased the sculpture for permanent display.

 

Allan Houser was an artist, teacher, and member of the Chiricahua Apache tribe. He grew up in Oklahoma, where many members of his tribe were incarcerated for 27 years as U.S. prisoners of war after the surrender of Geronimo and the seizure of millions of acres of their homelands in New Mexico and Arizona. Houser attended the Santa Fe Indian School for painting in 1934. In his early days of schooling in Oklahoma, his name had been changed from the native Haozous, which refers to the sound and feeling of uprooting a plant, to “Houser.” He taught art at the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, Utah before founding the Institute of Native American Arts in Santa Fe in 1962. After gaining popularity in Europe and the American Southwest, Houser’s sculpture Offering of the Sacred Pipe, which is thematically similar to May We Have Peace, was installed at the United Nations building in New York. In the final two decades of his life, Houser focused on a prolific sculptural practice and became the first Native American awarded the National Medal of the Arts. Houser’s vast legacy includes navigating an inheritance of state violence against his tribe and ongoing marginalization of Native Americans.

Knaphus was a Mormon convert, who produced many sculptures and bas-reliefs for LDS temples, as well as busts of famous Utahns, decorations for office buildings, mortuary and chapel friezes. His best known work is the Handcart Monument, one of the most recognized symbols of Mormonism. The heroic size version stands in Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

Perhaps his best-loved secular monument is the 1937 School Children’s Monument near the west entrance to the Salt Lake City and County Building. It features a granite base holding a scroll depicting the United States constitution. On either side of the base, facing each other, are life-size statues of a boy and girl looking up at the United States flag atop the seventy-foot flag pole set in the base. The statue honors school children, whose nickels and dimes paid for it.