Grafe, Steven L.

PERSONAL:

Education: Oregon State University, B.A.; University of New Mexico, M.A., Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Home—OK. Office—National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, 1700 N.E. 63rd St., Oklahoma City, OK 73111. E-mail—steve.grafe@nationalcowboymuseum.org.

CAREER:

High Desert Museum, Bend, OR, cataloger; National Park Service, Mesa Verde, CO, and Cape Hatteras National Seashore, NC; Southwest Museum, Los Angeles, CA, chief curator; National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, OK, curator of Native American collections, 2004—.

WRITINGS:

Peoples of the Plateau: The Indian Photographs of Lee Moorhouse, 1898-1915, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 2005.

(With others) A Western Legacy: The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Steven L. Grafe studied fine arts at Oregon State University, where he earned his undergraduate degree in graphic design. He then went on to study art history at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, ultimately earning his doctorate degree. During his graduate studies, Grafe focused on the indigenous art of the western United States, especially nineteenth-century Native American beadwork. Over the course of his career, Grafe has worked at a number of museums and national parks cataloging collections and advocating for the preservation of native art. At the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon, he helped organize a collection of Columbia River Indian art. He has also served at the Mesa Verde, Colorado, National Park Service site and the Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina. He is the former chief curator of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, California, a position he left to become curator of Native American Collections at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, where he is in charge of the 2,500-piece Arthur and Shifra Silberman Collection of American Indian fine art. Grafe is a contributor to A Western Legacy: The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, and the author of Peoples of the Plateau: The Indian Photographs of Lee Moorhouse, 1898-1915. The Moorhouse book collects photos taken by the businessman and military officer in the Pacific Northwest at the start of the twentieth century and includes text by Grafe. A contributor for Reference & Research Book News called the work a "valuable aid to tribal researchers and historians."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Reference & Research Book News, August, 2006, review of Peoples of the Plateau: The Indian Photographs of Lee Moorhouse, 1898-1915.

ONLINE

National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum Web site,http://www.nationalcowboymuseum.org/ (April 14, 2007), "Native American Curator Joins National Cowboy Museum Staff."