Our Arklahoma Heritage: Ferguson went from Haskell County dreamer to a world-renowned artist and art educator
Charles Arthur PebworthCharles Arthur Pebworth was born November 3, 1926, in Kinta, a small railroad town in Haskell Countyon land that had been Choctaw country since the removals of the 1830s.
Kinta, whose name means beaver in Choctaw, sat at the crossing of State Highways 2 and 31 in the old Sans Bois district, not far from the house of Principal Chief Edmund McCurtain.
He was the second of five children of Louis Aaron Pebworth and Ann Lorene Hodges Pebworth. Louis, recorded on the Dawes Commission rolls as a member of the Choctaw Nation, later worked as a landman for the oil interests of the Osage Indian Tribal Agency.
Ann Lorene, born in 1906 in Lee County, Mississippi, was white.
An older brother, Louis Aaron Pebworth Jr., had been born in Kinta three years earlier, on August 24, 1923. The family left Haskell County when Charles was six and settled in Pawhuska on the Osage Reservation, where the boy spent the Depression years outdoors among rocks, plants, and the geometry of the land.
He would later say he felt more attached to the Osage than to the Choctaw, yet Indian imagery and a pride in that mixed heritage ran through his work and through the stories he told his own children.
He was a poor student who left high school in his senior year hoping to see combat. Too young for the Navy, he passed an Air Force pilot exam that astonished his teachers, then enlisted in the Army when the flying slots closed. He completed paratrooper school and was waiting in California for the invasion of Japan when the war ended.
After a brief try at forestry at Colorado A&M he followed a friend to the Art Center School in Los Angeles, passed through Pasadena City College, and by 1948 was an art major at Baylor University in Waco.
When the GI Bill ran short, he joined the National Guard, shipped to Japan, and served in Korea with an anti-aircraft intelligence unit of Oklahoma’s 45th Infantry Division.
He drew cartoons for the platoon newspaper, painted a unit banner, and once turned an unused quarantine tent into a kitchen until the mess hall shut him down. He came home in 1952, enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, and in a small art class of three people met Nona DeShazo.
They eloped to Houston in 1953 with money borrowed from his brother and a borrowed plastic ring. The marriage lasted sixty-six years.
He finished a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting at the University of Houston in 1955 while designing displays at Foley’s department store, then earned a master’s in sculpture at Louisiana State University in 1957, one of the few American graduate programs then devoted to the medium.
That same year he took a tenured post at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and stayed thirty-six years. He built the department’s first foundry for aluminum, bronze, and copper, taught in the university’s Mexican Field School in Puebla from 1958 to 1961, and later served as a guest professor at Del Mar College and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
In the early 1970s he worked Carrara marble in Italy and shipped the finished pieces home.
Students remembered a teacher who could see what was strongest in them and raise it; sculptor James Surls called him a doorway into the art world. Houston galleries, Stella Sullivan, DuBose, Ars Longa, and Moody, sold out his solo shows.
In 1987 the Art League of Houston named him Texas Artist of the Year.
The work that made his name was the metal relief, polished aluminum, brass, or copper set against wood and sometimes semi-precious stone, arranged in rhythmic geometries that suggested totems, pyramids, arrows, and stylized figures. He also carved marble and wood, cast bronze, and painted figurative watercolors of winged or mythic women that appeared on Houston Grand Opera programs.
Large commissions followed: a two-story relief and a rooftop piece for the Hyatt Regency Houston that remain in place, a five-ton marble for Herman Miller in Zeeland, Michigan, and a fifty-foot Cor-Ten steel sculpture commissioned by George Mitchell for the entrance to The Woodlands.
Pieces entered the Oklahoma State Art Collection, the Arkansas Art Center, the University of Houston, Huntsville City Hall, and private and corporate holdings across the country.
Charles and Nona raised four children in Huntsville: Lisa, later married to Abhijeet and mother of Ian and Larkin; Jeff, married to Julie; Alison, an artist known for itinerant installation work, with partner Chris Sollars; and Jared, married to Cindy King, father of Lily and Liam.
After he retired in 1993 the couple moved to Fayetteville in the mid-2000s to be nearer family and a cabin they built in the Ozarks, complete with a pizza oven and smokers he constructed himself.
He drew and painted every day, rode a stationary bike at ninety-two, and on his last birthday gathered children, grandchildren, former colleagues, and students around a fire.
He died January 10, 2019, in Fayetteville, of complications from a fall. Graveside services were held January 21 at Fayetteville National Cemetery, where a veteran of two wars was laid to rest. Nona died there on April 21, 2022, and was buried beside him.
He never returned to live in Haskell County. The tie that remains is the first one: a Choctaw father on the Dawes rolls, a birth in Kinta when the town was still young, and a childhood that began on land the tribe had held since the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek.
The metal, stone, and watercolor that followed carried that beginning forward, even as the man himself was buried far from the beaver-named town where his story started.
