T. C. Cannon
1946 –
1978
T. C. Cannon was born on September 27, 1946, in Lawton, Oklahoma. He was an enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma with the name Pai-doung-u-day or “one who stands in the sun.” He studied painting at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Cannon, who has been described as “one of the most influential, innovative, and talented Native American artists of the twentieth-century” by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, was also a poet. His writings are collected in the book My Determined Eye (Cannon Yi Publishing, 2006).
Cannon died on May 8, 1978, near Santa Fe, New Mexico, in an automobile accident.