Haozous works at the intersection of two of the most loaded inheritances available to a Native American artist of the postwar period, the modernist sculptural language his father did so much to legitimize within American art, and the political and ecological reckoning that followed in his own generation, and his work refuses to soften either.
Haozous's path into art was shaped from the start by his father's unparalleled position in twentieth-century Native American sculpture. Allan Houser was the leading Apache modernist of his generation and, in 1992, the first American Indian to receive the National Medal of Arts. Growing up in a working sculptor's household gave Bob direct access to the practical questions of materials, scale, and form, but his own emergence as an artist came after a considerable detour through other formative experiences.
His Navy service during the Vietnam War in particular layered an early adult encounter with American military power onto an already complicated inheritance for an Apache artist, and the political seriousness of his later work has its roots in that period. By the time he entered the studio life full-time after art school, he had a clearer sense than most of his contemporaries of the particular moral and historical questions that sculpture might be asked to address.
His public emergence began with the Santa Fe Indian Market, where he exhibited annually from 1971 until 1991. Across those decades he developed a sculptural vocabulary that combined strong silhouette and clean modernist construction with overtly political iconography drawn from Apache history, contemporary politics, and environmental concern. The result is at once formally rigorous and openly polemical, often using humor to deliver pointed critique.
Major recognition has followed both within Native American art and on the international stage. He was honored in a 1983 sculpture retrospective at the Heard Museum that he shared with his father, received the Heard's Gold Medal in wood and stone at its Sculpture Exhibition, and twice represented Native American art at the Venice Biennale, in 1999 and 2001. Solo and group exhibitions have included Old Man Looking Backward: Bob Haozous at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in 2018–19 and Relations: Indigenous Dialogue at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in 2006.
His public commissions have placed monumental work in Albuquerque, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seattle, including the Seattle Seahawks Stadium, and Tulsa, among other cities. Within contemporary Native American art he occupies a particular position: a senior artist whose practice continues to insist that sculpture is, among other things, a public language for argument about the world, and who has used that language with unusual persistence throughout a career now stretching across more than half a century.