By Brian D’Ambrosio,
The thing that really got to Doug Coffin at a young age was visual forms. Art signified something truly earth-spinning, and whether or not there had been a dime in it for him, he decided early on that he would follow his passion wherever it took him.
For more than 50 years, Coffin has thrown his ambitious spirit into a highly contemporary form of totemic sculpture. Creativity continues to pour into him, and the Abiquiu artist communicates its glow as zestfully now as he did in his youth.
Born on Pottawattamie Reservation in Kansas, his father, Tony Coffin, was an athlete in high school and earned a sports scholarship to the University of Kansas. He later coached football, basketball, and track at the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kan.
“I spent the first 18 years of my life on that campus,” Coffin said. “I still wear cowboy boots for most of the year because of it. … My parents told me to do something to make me happy. It was unique and rare to have the freedom then to think in those terms.”
Coffin said that his earliest inclination was to be an artist even though he had never been to a museum or gallery. He just remembered being struck by the artwork and murals on the walls of the campus cafeteria and dormitories. He also had heard stories of his great-grandmother’s brilliant beadwork, and somehow he intuited that he, too, could make something beautiful, namely jewelry and sculpture.
“I was born in 1946, a time when the average kid had little exposure to art,” he said.
Meantime, artist Allan Houser (1914-1994) was commissioned by the Haskell Institute to create a statue honoring Native servicemen who lost their lives in World War II. Coffin remembered being in awe of the grand “Comrade in Mourning” shortly after it had been unveiled. Houser’s piece, sculpted out of Italian marble, made Coffin even more determined to sculpt. Years later, Coffin was thrilled to see Hauser again, pouring bronze and doing wax work for his statues.
After completing a number of design and fabrication courses at the University of Kansas, Coffin began work as an assistant at a bronze casting foundry. Then he joined the Marines, arriving at Camp Pendleton in California on Easter Sunday in 1966. When he received an honorable discharge, he returned to Lawrence and enrolled in more art classes.
Coffin worked with a jeweler in Kansas City and then another in Florida, before attending the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., where he studied metalsmithing for two years.
However, he remembered from a family trip in 1955 that the views and the weather were much better in New Mexico. So, in the late ‘70s he stuffed everything he owned into a Chevy Vega GT station wagon and drove West with the purpose of becoming an artist.
“Santa Fe was where people were making a living as artists,” he said. “It seemed that I would fit in better there than New York or Los Angeles. I figured I would do this no matter what happens. I knew I could be sleeping under a bridge in Topeka at age 60, but I figured that I’d still try it.”
Grateful to be reunited with his artistic hero, Houser, Coffin worked at the esteemed sculptor’s Shidoni Foundry and Galleries, north of Santa Fe, where he gained firsthand experience about how an artist could successfully make and sell their work. Large, cutting-edge sculptural shows at Shidoni were common, and the spotlight at the time was fixed on the contemporary wave of artists who were taking chances.
“Artists were having their pieces cast, and things were getting bigger and better,” Coffin said. “The first piece I showed at Shidoni was a wooden totem, 24 feet tall, 45 years ago. It just popped out of my head, and I made the model.”
Subsequently, Coffin added even more modernist aspects to his totems, with sculptures ranging from knee high to more towering installations. On average, they were between 20 and 30 feet in height. He constructed a taller 45-foot steel totem for the front yard of an automobile magnate’s estate in Michigan.
Regardless of size, his sculptures engaged people’s curiosity with their distinct contemporary style. Innovative, educational, and deeply inspired, their construction elements revealed both a historical point of view – family crests, familial legends, etc. – as well as the personal outlook of the artist.
“They were like my own billboards,” Coffin said. “If you know how to read them, then you will know what it says about the people who live in the house behind the totem.”
His totems have attracted much attention throughout the years, including invitations to Native-themed shows, as well as larger, broader exhibits, such as one at the Kennedy Center in 1981, and at the White House, where he showed a 28-foot piece in the Rose Garden during the Clinton years. His sculptures may be found in public and private collections across the country, and his paintings hang in embassies in Africa, Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East.
Coffin also met actor and fellow Kansan Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) in New Mexico. Hopper lived in Taos, where he followed the local art scene and liked to carouse with creatives. The two struck up a friendship, and Hopper helped Coffin expand his reach and visibility. Hopper introduced him to actor Dean Stockwell (1936-2021), sparking another uniquely inspired friendship. Indeed, Stockwell once told a magazine that D.H. Lawrence, Eugene O’Neill and Doug Coffin were his main artistic influences.
“It is mind boggling how many movies Dean had been in starting at age 6,” Coffin said. “He and Dennis loved artist studios and artists, and did versions of art themselves. I sent dice to Dean and got him started in dice construction sculpture. He loved twisting and assembling them and made a couple of shows with just dice.”
Recently, Coffin returned to Lawrence, Kan., for the dedication of a 24-foot sculpture placed in front of the Tony Coffin Sports Complex, named after his father. Over the past few years, he has erected five 30-foot and two 18-foot totems at museums and public spaces in other parts of Kansas.
It has been more than 30 years since Coffin moved to Abiquiu and about 25 years since he opened the studio adjacent to his home, which teems with projects in various phases of realization. Some days, he will paint abstract pieces and then switch to making jewelry. Other days, he will start cutting and welding tiny metal adornments destined for larger sculptural pieces, before jumping into an ongoing undertaking of a different medium.
“I have a lot of tools, materials, equipment and a lot of experience, and I can make something magic happen. If I pick up an idea, I can pretty much make it.
“What can I say? I am just a happy Indian from Lawrence who got to be a part of an interesting world. I do what I want to do. I’m on my own time.”
