The Island People of Janitzio is a seven-color lithograph created in 1983 by American artist Millard Owen Sheets. It is pencil signed and inscribed Presentation Proof. The Island People of Janitzio was printed on Arches Cover Buff paper by Evelyn Lincoln at Editions Press (San Francisco) in an edition of 100 plus 30 proofs. Sheets drew the image on two stones and five aluminum plates to enable the printing of ochre, vermillion, green, light blue, crimson, dark blue, and black. This lithograph was published by Northland Press of Flagstaff, Arizona to accompany the deluxe limited edition book, Millard Sheets: One Man Renaissance. The image and sheet size of The Island People of Janitzio measures 17 x 23 inches.
Millard Sheets was an avid world traveler and took groups on painting workshops. The island of Janitzio would have been an ideal and exotic place for such an adventure. Janitzio is the largest of five islands in Lake Pátzcuaro in the state of Michoacán, Mexico. The isle is inhabited solely by the indigenous P'urhepecha people. In Millard Sheets: One-Man Renaissance, Janice Lovoos wrote: “The subjects, people, and societies of some of Sheets’s best-known works are considered primitive to most Americans. Sheets, on the contrary, sees these groups as far more advanced than American civilization. Sheets’s definition of civilization is the thoroughness with which individuals are able to adapt to their circumstances. In his estimation, Americans, while technologically superior to most of the world, remain far behind the Mexican, the Tahitians, and the Africans in their ability to cope with their physical and cultural environment.”
Millard Owen Sheets, painter, printmaker, muralist, teacher, world traveler, architectural designer, and collector, was born on 17 June 1907 in Pomona, California. His maternal grandparents and his aunts raised him after the tragic death of his mother during childbirth. His grandfather, Lewis Owen, bred and raced horses and instilled in his grandson a passion for the animal. After graduating from Pomona High School, Sheets studied at the Chouinard Art Institute between 1925 and 1929 where he was a pupil of Frank Tolles Chamberlin and Clarence Hinkle.
After graduating from Chouinard in 1929, Sheets had his first solo exhibition at the Dalzell Hatfield Gallery in Los Angeles and won second place in the annual Edgar B. Davis competition in San Antonio. He garnered $1,750. in prize money which allowed him to travel to New York and Paris. While in Paris, Sheets worked at the lithographic workshop of M. Gaston Dorfinant.
Sheets taught at Chouinard between 1928 and 1935 and, in 1931 he was appointed Professor of Art at Scripps College. The following year he became Head of the Art Department at Scripps and served in the capacity until 1955 when he became the Director of the Otis Art Institute.
Sheets was the director of exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Fair from 1931 to 1959. He served as a war artist for Life magazine, covering the Burma-India front from 1943 to 1944. Upon his return to California, he executed mosaic murals throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Sheets created the architectural design for many buildings, produced illustrations for national magazines, and handled production design for Columbia Pictures. Sheets saw his work as a synthesis of Cubism and Impressionism. He traveled throughout Europe, Central America, Mexico, the United States, the Pacific and the Orient, but continued to live permanently at his estate, Barking Rocks, along the northern California coast in Gualala.
He was a member of the Laguna Beach Art Association, the California Watercolor Society, the California Art Club, the Society of Motion Picture Art Directors, and the Bohemian Club. He was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1944 and elevated to full Academician in 1947. His work is represented in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Academy of Design, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, California; the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; the Witte Museum, San Antonio, Texas; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Millard Owen Sheets died in Gualala, California on March 31, 1989.
