William P. Healey Collection of Native American Art Going on View in Phoenix
By Chadd Scott on
William P. Healey grew up with Charlie Russell prints hanging in his bedroom. His Long Island bedroom.
The universal allure of the West.
Healy’s dad was a pilot for American Airlines and later assigned to its corporate office in New York. Along with his father, the boy would routinely visit the home of C.R. Smith, President of American Airlines. It was a home filled with Western art, particularly Charlie Russell. From the 1920s through the 50s, Smith was one of the handful of most prominent collectors of Western art in the United States. He eventually bought out the estate of Charlie Russell’s wife Nancy.
As Healey’s real estate development business took off in the 70s – mainly shopping centers – he began to seriously collect Western art himself. His interest was in the genre standards: Russell, the Taos Founders, Edward Borein. In an interview with Healey, Medicine Man Gallery founder and owner Mark Sublette described him as a “mythic figure of collecting” in Western art circles for the money he spent and the caliber of work he acquired.
Healey served for multiple decades as a member of the Charlie Russell Riders and Foundation as well as on the Board of Directors at the C.M. Russell Museum and the Gilcrease Museum in Oklahoma City.
Then, abruptly, his interest took a turn. Not away from the West, but to another aspect of it.
During a visit to the Heard Museum in Phoenix in the early 2010’s – one of the finest museums of Native American art in the United States – Healey became aware of the Indian Boarding School era tragedy.
“How could I have collected all of this Western art for 50 years and not have known this story – it’s a horrendous story,” Healey told Sublette during their interview. “It was such a sad story that I couldn’t focus on (the abuse), because I was now 70 years old, so it was going to depress me, so flip it around like we used to try and do when we were in trouble in business and try to find something good to focus on. The bad doesn’t go away, but it takes you out of the funk.”
The “something good” he decided to focus on was Native American art. Healey was starting from scratch with his knowledge and collection. He began with paintings from the early 20th century and evolved into contemporary Native paintings.
Healy had help along the way. Legendary Diné painter Tony Abeyta closely consulted him as did noted contemporary Native American art gallerist and advocate James Trotta-Bono. Healey prioritized purchasing directly from artists or their estates.
In little over a decade, Healy undertook a collecting spree of modern and contemporary Native art, amassing one of the finest private collections in existence.
William P. Healey Collection in Phoenix
In June of 2026, the Phoenix Art Museum announced 185 works from Healey’s collection had been gifted to the institution marking the single largest gift of Native art in its 65-plus year history. In November of 2023, a gift of similar significance from Healey to the St. Louis Art Museum was announced.
To Phoenix, 99 artists representing 44 tribal nations were gifted. Jaune-Quick-to-See Smith (Confederated Salish and Kootenai), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Harry Fonseca (Miwok, Nisenan), Fritz Scholder (Luiseño), Pablita Velarde (Tse Tsan, Santa Clara Pueblo), Oscar Howe (Dakota Sioux), Acee Blue Eagle (Muscogee Creek), Harrison Begay (Navajo), T. C. Cannon (Kiowa, Caddo), Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee), Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo).
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, ‘Xeriscape,’ 1991. Mixed media and paper collage on paper. William P. Healey Collection of Native American Art at Phoenix Art Museum, Gift of William P. Healey. Photo: Davin Lavikka. Courtesy of the Estate of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.
The collection offers the rare opportunity to highlight the continuity of artistic tradition across generations of families; parent-child artists represented in the gift include Fred and Michael Kabotie (Hopi), Allan Houser and Bob Haozous (Apache), and Narciso and Tony Abeyta. Additionally, 22 of the 99 artists represented in the collection are women.
On August 26, 2026, the Museum premieres “The Way We Came: A Century of Indigenous Art (The William P. Healey Collection at Phoenix Art Museum),” an examination of modernity in Native American art and the numerous ways Indigenous artists from the 20th century through today have sustained, adapted, and reimagined cultural knowledge. The exhibition features more than 100 of Healey’s gifted works.
“At a moment when the American art canon is being reshaped and expanded, I believe it is paramount that Native American artists are recognized as essential to that story,” Healey said in a press release announcing the show. “Phoenix Art Museum has made a major commitment to using this collection to help achieve that end.”
William P. Healey and Tony Abeyta
Healey had been collecting Tony Abeyta paintings before he committed to amassing a collection of Native American art. That’s how the two first came to know each other.
“We had conversations about my father, who was a painter from the Santa Fe Indian School, and he knew that I collected American Indian work,” Abeyta, who co-curated the exhibition along with the Phoenix Art Museum’s adjunct curator of Art of the Americas JoAnna Reyes, told me. “He had this epiphany, he saw this exhibition at the Heard, and he said, ‘When you're in Phoenix, call me. I want to talk to you about an idea. I want to start building a collection of Indian paintings.’”
Oscar Howe, ‘The Medicine Dancer,’ c. 1965. Casein on paper. William P. Healey Collection of Native American Art at Phoenix Art Museum, Gift of William P. Healey. © by permission, OSCAR HOWE ART LLC
Healey spends part of each year in Arizona away from his primary residence in Jackson, WY.
When the two began discussing building a collection, Healey’s initial idea was to focus on the Boarding School era, both in New Mexico with the Santa Fe Indian School, and also in Oklahoma at Bacone College, the University of Oklahoma, and the Kiowa Five.
“As friends, we had conversations. He'd ask me what was this artist thinking about, and at the time he was finding an immense amount of work, going kind of nuts with acquisitions of amazing stuff,” Abeyta remembers. “I realized he was serious about this. I thought, ‘Wow, what an amazing project to embark on.’”
Abeyta occupies a unique position in Native American art history, not only as a premier painter, but as a witness. Through his father and older sisters, he has heard firsthand accounts of the Santa Fe Indian School painters – Houser, Velarde, Begay. His older sister Elizabeth was among the first classes at the Institute of American Indian Arts alongside T.C. Cannon (Kiowa-Caddo) and Earl Biss (Apsáalooke) and Kevin Red Star (Apsáalooke0.
“I grew up with the stories of my dad boxing Alan Houser and my sister partying with Earl, and the crazy backstories that go along with being artists, being creative,” Abeyta said.
Abeyta graduated from IAIA in 1986 and has been a leading artist as the profile and recognition of contemporary Native art has exploded over the past 10 years. He counts multiple generations of Native artists as colleagues and friends.
“I helped (Healey) connect the dots. How do you connect the dots between what's happening at Santa Fe Indian School, Frank Applegate and Edgar Hewitt and some of the San Ildefonso School painters that predated Dorothy Dunn, and then look at how that impacted the Hopi Day School and Fred Kabotie and Waldo Mootzka, all of these other tentacles of creativity that are happening throughout the Southwest,” Abeyta explained of his role in the project.
The duo wanted to do more than buy great artworks from great Native artists. They wanted to tell a story.
“What was American Indian art missing – the Native American story. That saga is an American story, and this involves Indigenous people, the first people of the Americas,” Abeyta explained. “Also looking at how (Native artists) were unique, but still we're finding influences from modernism and finding influences from other artists they're exposed to along their journeys.”
Ernest Spybuck, ‘Shawnee Gathering,’ c. 1915. Watercolor on paper. William P. Healey Collection of Native American Art at Phoenix Art Museum, Gift of William P. Healey.
Intention and Curation
Watching Tony Abeyta walk around Santa Fe where he lives, you’d think he’s handing out $100 bills. People are drawn to him. Charisma. He seems to know and remember everybody and has the special gift of making those interactions seem as meaningful to him as vice versa.
Some of these people ask him about artists to “buy.” I wondered how he determines a collector’s intention. Healey’s intention. Whether a person cares about the work or is looking for the art equivalent of a stock tip.
“I can't determine what people's intentions are. I can kind of tell. Usually, it begins with a conversation like this: ‘Do you know where I can get a Fritz Scholder painting?’ I kind of cringe,” Abeyta said. “You have to remember, from my perspective, I knew Scholder, I used to go to his openings at Elaine Horwich, I saw his whole career. I was 19 when he was famous. He was selling those paintings for $50, $60,000 back then. For me, (collecting famous Native artists is) not as intriguing as discovering new people that are having equally important contributions to the narrative.”
Abeyta increasingly finds himself balancing art making with curation, expanding his reach in telling the story of Native America through the work of other artists.
“I don't curate things that I don't know about. These (stories are) at the tip of my tongue, stories I understand because as an artist, who are my own influences, who are my heroes of Indian art,” he said. “It's easy to help and direct and give insights to building a collection. Should you pick the most famous, or should you tell the story that's complex, that is poetic at times, and often, in some cases, tragic.”
A tragic story led William P. Healey to collecting Native American art.
With the help of Abeyta and others, the collector found a way of making something good from it.
“The Way We Came” can be seen through July 11, 2027.
