Additional Images

Provenance:

North Start Fine Arts, Calgary, AB;
Private collection, Ontario

Note:

While hoop dancing originated as a healing dance within a ceremonial context, the performance has been popularised at cultural events as an artform and even a form of showmanship. Performed by all genders, hoops symbolise the circle of life and the interconnectedness of all things.

Cobiness was sparing with his compositions, able to convey much with few brushstrokes. Although he worked in many styles throughout his career, Hoop Dancers showcases the artist perhaps at his most elegant. Cobiness effortlessly captures the dramatic motion of two symmetrical dancers in muted natural tones. Cobiness liked this composition so much that he made several variations on the theme—he even put it on his business card.

While Cobiness drew primarily from his own Anishinaabe traditions, circular motifs figure prominently throughout central North American ritual and art. The significance of circles among the Oglala Lakota has been poignantly articulated by Oglala medicine man Black Elk:

Everything the power of the world does, is done in a circle. The sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tipis were round like the nest of birds, and these were always set in a circle; the nation’s hoops, a nest of many nests where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.”

References:
John G. ​​Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition, (Winnipeg: Bison Books, 2014), 121.