Provenance: Private Collection, Montana In 1916, Carl Oscar Borg headed into Indian Country on behalf of the University of California Department of Ethnology and the United States Bureau of Ethnology. What he found was a life’s dream of subject matter. While he painted several major tribes, it was his experience with the Navajo people of Northern Arizona that transformed him as an artist. “Here one is much nearer the creator of it all,” Borg wrote home, adding that “the Navajo and Hopi land [became] the most interesting in the whole world.” In Carl Oscar Borg and the Magic Region, Helen Laird wrote: “He rode his horse through painted desert and slept on the ground wrapped in a couple of blankets and looked up at the velvet sky. The air was so clear that it looked as though one should be able to reach the stars just by reaching up one’s hands.” That first trip was so transformative that Borg would return to the Southwest for the next 15 years. His subjects gave him a name: Hasten-na-va-ha-sa, or “He Who Comes in the Spring.”