Bob Boyer began painting on blankets after experiencing Mongolian yurt rugs, silk Chinese prayer cloths, and fabric banners in Tokyo, during his travels through East Asia the early 1980s. The artist’s symmetrical, abstract designs, which recall the nineteenth century tipi and parfleche painting on the Plains, engages with the narrative of Western modernism. As Boyer stated, “I consider myself an abstract painter using a very ancient Northern Plains tradition of abstraction that modern artists dipped into and copied. So the history of this is older than modern abstraction. Where I’m coming from is more deeply rooted.”