About R.V. Greeves

Richard Vernon Greeves (born 1935) aka R.V. Greeves captures the spiritual essence of the people and animals of Western North America. As a boy in St. Louis Richard Greeves studied the actual journals of Lewis and Clark. Greeves’s innate fascination with the travel or expedition and the respective persons involved has continued through his life. Early this century, the artist created a series of bronze sculptures that depict every tribe the explorers encountered on their historic expedition across North America.

Greeves is a self-taught artist whose work can be found in museums and prominent collections both nationally and internationally. His studios are located in Fort Washakie, Wyoming, and Scottsdale, Arizona.

Greeves is a past winner of the Prix de West Purchase Award from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, and he is a regular instructor at the Scottsdale Artists’ School. The Unknown was commissioned by the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, where it is on permanent display.

At the 2016 Masters of the American West, Greeves won the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation Award for Sculpture. In 2009 the Autry Museum’s Trustees acquired Greeves’s Crazy Horse monument for its permanent collection, and in 2008 he was featured in Southwest Art and Western Art Collector magazines. In 2006 he had a one-man exhibition of twenty-nine sculptures, titled Lewis and Clark Among the Indians: Sculptures by Richard V. Greeves, at the Autry, where he was also honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The Autry Museum acquired his sculpture The Sheepeaters of Yellowstone in 2000. In the same year, Greeves won the James Earle Fraser Sculpture Award at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum’s Prix de West for his larger-than-life statue of Chief Washakie.

A sculptor of monumental bronze Indian figures, Richard Greeves was born and grew up in an Italian neighborhood in St. Louis, where he lived in his words, a “Huck Finn childhood.” Many of his neighbors were handy with tools, and they influenced his love of building and creating.

At the age of 15, he met an Indian girl whom he visited on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, and he later moved there and purchased the local trading post which became his home and studio. With one-third of an acre enclosed and 26-foot high ceilings, he has plenty of room to work!