"I paint for my people. Art is a way for our culture to survive; perhaps the only way. More than anything, I want to become an orator, to share with others the oldest of Indian traditions. I want people to look back at my work just as we are today looking back at the ledger drawings. I'm working one hundred years after those people, saying, this is how we still do it. We still have our traditions."

Of Cherokee and Creek descent, Virginia Stroud was born March 13, 1951 in Madera, California. Although Ms. Stroud is a Cherokee, she was adopted and raised (in the Indian sense of the word) by a Kiowa family in Oklahoma. She was educated in public schools in California and Oklahoma, and graduated from Muskogee Central High School in 1969. Virginia attended Bacone Junior College from 1969-1970 and the University of Oklahoma, 1971-73, 1975, and 1976-77, majoring in elementary education and art.

Stroud has been honored as Miss Cherokee Tribal Princess, 1969-70, Miss National Congress of American Indians, 1970-71, Miss Indian America, 1971, and she served on the Board of Directors of the Indian Arts and Crafts Association. In May 1970, she became the youngest Native American artist to receive first place honors in the Woodlands division of the 25th Annual American Indian Artists Exhibition at Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 1972, she won the Heritage Award at the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Again, in 1975, Stroud won a first place award at the 30th American Indian National Exhibition at the Philbrook Art Center, and spent the next year as an artist in residence for the City of Norman, Oklahoma. In 1978, her pictographic work, "Enemy Treasures" won the award for graphics at the Heard Museum, and in 1982, she was selected Artist of the Year by the Indian Arts and Crafts Association. More recent honors include the Woody Crumbo Memorial Award, Best of Show, Best Painting, and Best in the Traditional category at the 1992 Indian Market in Sante Fe, New Mexico.

Over the past thirty years, Virginia Stroud has established herself as a leading contemporary Native American artist and has compiled an impressive record in the process. Stroud attributes a major influence in her career to the early encouragement of the late Dr. Richard West of Oklahoma, who schooled her in the history of ledger art and termed her gift for color combinations as innate, resembling that of Picasso. When Stroud entered college, her initial goal was to major in education so that she could teach art in either primary or secondary schools. Instead, due to the guidance of Dr. West, Stroud chose the life of a freelance working artist.

Continuing in the earliest traditional painting style, she does not paint the facial features of the characters in her paintings. Individual identities pass into the background. Characters are recognized by their clothing and their identities are established by their roles in the community. This is especially true of the Native American women whose roles as caretaker, nurturer, gatherer and spiritual instructor remained the same handed down from one generation of daughters to the next. Identity is established by what is familiar to a culture, and the viewer is asked to both recognize the differences and to overlook those differences, thereby enriching the spiritual world by minimizing the distance between themselves and the art.

Ledger art is traditionally a male American Indian pictographic art form, and historically, it has been characterized as such by researchers. The earliest Indian paintings were pictographs, picked into cave walls. When the settlers arrived, paintings were done on hides, flour sacks and covered wagon cloth. In the nineteenth century, paintings were done on the blank pages in ledger books. The ledger books were used by traders to maintain an accounting record of their trading activities. The artwork told a story in pictures because there was no written language to record an historically important event.

Chronologically, ledger painting stylistic development belongs to the Proto-Modern era of the Native American Fine Arts Movement. Only recently, have researchers of ledger art recognized Virginia Stroud as the native American woman artist who, as a Second Generation Modernist and a member of the so-called "New Indian Art Movement", revitalized a traditionally male form of artistic expression with her pictographic images. The influences on Stroud's stylistic achievements can be traced to her Kiowa upbringing in Oklahoma, which is the major geographic center of the Southern Plains school, combined with her attendance at Bacone College under the direction and influence of Dr. Richard West.

Stroud has experienced a transitional phase in her stylistic development which progressed from the traditional earthy pictorial images to a more brilliant color schema that focuses on the roles of women and children in Native American culture. Stroud's contemporary work displays a bold sense of color, combining the elements of the prior generations of Modernists yet retains its traditional style. During this later stage of Stroud's development, she has produced works that are associated with Cherokee traditions which may be attributed to her Cherokee ancestry. She has experimented with themes that are purely Southwestern, a phenomena indicative of her residency in the southwest during the transition to the Contemporary stage of the Native American Fine Arts Movement.

Stroud wrote and illustrated her first children’s picture book, Doesn't Fall Off His Horse, (Dial). It was recognized as NCSS-CBC Notable Children's Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, International Reading Association (IRA) and Children’s Book Council (CBC) Children's Choice, and received the IRA Distinguished Book Award. Other children’s picture books written and illustrated by Stroud include: A Walk to the Great Mystery,(Dial) and The Path of Quiet Elk: A Native American Alphabet Book, (Dial).These books were influenced by the tribal history, legends and tales which she heard as a child from her Kiowa, Grandpa Steve and other family members. Stroud illustrated The Story of the Milky Way, (Dial) written by Joseph Bruchac and Gayle Ross.

Stroud spent 1999 as a candidate for Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation and in 2003, a large collection of Stroud's artwork was included in the Smithsonian's archives of living artists and the Fred Jones, Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma.

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