Julie Buffalohead

Interlacing Native American histories and beliefs with personal family narratives, Buffalohead’s imaginative and wryly humorous practice uses allegory and symbolism to reconcile often painful legacies through the transformative and malleable properties of storytelling. Drawing from Native American oral and material culture, her painterly renditions of women and animal spirits alongside sculptural objects in rawhide, beads, porcupine quills, dentalium and abalone shells revives and recontextualizes historically elided traditions.

Julie Buffalohead (b. 1972, Minneapolis, MN) is a member of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma. She received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MFA from Cornell University. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant, Guggenheim Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, and the McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts.

Buffalohead has had solo exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Denver Art Museum; Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis; the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM; and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, New York.

Her work is in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Denver Art Museum; Davis Museum, Wellesley, MA; Field Museum, Chicago; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; among others. Julie Buffalohead is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.