Julie Buffaloheadby

Julie Buffalohead’s debut solo exhibition at Dreamsong features new paintings alongside fabric and rawhide sculptures. Drawing from Native American histories and beliefs, personal narratives, and current events, Buffalohead’s thoughtfully moving and wryly humorous practice uses allegory and symbolism to explore social and political injustice, family history and cosmological belief-systems. Built atop fluid, color-saturated grounds, the artist’s paintings frequently depict interactions between the human and animal worlds that reference storytelling from both the artist’s Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma and from other Native American mythologies. Linked through a common rosy-pink hue, the two largest works depict Ishtinike, a Ponca mythical trickster/hero figure who alternates between good deeds and malevolent acts. Taking the form of mischievous vervet monkeys, the primates both serve and antagonize their human taskmaster, congregating contentedly in front of a line of dead businessmen and disrupting the serenity of a domestic home by uncovering old wounds.

Buffalohead’s cured rawhide sculptures lean into abstraction, using traditionally Native American materials including lane-stitched beadwork and painted porcupine quills. Organically shaped, these works allude to Native mythologies of birth and emergence and celebrate the strength, perseverance, and knowledge of Native American womanhood. The exhibition’s centerpiece is a new sculpture by Buffalohead that references the forced expulsion of the Ponca people from their ancestral homelands in Nebraska to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma. Taking the form of a hand-sewn wool dress, the work is adorned with 739 handmade mirrored plaques that replicate US census records of the names and symbols of tribal members forced into making the march southward. An act of displacement and state violence that resulted in the deaths of nearly a third of the tribe, Buffalohead’s sculpture both laments her people’s lingering generational trauma and memorializes the bravery and hardship of their history.

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. She 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.