Two paintings in the exhibition consider type-cast cliches of Nativeness through the artist’s wry and ineffable humor. In The Noble Savage (2022), a conjured vision of the archetypal noble savage appears rendered in outline against a background of gestural pink brushwork. The figure is offered trinkets—strings of beads and snakes—by a cadre of otters. Standing opposite is the trickster coyote in a red dress and high heels. With arms crossed the coyote casts doubt upon the proceedings, begging questions of representation and ideas of Native mystique.

Demonstrating the artist’s command of color and space, painterly figures are suspended in jewel-toned compositions that suggest a kind of intimacy in which no hierarchy exists between background and foreground. In Isle of Dogs (2022), an expanse of teal brushwork holds an elderly mother lying on her side among a family of resting dogs. A muskrat, who is a hero in Ojibwe stories for gathering earth to formulate the world, brushes the woman’s hair. This gesture of mothering the mother considers kinship within the context of a creation narrative.

Notions of nostalgia and childhood are distilled together with contemporary culture in Buffalohead’s pen and ink-wash drawings. In Monopoly (2022), an otter examines the classic boardgame, while a coyote and badger sit in a cardboard Amazon delivery box, setting sail a make-believe ship and drawing reference to another kind of monopoly.

In all the works, witty and whimsical scenes explore ideas of duality and contradiction with animals as stand-ins for humans, but also, creatures from whom humans can learn. As Buffalohead says, “I’m always waiting for animals to talk again.”

Julie Buffalohead (b. 1972, Minneapolis, MN) received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1995 and her MFA from Cornell University in 2001. 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, Washington, D.C. Her work is in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Walker Art Center, MN; 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. Buffalohead is a member of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma. She lives and works in St. Paul, MN.