Julie Buffalohead: The Wisdom of Wild Things

January 9-February 22, 2025

Jessica Silverman is delighted to present Julie Buffalohead‘s “The Wisdom of Wild Things,” the St. Paul-based artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, from January 9 to February 22, 2025. A member of the Ponca tribe of Oklahoma, Buffalohead is celebrated for her soulful painted canvases through which animal storytellers reveal complex truths. In this new series of nine paintings, Buffalohead looks to Native American creation lore and cycles of kinship to explore themes of emergence, resilience, and care. Her works explore the convergence of personal and collective myth-making.

INSTALLATION VIEW

GALLERY / GRID

SELECTED WORKS

Julie Buffalohead
Ribbon Skirt, 2024
Oil on canvas
32 x 48 inches / 81.3 x 121.9 cm

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Julie Buffalohead
Snoopy, 2024
Oil on canvas
32 x 48 inches / 81.3 x 121.9 cm

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In Snoopy (2024), the artist reflects on her own youth, depicting familiar objects from childhood such as a Snoopy stuffed toy and moccasins. These items float within an abstract design inspired by Ponca ribbonwork, accompanied by a deer, a dog, and a hare. This mediation on inheritance and comfort links the contours of memory with the experience of parenthood and ancestral guardianship. Here, and elsewhere in the series, ribbonwork formally anchors the composition. For Buffalohead, it serves as a kind of woman’s signature—a mark-making that encapsulates her female-centered mythologies.

Julie Buffalohead
Cherries, 2024
Oil on canvas
24 1/2 x 44 1/2 inches / 62.2 x 113 cm

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Across the series, deep reds and vibrant greens weave a connection between the body and the landscape. Wind Woman (2024) portrays a reclining, pregnant figure in a verdant expanse. In a dynamic, tumbling motion, the four hares embody trickster archetypes that are central to this series, heralding profound transformation and strength in the face of chaos and upheaval.

Julie Buffalohead
Wind Woman, 2024
Oil on canvas
24 1/2 x 44 1/2 inches / 62.2 x 113 cm

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Julie Buffalohead
The Wellspring, 2024
Oil on canvas
24 1/2 x 44 1/2 inches / 62.2 x 113 cm

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Throughout the exhibition, coyotes, deer, geese, and hares are central characters in the genesis of all things. In Wellspring (2024), a stack of books emerges from the birthing body of a brown bear, symbolizing the creation of knowledge. Buffalohead’s animal characters, as enigmatic as they are playful, bridge worldly and spiritual realms as conduits of protection and metamorphosis.

Julie Buffalohead
When Life Gives You Lemons, 2024
Oil on canvas
Overall: 27 1/2 x 36 inches / 69.85 x 91.44 cm

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Julie Buffalohead
The Smallest Gift, 2024
Oil on canvas
32 x 48 inches / 81.3 x 121.9 cm

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Julie Buffalohead
The Lick, 2024
Oil on canvas
Overall: 27 1/2 x 36 inches / 69.85 x 91.44 cm

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Julie Buffalohead
When Life Gives You Lemons, 2024
Oil on canvas
Overall: 27 1/2 x 36 inches / 69.85 x 91.44 cm

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Julie Buffalohead
The Smallest Gift, 2024
Oil on canvas
32 x 48 inches / 81.3 x 121.9 cm

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Julie Buffalohead
The Lick, 2024
Oil on canvas
Overall: 27 1/2 x 36 inches / 69.85 x 91.44 cm

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Like ribbonwork, “The Wisdom of Wild Things” intertwines personal narrative and ancestral wisdom to tell birth stories that are deeply intimate and universally resonant. With an ensemble of animal guardians, Buffalohead reveals new cosmologies of kinship and creation.

ARTIST BIO

Julie Buffalohead (b. 1972, Minneapolis, MN) 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. Buffalohead is a member of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma. She lives and works in St. Paul, MN.