Julie Buffalohead: Stories of Becoming

On view February 6 through July 26, 2026

---

Julie Buffalohead, Becoming Red, 2025, oil on canvas, 60 x 84 x 2 1/2 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, copyright The Artist. Photo: Rik Sferra

---

Motherhood transforms you; Indigenous motherhood makes you conscious of impediments. As an Indigenous mother, I quickly realized that even the animals incorporated into the toys, books, and clothes available to my daughter were from distant places. I pondered how this builds empathy and care for the animals that are a part of our environment and how it shapes the teachings for our clans. Stories of Becoming features a new series by Julie Buffalohead that incorporates animals of Indigenous stories alongside the often contradictory stories from European folklore to inform the teachings and influence we impose on our youth, especially our daughters, and within our communities. Buffalohead’s practice shifted after becoming a mother.

A citizen of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, Julie Buffalohead (b. 1972) contrasts settler greed and desires with nurtured Indigenous sovereignty in her debut of the folktales series, which includes the works Becoming Red, Puss Out of Boots, Throwing Stars, and Receiving Growth. While Becoming Red and Puss Out of Boots highlight two Charles Perrault tales that foreground the male deception of women and girls, in Throwing Stars and Receiving Growth, the animals act as the allegorical figures of nurture, surrounding the central coyote and deer with bowls and seeking the warmth of their applique-decorated cloaks.

In another recent body of work, Buffalohead engages with the images of contemporary femininity and youth alongside the representation of traditional and modern protectors. For example, Oblivious incorporates the mythical creature, the water panther, as a familiarized spiked-back feline. One of the armadillos illustrated is offering water to the spirit and warding off danger as the woman rests, unaware of the gestures of the armadillo spirits on her behalf. In Travois, Buffalohead depicts her father’s childhood dog, compassionately hauling the materials of a pillow fort laden with references to Native stories.

Within Buffalohead’s works, we see the repetition of women and red dresses, with these figures representing enduring resilience and necessary interventions. Sewn within another red dress, Buffalohead recognizes the historic tribulations of removal in Ancestral (Honga), a wool trade cloth dress with mirrored tags listing the names of Ponca that were removed from Nebraska to Oklahoma in 1877. Each mirrored tag reflects the viewer and space surrounding the dress–positing this history and the impact removal continues to have now. Complete with cones at the hem, the red, white, and blue dress calls for reparative relations between the federal government and the Ponca Nation. Considering the weight and recognition of ancestors embellishing Honga, which is the Ponca word for “leader,” Buffalohead offers a gesture of the act for rematriation, the Indigenous women-led movement to restore pre-settler ancestral teachings. 

In accordance with the Indigenous imperative to see the land, animals, and other living beings represented, Julie Buffalohead’s work exhibits a rematriated children’s story with Indigenous morals, highlighting love for beings beyond oneself. As we reframe what we hold dear and what we pass down to our children, Buffalohead recenters the stories we need to hold onto–the ones that tell of the spirits and safeguards still present with us in our contemporary lives, the ones that remind us to care for our community, and the stories of pain that established our long histories of resiliency. Within Stories of Becoming, Buffalohead grounds her depictions in space and a more defined landscape, materializing the reality, authenticity, and validity of Indigenous stories while still leaving room for humor.

Buffalohead received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minneapolis, MN and her MFA from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, and Guggenheim Fellowship.

—Kendra R. Greendeer, PhD, Ho-Chunk and Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, Ihlenfeld Curator of Collaborative and Community Exhibitions, Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN