Julie Buffalohead (b. 1972) enrolled Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, is a visual artist living and working in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1995 and her MFA from Cornell University in 2001.
Buffalohead has received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2019), the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant (2019), the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2016), and the McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts (2015), among other fellowships and accolades.
Buffalohead has held notable public solo exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019-20), the Denver Art Museum (2018-19), Highpoint Center for Printmaking (2015-16), the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe (2015), and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (2012-13).
Buffalohead was featured in the traveling exhibition Hearts of Our People (2019-20). Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (2019-20), Para-Site in Hong Kong (2019), Walton Arts Center, Fayetteville Arkansas (2018-19), and the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis (2017-18). Additionally she has exhibited and spoken at many universities (and cultural venues) in recent years.
Buffalohead creates visual narratives told by animal characters that have personhood, agency, and individuality. She connects the mythical with the ordinary and the imaginary with the real, offering a space to which viewers can bring their own experiences. She coaxes us to discover additional layers of meaning–social, historical, political, personal – using metaphor, wisdom, and wit.
