Enduring Buffalo

Exhibition Website

May 12 2024 - Dec 1 2024

Baltimore Museum of Art

Baltimore, MD

This exhibition reflects upon the buffalo as essential to Indigenous lifeways on the Plains since time immemorial. Euro-American colonizers and the United States government attempted to eradicate the species in a calculated strategy to subdue Native people and force them onto reservations in the late 19th century. 


This effort fundamentally transformed Native artmaking, both historically and presently. The critical importance of the buffalo within Plains Indigenous cultures can be felt across artworks that pre- and post-date the attempted eradication of the species.

Featured artists whose names are known to us include:
  • Pawnee Bear Doctors Society, Nebraska
  • Making Medicine (O-kuh-ha-tuh) (Cheyenne, b. circa 1844, Indian Territory, now OK; d. 1931, Watonga, OK)
  • Bear’s Heart (Nockkoist) (Cheyenne, b. 1851, Great Plains, d. 1882,Indian Territory, now Oklahoma)
  • Long Soldier (Húnkpapȟa Lakȟóta, active 19th–20th century)
  • Cannupa Hanska Luger (enrolled Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota heritage, b. 1979, Standing Rock Indian Reservation, ND)


Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum is a wide-reaching project that proposes Indigenizing interventions to address and refuse the oppressive hierarchies of coloniality that pervade the realm of culture and serve as the underpinning of museums. The project encompasses community engagement, a series of nine monographic and thematic exhibitions, institutional interventions, public programs, and an untraditional catalog.

Credit: Overview from museum website

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