When the kingdom of the four-legs turns away from the two-legs, the message is overt and unavoidable: STOP! The fox, badger, birds, prairie dog, and deer in Julie Buffalohead’s mixed-media work, Turn a Blind Eye, are injured, overwhelmed, and blindfolded. In a scene of disconnect from the natural world, the creatures who share the composition are subjected to the cowgirl: an Annie Oakley wannabe who rejoices with glee, yet fails to regard the humbled and desperate condition of the creatures beside her. A badger ponders the tiny dead bird on his back wearing a horse head mask. A slumped prairie dog holds two signs, one with a frown, the second with a smile, which he reluctantly raises. The doe tries to remove the mask across her eyes, and a killdeer with a heavily cast leg stands beside her. The fox, in an ungainly position, appears about to stand on its head. Nothing in the arrangement of creatures signals that the natural world is in balance, unharmed, or in a posture of normalcy.

       Buffalohead is recognized for incorporation of trickster animals and morphed creatures, often in human clothing, as pop art characters that mirror the unbalanced state of the natural world. Human interference with nature, the planet, ecology, balance, and violence become featured subjects in her work. Tricksters such as the rabbit, tropic coyote, and raven have permeated Native art for decades, but has their inclusion for so long worn out their cautionary significance? Their relationship with us is far from copacetic. The notion of using animals as red flags is significantly hampered by popular, Disney-like characterization and mass commercial marketing often used to normalize their presence amid a human sphere. The appearance is cute, cuddly, and familiar yet separated from the human world, and Buffalohead underscores that imbalance, with the four-legs and birds crowded together to avoid the gun-toting cowgirl. She dominates the left side of the composition in a pose familiar today: guns in each hand. All the while, the animals fail to regard her and attempt to avoid the dangerous nature of her presence. Buffalohead observed, “in my recent work, I was thinking about violence and images from Westerns and the glamorization of violence and guns. I was trying to weave a narrative around some of those images.”¹ The tale of a human with a gun and victims of aggression is more relevant than ever in recent times. The wild Wild Western remains unchecked as a cautionary story, transformed into reality for some humans while the animal kingdom continues to suffer at their hands.

       Turn a Blind Eye, from the Uncommon Stories series, articulates the violence in daily survival. In her painting, Buffalohead places before us damaged and deceased representatives of human interaction, innocent victims of aggression who were never a threat. Like the ledger drawings of the nineteenth century Plains tribes, there is no ground line or horizon to anchor the figures. The fashionable cowgirl is easily at home in the Santa Fe gallery setting where Natives and non-Natives dress up in chic western garb fashioned from the styles of past. The visual language communicated in the work takes aim at the observer to translate the ambiguous relationship with cryptic, droll irony. Native humor can be cutting, edgy, and secondary, however, the perspective often aims to warn, teach, or justify the message in many unlikely—but familiar—forms.

¹ Mason Riddle, “Julie Buffalohead: Uncommon Stories,” in First American Art Magazine, no. 5 (winter 2014), 66.


Image courtesy Bockley Gallery.