“My work is focused on color and form, and how they interact with one another,” says Piikani(Blackfeet) citizen and visual artist Terran Last Gun. The Piikani of Montana are one of four nations that make up the Blackfoot Confederacy and are collectively referred to as the Niitsitapi (Real People). Last Gun’s work is deeply influenced by his cultural heritage, particularly Blackfoot painted lodges, hides, war shirts, and archaeology throughout Montana and Alberta. His work explores the relationships between color, shape, land, cosmos, cultural narratives, and personal experiences, which he describes as the “building blocks of my art practice.” He works with a range of media including printmaking, painting, photography, and ledger drawing.
His upcoming show at Hecho a Mano will feature a new body of ledger drawings, a medium that has been the focus of his work for the past several years. Its history dates back to at least the 1860s, when it was being developed by incarcerated Great Plains people who created narrative works of art using whatever materials they could access: “usually sheets of paper that were torn out of ledger books and given to these prisoners,” Last Gun explains, as well as crayons, colored pencils, and sometimes watercolors.
“Ledger art is very unique to Indigenous people,” Last Gun says, interpreting the art form as an expression of resourcefulness in documenting experience. Last Gun’s own ledger art is more geometric than representational, yet still functions as a kind of eloquent record. “I am often pondering how we relate to color and form, both individually and collectively as human beings,” he says.
His visual vocabulary draws from Piikani geometric aesthetics and collective narratives that inform his explorations of color and shape. He often uses antique ledger sheets, documents and records as materials for creating his ledger art in the tradition of the artists who originally developed the medium. His work is luminous, vivid, and portrays abstract minimalist qualities rich in significance informed by a deep sense of time and place.
While the shapes Last Gun employs in his work may appear to be purely abstract, they draw on a visual vocabulary he developed in studying ledger art created by his father, Terrance Guardipee, as well as painted lodges used by the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy. He layers symbols used to indicate the stars and cosmos, mountains and landscapes, and animals to create works of Indigenous abstraction that are a part of a cultural continuum of expression from the ancient to the contemporary.
Born in Montana, Last Gun now lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He received his A.S. degree from the Blackfeet Community College in 2011, and later studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts where he earned a BFA in Museum Studies and AFA in Studio Arts in 2016. He has received awards from the First Peoples Fund 2020 Artist in Business Leadership Fellowship, Santa Fe Art Institute 2018 Story Maps Fellowship, and Museum of Indian Arts and Culture 2016 Goodman Fellowship. He was also named one of the 2022 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now in Southwest Contemporary.