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Artworks
Terran Last Gun
Piikani/Blackfeet, b. 1989, Browning, MT
Lives and works in Santa Fe, NM
Terran Last Gun is an enrolled citizen of the Piikani Nation, one of the four nations collectively known as the Blackfoot People or Niitsitapi (Real People). Drawing on the visual languages of the Piikani Nation—specifically, its painted lodges, hide art, and war shirts, as well as Blackfoot archaeology, his work centers around an exploration of color and form, and a visual documentation of nature, cosmos, cultural narratives, and personal experiences.
Last Gun works across multiple media, including printmaking, photography, and ledger drawings, a Plains pictorial tradition that emerged in the nineteenth century as Indigenous artists adapted older practices of hide painting to new materials. The focus of Last Gun’s practice for the past several years, his ledger drawings layer geometric references to the stars and cosmos, mountains and landscapes, and animals onto antique sheets and documents. The works reveal fragments of time, history, and the cultural continuity of Piikani abstraction.
In 2027, Terran Last Gun: Mystery Beings of the Above World will open at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, AL. Notable group exhibitions include Paper Trails: Unfolding Indigenous Narratives at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM (2026); Once Within a Time, the 12th SITE Santa Fe International (2025); Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always, curated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (2025), and Exploding Native Inevitable, a traveling exhibition that originated at the Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME in 2023 and traveled to three museums nationally.
Last Gun is a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award (2024), First Peoples Fund Artist in Business Leadership Fellowship (2020), Santa Fe Art Institute Story Maps Fellowship (2018), and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Goodman Aspiring Artist Fellowship (2016), as well as residencies at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center and IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (2017). His work is held in the collections including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Hanover NH; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; Microsoft Art Collection; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC, among others.
Photo by Samantha Tracy, courtesy the artist
