It’s obvious there are stories behind artist Julie Buffalohead’s work. Woodland animals interact – sometimes in very human settings and clothing. Sometimes with humans. There are trees and toys and birds on strings and sticks. They’re sly, shy, audacious, humorous and mystifying.

Buffalohead, who lives and works in St. Paul and has an exhibition of three large works opening Nov. 23 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, says her work is built on Native storytelling. She’s an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma.

Sometimes the stories behind her works are very specific, she says. Sometimes, she’ll begin a piece with an open-ended story that develops as the work is created. Earlier in her career, Buffalohead adds, the stories were more specific. “Lately, things tend to divert from the original intention, and I’m OK with that.”

While she knows the stories behind her work, she likes to see how others interpret the images, she says from the studio she and her partner, artist Nate Flink, share in the Dow Building on University Avenue in St. Paul.

The animals in Buffalohead’s work are specific to the Ponca Tribe, she says. “Animal figures in storytelling often represent other things.”

Buffalohead, who was born in 1972, says she found refuge in art when she was in high school. Her father headed up the American Indian Department at the University of Minnesota, the first university in America to offer an American Indian studies degree, she says. Her mother taught anthropology. She grew up in an environment where her parents had “a lot of different kinds of people in their lives”: poets, artists, students, friends.

But as an introvert, Buffalohead says, she was often alone with her drawings, stories and poems.

“I had a hard time in high school and spent a lot of time in the art department,” she says, calling it a “supportive environment.”

Buffalohead went to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where she trained in figurative oil painting. Her love of working on paper grew with the pieces of paper scattered on the kitchen table as her daughter (now 11) grew up.

Within the last three years, Buffalohead says, she’s been going to larger works. The three pieces in the solo exhibition at Mia are each about 12 feet long and 4-1/2 feet tall.

But it’s not all oil paint and paper drawings. Buffalohead says she also works with sculpture and printmaking — “whatever I’m feeling at the moment.” As she was putting the finishing touches on the Mia exhibit, she said she’s hoping to shift back to oil painting, but calls it a learned skill that requires her to immerse herself in the work and relearn it.

Buffalohead has been working out of the Dow for about four years. She doesn’t schedule her work, but says she’s able to get to the studio more often when her daughter is in school. “It’s important for artists to take breaks – important to reflect.”

“White Savior Complex,” one of the three big pieces in her show, reflects something that Native people experience a lot, Buffalohead says. “Good intentions” is written on a tag on a bird. There’s a raccoon clutching a Barbie doll and a Lone Ranger doll, both of which are looking at cellphones. The toys are playful, but are characters in the story.

“I often include toys in my work,” Buffalohead says. “My whole life has been toys the last 10 years.”

Buffalohead, Flink and their daughter live in St. Anthony Park. They’re rock climbers. “We like nature. We like being outside,” she says, adding that she’s also “obsessed” with raising heirloom tomatoes.

Buffalohead has been awarded numerous fellowships and grants, including the Guggenheim Fine Arts Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, and the McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts. Her work has been included in group exhibitions in Hong Kong, Indianapolis, Fargo and Phoenix. She’s had solo exhibitions at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, Denver Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, and Bockley Gallery.

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Twin Cities quilt exhibits look at racism and police brutality “Storytelling: Julie Buffalohead” was curated by Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Mia’s associate curator of Native American art, and Josephine Lampone, media and technology fellow.

“This exhibition offers new monumental works on paper that are especially powerful, as their scale quite literally immerses you in a story,” Ahlberg Yohe said in a news release. “Julie Buffalohead is known for using characters to reveal layers of meaning – personal, social, political.”

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