Star WallowingBull

09.04.2026 – 01.09.2027

exhibition sponsors

Gareld Krieg
Bev Ross
Sarah Grau & Vince Long
Deborah Anspach & John Hanson
Anonymous

related events

Exhibition Celebration with Star WallowingBull and Todd Bockley of Bockley Gallery
Thursday, September 17 // Reception 4:30 PM

Star WallowingBull
Futuristic Time Keepers

Charles M. Bair Gallery

September 4, 2026 – January 9, 2027

Futuristic Time Keepers marks Star WallowingBull’s (White Earth Ojibwe/Arapaho) first exhibition in Montana, presenting a selection of new and recent works that merge Indigenous cultural references with American pop culture, autobiography, and mechanical systems. Working with colored pencil on paper and acrylic on canvas, the artist builds densely layered compositions where figures, symbols, and environments interlock in indeterminate time structures.

WallowingBull’s practice is shaped by two formative mentorships. Under his father, artist Frank Big Bear, he developed a disciplined foundation in drawing through highly detailed colored pencil work defined by precision and accumulation. He later studied with Pop artist James Rosenquist, a mentorship that expanded his practice into large-scale acrylic painting and deepened his engagement with the visual language of American mass media. Within this context, Indigenous identity is not presented as fixed or historical, but as adaptive and ongoing — into cosmic futures.

WallowingBull’s compositions function as visual networks in which memory, media, and lived experience are continuously assembled through layered structures that resist simplification. While his work is often discussed in relation to Pop Art, it remains grounded in Indigenous frameworks and autobiography, reworking familiar imagery through a Native futurist lens and reframing cultural imagery as something active and continually evolving.

About the Artist:

The vividly intricate colored-pencil drawings and acrylic paintings of Star WallowingBull (Ojibwe/Arapaho) explore intersections of Indigeneity and United States pop culture, conceptually and oftentimes playfully exposing fundamental mechanisms of control.

WallowingBull’s solo exhibitions include Mapping and (Meta)Morphing, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (2025); Machine Head, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (2021); Transformer, Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND (2015–16); and Mechanistic Renderings, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Sante Fe, NM (2015).

His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation, Detroit Institute of the Arts, MI (2025–26); Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always, Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, New Brunswick, NJ (2025); and The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2023–24).

WallowingBull’s work resides in notable public collections such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the British Museum, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Tweed Museum of Art, and the Weisman Art Museum. He is a recipient of the Jim Denomie Memorial Scholarship, as well as awards from the Jerome Foundation, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and the Bush Foundation. WallowingBull is an enrolled member of the White Earth Band of Chippewa. He was raised in the Twin Cities and is now based in Fargo, North Dakota.