Terran Last Gun

The works of Terran Last Gun will be on view at the Armory Gallery January 29 through March 18.

Join us for the opening reception and meet the artist at the exhibition opening reception on January 29, from 4-6 PM.

About the Artist

Terran Last Gun, Saakwaynaamah’kaa (Last Gun), (Piikani, USA, b. 1989, Browning, MT) is an enrolled citizen of the Piikani (Blackfeet) of Montana and a visual artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Piikani are one of four nations that make up the Blackfoot Confederacy, collectively called the Niitsitapi (Real People). Born and raised on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, Last Gun works across media to explore color, form, and abstraction. Drawing inspiration from land, cosmos, cultural narratives, and experiences, Last Gun pushes the boundaries of Piikani modernism.

He has exhibited at venues including the Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Snowmass Village, CO); Glacier Art Museum (formerly the Hockaday Museum of Art) (Kalispell, MT); Missoula Art Museum (Missoula, MT); Bates Museum of Art (Lewiston, ME); Newberry Library (Chicago, IL); The 8th Floor (New York, NY); Museum of the Plains Indian (Browning, MT); Contemporary at Blue Star (San Antonio, TX); and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe, NM), among others.

Last Gun received his BFA in Museum Studies and AFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2016. He has received awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 2024 Biennial Award, First Peoples Fund 2020 Artist in Business Leadership Fellowship, Santa Fe Art Institute 2018 Story Maps Fellowship, and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture 2016 Goodman Aspiring Artist Fellowship. Last Gun was named one of the 2022 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now in Southwest Contemporary.

Artist Statement

Color and shape are the building blocks of my art practice and connect me to my Piikani heritage. As a Piikani visual artist, my influences are Blackfoot-painted lodges, hides, and war shirts, as well as Blackfoot archaeology throughout Montana and Alberta, Canada. The ancient human narrative of North America, and more specifically of the Blackfoot People, has always fascinated me. Other sources of inspiration include ancient sites, petroglyphs, pictographs, pictorial imagery, rocks, rock formations, and glacial erratics. My work often employs geometric aesthetics and contributes to an ancient yet continuum Piikani narrative. It bridges the ancient to the contemporary, all while creating visual color stimulation in my varied approaches to making art: printmaking, painting, photography, and ledger drawing that utilizes antique ledger sheets and documents. I am revealing fragments of time, history, and Indigenous abstraction—an art form that has continued to survive in North America for thousands of years. My work is bold, vivid, and has abstract minimalist qualities that are potent in meaning, content, and place.