Drawing book: Buffalo Dreamers ceremony
Returned to lender
This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.Black Hawk’s extraordinary drawing book contains scenes of hunting, dance, warfare, and ceremony as well as natural history images. Here, Black Hawk depicted the ceremony of a medicine society whose members had visions involving buffalo. When performers donned masks, they transformed into the animal—hence, feet and hands become hooves in the drawing. The hoops are gateways into the spirit world. The ceremony assured that buffalo remained plentiful.
Plains men painted their autobiographies on animal hides until the 1880s, when they transferred their efforts to European media. Black Hawk’s book is the most complete surviving visual record of nineteenth-century Lakota life. During the winter of 1880–81, William Caton, a trader at the Cheyenne River Agency in Dakota Territory, offered the artist a store credit of fifty cents for each drawing. Later the pages were backed with linen and bound into a book.
Plains men painted their autobiographies on animal hides until the 1880s, when they transferred their efforts to European media. Black Hawk’s book is the most complete surviving visual record of nineteenth-century Lakota life. During the winter of 1880–81, William Caton, a trader at the Cheyenne River Agency in Dakota Territory, offered the artist a store credit of fifty cents for each drawing. Later the pages were backed with linen and bound into a book.
Artwork Details
- Title: Drawing book: Buffalo Dreamers ceremony
- Artist: Black Hawk (Native American, Sans Arc Lakota (Sioux), South Dakota, ca. 1832–89)
- Date: 1880–81
- Geography: United States, South Dakota
- Culture: Lakota (Sioux)
- Medium: Ink and pencil on paper
- Dimensions: Closed: H.10 1/4 × W. 16 1/2 in. (26 × 41.9 cm)
- Classifications: Paper-Drawings, Paper-Graphics
- Credit Line: Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection, Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY (T0614)
- Curatorial Department: The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing