Terran Last Gun, Another Human Being Experience: Return Of The Unseen To Offer Guidance, 2025, ink and colored pencil on antique “The Tisch-Hine Co, Grand Rapids, Mich.” accounting ledger sheet, 16 5/8 x 55 in. (overall). Collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS, Acquired with funds provided by the Barton P. and Mary D. Cohen Art Acquisition Endowment at the JCCC Foundation
At the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College
The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art is excited to announce the recent acquisition of Terran Last Gun’s Another Human Being Experience: Return Of The Unseen To Offer Guidance (2025), a quadriptych work featuring ink and colored pencil on antique accounting ledger sheet paper.
Terran Last Gun, Saakwaynaamah’kaa (Last Gun), (b. 1989) 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).
Drawing inspiration from the land, cosmos, cultural narratives, and experiences, Last Gun pushes the boundaries of Piikani abstraction. In an interview with the Nerman Museum, he said, “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. … 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.”
“Really, ledger art is a form of documenting and recording changing environments. The original ‘traditional ledger art’, it’s very figurative, it’s very representational, it’s usually a scene, an event … So, you’re seeing these changing environments throughout the history of ledger art, and it gets to my work, which is — I’m still recording and documenting experiences, events, and feelings, more in this geometric, abstract way, though. … I love playing with abstraction because it just really leaves the door open to all sorts of interpretations.”
“I am often thinking about not just my own tribe, or not just Indigenous people of America, but all human beings, and what has that human story been like here on this continent. And obviously, it has continually changed and shifted, both people and animals. And so, [I’m] thinking about the Transcendental Painting Group of the 1940s and 50s, about the [ledger] paper, which is from 1923 — I’m thinking about all of these dates, and how those human experiences from each of those timelines are so different, but also [there are] parallels. … That’s what I was really thinking about when I titled this work Another Human Being Experience — I’m pulling from all of these different histories and bringing them together with my own history.”
Last Gun received his BFA in Museum Studies and AFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2016.
Learn more about this exhibition at nermanmuseum.org
