'Color and form 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...Other sources of inspiration include ancient sites, petroglyphs, pictographs, pictorial imagery, rocks, rock formations, and glacial erratics.
Terran Last Gun, Saakwaynaamah’kaa (Last Gun), (b. 1989, Browning, MT) is an enrolled citizen of the Piikani Nation (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.
Last Gun is included in Indigenous Identites: Here, Now & Always, curated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, opening February 2025. Recently, he exhibited ledger drawings in Modern Recordings of Ancient Blackfoot Symbology, a two-artist exhibtion (with Last Eagle), at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO; Piikani Visual Sovereignty, at Hockaday Museum of Art, Kalispell, MT; Future Cosmic Energy, Missoula Art Museum, Missoula, MT; and Exploding Native Inevitable, a traveling exhibition organized by Brad Kahlhamer and Dan Millers, Scottsdale Museum of Art (SMoCA), and Bates Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME; 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 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.