Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Pipe Bowl
Not on view
This sculpture portrays the buffalo as a symbol of continued life and procreative power. It also celebrates the animal’s physical strength. Rooted to the ground over the form of a ridged phallus, the monumental bull looks straight ahead with nostrils flaring, a stance of might and potency. Plains people considered the buffalo a sacred relative. The near extinction of the herds by 1881, through Euro-American commercial hunting, threatened the physical and cultural survival of Native peoples.
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