On loan to The Met The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Drawing book: Buffalo Dreamers ceremony
Black Hawk Native American
Not on view
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.
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