This exhibition refers to hidepainting -or painted animal skins-, a widespread artistic practice among the so-called “Plains Indians” of North America (Sioux, Blackfoot, Crow, Apache, Lakota, Arapaho, Kiowa and Cheyenne).

Among the various objects on display-parfleches, crushers, quivers, leather scrapers, miniature tepees-a painted buffalo hide, analyzed and interpreted by Smithsonian Institution researchers, a study coordinated by ethnographer Candace Greene, PhD, stands out.

According to this research, the skin painted with ten autobiographical scenes was made by several blackfoot artists at different times, between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.