Artist Biography

Butch ThunderHawk is an enrolled member of Standing Rock Lakota/Dakota Nation. He currently resides in Bismarck, North Dakota and is a Tribal Arts Instructor at United Tribes Technical College. He studied Graphic Design at California College of Arts, Oakland California and later received a Fine Arts Fellowship from Dickinson State University.

Spending time on the Standing Rock Reservation as he grew up, ThunderHawk credits many local bearers of traditional knowledge for the skills they taught him. He is known both for his ledger drawings and his horse memorial effigies. He has been contracted to produce artworks for several national museums including Thomas Jefferson’s home in Virginia, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas, The North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame, the James Monroe House Museum, Virginia and Harvard’s Peabody Museum.

ThunderHawk is a Visiting Curator and Student Mentor at the Peabody Museum, where he has co- curated and assisted in the design work for exhibitions on Lewis and Clark and more recently on ledger art.