Asterisms are easy to spot. They are familiar star patterns like Orion’s Belt or the Big Dipper that are created, shared, and recognized by people all over the world. As opposed to officially recognized constellations, anyone can chart their own asterism. As they shift over the seasons and years, one way of relating to the unending field of stars is to create patterns and stories from them. 

In 50 years of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin, countless stars in the form of artists, staff, volunteers, funders, and visitors have come together to create their own asterisms in the relationships that continue to shape the Gallery. In this way, a gallery is not a building. It is an ever-evolving series of relationships where many versions of the same gallery overlap and coexist.

Asterisms is a four-part exhibition series presented across the Gallery’s 50th year that sees past exhibiting artists working in a peer-mentorship model with early-career artists of Treaty 7 Territory. The exhibition series is a non-hierarchical learning opportunity for artists at different stages in their careers to develop an exhibition together.

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Sspohtsi Piskaan - Sky Corral centres the Nitsitapii (Blackfoot) cosmos as an essential guide of time, the flow of the universe, and of living in reciprocity with our terrestrial neighbors like the bison. [1] In the collective spirit of the Asterisms series, Sikapinakii Low Horn and Adrian Stimson entwine their practices through collaborative painted murals, beading, sculptural installation, and sound.

Looking to the night sky, Low Horn and Stimson consider Niitsitapi understandings of the stars as guides for living within the natural cycles of the earth. In Niitsitapi cosmology, the stars are often referred to as Sky Beings or Sspomitapi that were sent to earth by Napi to help people. [2] Star formations like the Big Dipper aid as both clock and navigational guide while the Milky Way or Makoiyoh’sokoyi is a reminder for living in harmony with animate surroundings. [3]

Across the gallery walls, murals of the night sky create an ethereal pasture for hundreds of sculpted bison. Through an emergent process, both artists worked together on the same paintings without pre-determination of a finished result, turning the gallery into a place of improvisation and creation. The murals make reference to the Sspomitapi (Sky People) and Makoiyoh’sokoyi (the Milky Way) as they swirl around beaded medallions on the wall. Both found and beaded by the artists, their pictographs and symbols are a visual language that, in part, allude to the personas of each artist: the Buffalo Boy and the Blackfoot Cowboy.

Roaming through the murals of a Nitsitapii sky, hundreds of bison sculptures flock together on the floor of the gallery. Cast from Hydrostone and painted through community engagement projects that Stimson has led across the country, the bison re-populate the gallery and the landscape, filling the gallery floor in wavering arcs that recall Makoiyoh’sokoyi. Gallery visitors are invited to choose a bison sculpture to take home with them as a reminder for living in harmony with land and sky. [4]

Curated by: Adam Whitford, Curator & Exhibitions Manager
Lead Preparator: Arianna Richardson, Preparator: D. Hoffos

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[1]  Lisa Rowson, “Kainai elder and astrophysicist share stories and myths of the Blackfoot Skies.” University of Calgary, June 26, 2017,

[2] City of Edmonton, “Sspomitapi Ward: Star Person SS-POH-ME-TAH-PEE.” Transforming Edmonton, City of Edmonton, July 12, 2021, .

[3]  Carl Brave Rock, “The Wolf Trail Makoiyoh’sokoyi,” Building Brains Together, accessed November 5, 2026,

[4]  “The Wolf Trail Makoiyoh’sokoyi.”

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Curated by: Adam Whitford, Curator & Exhibitions Manager
Lead Preparator: Arianna Richardson, Preparator: D. Hoffos

Sikapinakii Low Horn utilizes a variety of mediums that include traditional and modern ways of creating, and within their work they find importance in sharing the history and stories of the Blackfoot people. They have utilized mediums of beadwork, digital illustration and creating murals with bold colour palettes that stretches across their work. Low Horn often depicts the Southern Alberta landscapes with Blackfoot iconography to educate others and to show the beauty within our surroundings.

Adrian Stimson is a member of the Siksika Nation, Treaty 7, Alberta.

Adrian has a BFA with distinction from the Alberta University of the Arts and MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. He has exhibited in three International Biennales, Photo Quai, Paris, France 2009, The Shoreline Dilemma, Toronto 2019 and Narin, Sydney 2020.

Adrian majored in painting, his paintings vary from abstract to realism, his bison paintings are melancholic, memorializing, political and sometimes whimsical.  

His performance art looks at identity construction, specifically the hybridization of the Indian, cowboy, shaman and Two Spirit being. Buffalo Boy, The Shaman Exterminator and Lord of the Plains are reoccurring personas. 

His installation work examines the residential school experience; he attended three residential schools in his life, works that speak to genocide, loss and resilience. 

His public art includes; Spirit of Alliance, Saskatoon; Bison Sentinel healing gardens of the FNU Regina. Inii Bison Heart, Animals that Roam the prairie, Sweet Grass Bison, Past Present Future count in Calgary, National Monument to Canada’s Mission in Afghanistan, In progress, Ottawa, From Earth to Sky in Airdrie and recently announced The Wandering Spirit, Indian Residential School Memorial, Calgary.

He was a participant in the Canadian Forces Artist Program, which sent him to Afghanistan in 2010. 

Adrian was awarded the Alumi of Influence award by the University of Saskatchewan in 2020, the Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2018. REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award – Hnatyshyn Foundation 2017. He was awarded the Blackfoot Visual Arts Award in 2009, the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005 and the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003.

The Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin acknowledges the support of the City of Lethbridge, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.