In Kicking Bear, David Bradley adopts the visual language of Pop Art – most notably the serial repetition and high-key palette associated with Andy Warhol – to interrogate how Indigenous leaders have been flattened into historical icons. The Lakota chief Kicking Bear appears four times, each iteration rendered in shifting fields of pink, blue, green and yellow. Face and sky trade colors across the quadrants, destabilizing any single, authoritative image.

By repeating and recoloring a figure so often fixed in the historical imagination, Bradley exposes the ways Native identity has been reproduced, consumed and aestheticized. The work is at once playful and pointed: a critique of celebrity culture, historical reduction, and the mechanisms through which Indigenous figures are transformed into symbols rather than understood as complex individuals.