Last Gun's studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is stacked with the literal receipts of this annexation in the form of antique accounting ledgers, many of them from Montana. In tight cursive, they document the surge of a settler colonial grid over the Great Plains, as well as all sorts of micro-histories therein. "There was a note in one of them," Last Gun said. "Somebody had erased it, but I could still read it. It was like a crime report — it said, 'He beat her.'"

Using ink and colored pencils, Last Gun applies crisp geometric forms to sheets he excises from the tomes he collects. Some of the fields are Ellsworth Kelly–flat; others reveal the thousands of strokes that overtake tidy ledger cells. The underlying grids hold such extreme historical tension that adding anything to them feels charged, opening up an unlikely, unemphatic space for the artist to play.

Last Gun's work is a departure from ledger art, a Plains Indian tradition in which late 19th-century artists adapted to reservation confinement by making narrative art on ledgers instead of hides. Historical examples largely feature figurative imagery on blank sheets, whereas Last Gun tends toward geometrics that evoke midcentury architecture, vaporware desktop art — and cheerful censor bars.

Read the rest in the Summer 2026 issue of Art in America.