NATIVE ART EXHIBITIONS
CURRENT
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s to 1970s
Action/Abstraction Redefined is the first major traveling exhibition to highlight modern Native American art through the lens of 20th-century Abstract Expressionism, Color Field, and Hard-Edge Painting. Comprising 52 works by 36 artists—including George Morrison, Fritz Scholder, and T.C. Cannon—the exhibition showcases work by artists who redefined the concept of abstraction at midcentury and pushed the boundaries of Native art.
Drawn from the collection of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, a school where revolutionary approaches encouraged experimentation and risk-taking, Action/Abstraction Redefined explores how artists combined New York School art influences with Native art traditions and challenged stereotypical expectations of American Indian art.
Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts
Little Rock, AR
On view through May 26, 2024
Fritz Scholder, New Mexico #21, 1965
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
For his solo exhibition at MCA Denver, Steven J. Yazzie (Diné/Laguna Pueblo) presents recent painting, drawing, sculpture, and video works that reflect on his shifting perceptions of and relationship with landscape. Yazzie is a multidisciplinary artist who explores the complexities of an Indigenous experience as it relates to personal identity, community relationships, and a connection to the land as the source of life, stories, conflict, and healing.
MCA Denver
Denver, CO
On view through May 26, 2024
Steven Yazzie: Meandered
Steven Yazzie, EARTH LINES - DINÉTAH 1, 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
What happens when Native American and American art is seen together, rather than in separate places? Might we look at these artworks in a new way? What stories and connections emerge from this new way of being together?
These are some of the questions that guided a collaboratively reimagined suite of galleries. This Indigenous-led, consensus-based curatorial experiment is based on Dakota philosophies and ways of being. It includes thematic installations that center “place”, honor the living land, explore the power of relationality — the idea that we are all connected and build relationships based on this awareness – and ends with a reflection, inviting visitors to join us in imagining the future we wish to have. What does it look and feel like? How do we build it together?
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Minneapolis, MN
On view through May 27, 2024
Reimagining Native/American Art
Christi Belcourt, It’s a Delicate Balance, 2021
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
This exhibition features the multi-disciplinary work of Cannupa Hanska Luger (b. 1979), an artist who is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European descent. Working with a wide array of media—video, performance, ceramic, textiles, found materials, and most recently paper—Luger activates cultural and social awareness relating to contemporary experience through his combinatory large-scale installations. He creates vivid aesthetic environments where Indigenous voices are amplified and rediscovered through the formulation of his inventive artistic vocabulary that counters a colonialist or anthropological gaze.
Nevada Museum of Art
Reno, NV
On view through June 2, 2024
Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless
Cannupa Hanska Luger, Untitled, 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Red is beautiful. For Robert Houle (Saulteaux Anishinaabe, Sandy Bay First Nation, b. 1947), color is powerful, expressive, and lies at the foundation of his artistic practice. Throughout his career, his work has embodied and expressed what he most values: the creative moment, the earth, and the sacred.
The spiritual power of ancient Indigenous knowledge not only endures, but also is essential to Houle’s creation of contemporary art. He works at the nexus of Western and Indigenous artistic traditions, whether he pierces the canvas with porcupine quills, reworks a grand history painting from an Indigenous perspective, or reconceives what is sacred while acknowledging his ancestors. In this way, Houle constructs a transcultural path forward with color, light, and gesture, grounded in Indigenous sovereignty. Red Is Beautiful, the first major retrospective of his work, celebrates more than fifty years of this singular artist’s remarkable career.
National Museum of the American Indian
Washington D.C.
On view through June 2, 2024
Robert Houle: Red Is Beautiful
Robert Houle, Red is Beautiful, 1970
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles
Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles showcases more than 30 textiles and related items from the extensive collection at MIAC. Historical and contemporary weavings will be displayed alongside materials, tools, digital prints, photographs, and other immersive media. “As forms of visual storytelling, Diné weaving and photography are created in collaboration with one’s surroundings,” said Rapheal Begay (Diné), photographer and Horizons co-curator. “Diné Bikéyah is not only our home but is also a source of inspiration for design, color, and connection to the past, present, and future. Our reciprocal relationship to land, language, and memory reflects our creativity and resilience as five-fingered beings.” Individually and collectively, the cultural belongings and artworks on view tell multiple stories. They reveal the material traces of artistic innovation and creative expression that have been overlooked until now. By challenging the colonial contexts of collection, preservation, and display, the Horizons curatorial team offers a new interpretation of MIAC’s historic collection.
Museum of Indian Arts and Culture
Santa Fe, NM
On view through June 2, 2024
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery
Pueblo Indian pottery embodies four main natural elements: earth, water, air, and fire. It is an art form literally of land and place, and is one of America’s ancient Indigenous creative expressions.
Foregrounding Pueblo voices and aesthetics, Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery is the first community-curated Native American exhibition in the history of The Met. The effort features more than one hundred historical, modern, and contemporary clay works and offers a critical understanding of Pueblo pottery as community-based knowledge and personal experience.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, NY
On view through June 4, 2024
The Met Museum
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
In the world of art, Western European art historical canon and hierarchy often places “fine art” and “craft” at odds with one another. “Crafting Resistance,” an original exhibition of the ASU Art Museum on view from Aug. 19 through July 14, 2024, seeks to explore the ways in which we understand and view the term “craft” and its relationship to fine art. The exhibition showcases new and existing work by artists Merryn Omotayo Alaka and Sam Frésquez, both ASU School of Art alums, as well as Sama Alshaibi, Andrew Erdos, Maria Hupfield, Yasue Maetake, Jayson Musson, Eric-Paul Riege and Curtis Talwst Santiago. It is organized by independent curator Erin Joyce, with support from Abigail Sutton, ASU Art Museum Windgate Intern.
Arizona State University Art Museum
Tempe, AZ
On view through July 14, 2024
Crafting Resistance
Eric-Paul Riege Diné, blankets have warmed us for a long time, why not keep making MORE. a blanket for a blanket. they get cold 2, 2021
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Native American Art of the 20th Century: The William P. Healey Collection
Native American Art of the 20th Century: The William P. Healey Collection celebrates a transformative gift of outstanding works by Native American artists active across the 20th century. The promised gift of 100 works establishes a critical junction between the Museum’s deep collection of Indigenous art pre-1920 and a growing emphasis on the contemporary.
Beginning in the 1920s largely self-taught artists such as Fred Kabotie, Tonita Peña, and Carl Sweezy established professional careers as easel painters in New Mexico and Oklahoma. Soon after, instructors trained Native students in the emerging genre of Native American painting. The Healey collection also charts significant changes to Native studio art following World War II. In 1962 the founding of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe helped expand the range of Native art practices, bringing the field in direct conversation with mainstream styles and media. The exhibition will showcase leading IAIA artists Fritz Scholder and T. C. Cannon.
Native American Art of the 20th Century: The William P. Healey Collection is cocurated by artist Tony Abeyta and Alexander Brier Marr, associate curator for Native American art.
St. Louis Art Museum
St. Louis, MO
On view through July 14, 2024
George Morrison, Ephemeration, 1962
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
To Take Shape and Meaning: Form and Design in Contemporary American Indian Art
Organized by guest curator Nancy Strickland Fields (Lumbee), director/curator of the Museum of the Southeast American Indian at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, the upcoming exhibition To Take Shape and Meaning: Form and Design in Contemporary American Indian Art features 3-D works by 75 Indigenous artists from throughout the United States and Canada, including eight from North Carolina.
To Take Shape and Meaning brings together a wide range of Indigenous world views, ideas, experiences, traditions, cultures, and media, and emphasizes the continuity and evolution of Native arts, both collective and individual expressions of Native America. This project also supports the NCMA’s ongoing goal of presenting expansive and inclusive art historical narratives in all aspects of the Museum, and of bringing in contemporary artists whose works focus on themes that are particularly relevant to the concerns of the current moment.
North Carolina Museum of Art
Raleigh, NC
On view through July 28, 2024
Virgil Ortiz, Convergence, Defenders Descend from Portal to Pueblo, 2023
MUSEUM INSTALLATION
Mercedes Dorame: Woshaa’axre Yaang’aro (Looking Back)
For the inaugural installation of its new Rotunda Commission series, Getty has invited Los Angeles-based artist Mercedes Dorame to create a special installation in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Entrance Hall at the Getty Center. On view June 20, 2023, through July 28, 2024, Mercedes Dorame: Woshaa’axre Yaang’aro (Looking Back), explores how we position ourselves in our relation to the land we inhabit, asking viewers to adjust their perspective and imagine a point of view that prioritizes the original caretakers of Tovaangar (the Los Angeles Basin and Southern Channel Islands).
Getty Museum
Los Angeles, CA
On view through July 28, 2024
Mercedes Dorame, Woshaa’axre Yaang’aro (Looking Back), 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village centers Pueblo perspectives on the contexts that informed the social and cultural landscape of Taos from 1915 to 1927, when the Taos Society of Artists (TSA), a group of Anglo-American painters, was active. Featuring the Colby Museum’s collection, including a key group of works from the distinguished Lunder Collection, as well as select loans, it also sheds light on issues that affect Native people today, in the Southwest and beyond. The exhibition puts paintings by TSA artists in dialogue with works by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Native American artists to illuminate the varied, complex, and rich art histories of the United States Southwest, in particular the city of Taos and Taos Pueblo, New Mexico.
Colby College Museum of Art
Waterville, ME
On view through July 28, 2024
Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village
Tony Abeyta, Citadel, 2021
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
In his first ever UK solo exhibition, American artist Jeffrey Gibson (b.1972) will create a new site-specific installation for the Sainsbury Centre.
Gibson will create a vast installation that incorporates 19th and 20th century objects from Indigenous cultures across North America. Alongside the beadwork, parfleche and dolls that are common motifs in Gibson’s work, I can choose (2024) will consider the artist’s relationship with these items alongside how they are displayed within public facing museums.
The exhibition will illuminate the rich practice of abstraction in Indigenous art, going against the common narrative within UK museums that abstraction only emerged in the 20th century. It continues a specific focus on this area of art from the Sainsbury Centre, following last year’s successful exhibition Empowering Art: Indigenous Creativity and Activism from North America’s Northwest Coast.
Sainsbury Centre
Norwich, UK
On view through August 4, 2024
Jeffrey Gibson: no simple word for time
Jeffrey Gibson, I Can Choose, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
On Earth features six artists who use moving images to explore the complex relationships between humans and the natural environment. The film and video works in this exhibition present land as a central figure, introducing themes of temporality, ritual, memory, territory, loss, and birth. Offering critical readings on the often destructive relationship between humankind and the earth, the artists also advance visions for alternative futures. The artworks directly engage with challenging realities, while acknowledging the joy, creativity, and growth that a relationship with land can provide.
Represented are the artists Ali Cherri (born 1976, Beirut, Lebanon); Jeffrey Gibson (born 1972, Colorado Springs, CO); Sky Hopinka (born 1984, Ferndale, WA); Ana Mendieta (born 1948, Havana, Cuba, died 1985); and Rivane Neuenschwander (born 1967, Belo Horizonte, Brazil), in collaboration with Cao Guimarães (born 1965, Belo Horizonte, Brazil).
Pulitzer Arts Foundation
St. Louis, MO
On view through August 4, 2024
On Earth
Sky Hopinka, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason, 2021
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Plains Art Museum is honored to feature over 50 works of art from nationally acclaimed artist Oscar Howe (Yanktonai Dakota). Oscar Howe: Ikíćiksapa, focuses on Howe’s complete artistic process from the drawings he developed on his drafting table to his completed paintings ready for the gallery wall. The gallery’s unique presentation of Howe’s artistic process from beginning to end, from drafted drawing to finished painting, helps highlight Howe’s graphic quality and intense artistic design he developed throughout his career. The gallery also includes a re-creation of Howe’s studio, with both replicas of his materials along with items from his actual studio space, to help put you in the mindset of this renowned and talented artist.
Ikíćiksapa is a Dakota phrase translating to “Instruct one in the right way” and describes an important piece of Howe’s life and career. Howe has always received recognition for his talents and intelligence, as he was originally gifted the traditional name of, “Ksapa” translating to “The Intelligent One” in Dakota.
Plains Art Museum
Fargo, ND
On view through August 17, 2024
Oscar Howe: Ikíćiksapa
Oscar Howe, Ritual Dancer, 1965
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Rose B. Simpson is an artist, a mother, and the daughter of a matrilineal line of ceramicists and potters spanning nearly 70 generations. The exhibition presents a comprehensive survey of the last decade of Rose B. Simpson’s artistic career. The show positions Simpson’s work in the greater context of family and womanhood, exploring the relationships between the artist and her maternal relatives and their influences on her work. A member of the Santa Clara Pueblo (Kha'p'oe Ówîngeh) in New Mexico, Simpson combines her ancestral and contemporary knowledge to create mixed media sculptures using clay, organic found items, and mechanical hardware.
Featured alongside Simpson's work will be sculptures by her mother, Roxanne Swentzell, a prolific artist whose expressive figures inspired Simpson; her grandmother, Rina Swentzell, who was a well-known academic, activist, and architect; and her great-grandmother, the artist Rose Naranjo, who was the center of gravity that connected Simpson’s many talented and successful relatives.
Norton Museum of Art
West Palm Beach, FL
On view through September 1, 2024
Rose B. Simpson: Journeys of Clay
Rose Simpson, please hold 1, 2021
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Reflecting Lenses: Twenty Years of Photography at the Gorman Museum
For decades, the Gorman Museum of Native American Art has hosted artists who advance Indigenous visual sovereignty – understood as the assertion of Indigenous autonomy through visual media. Photographs are now central to the museum’s collection of contemporary art. Themes that are prevalent in the collection relate to social and environmental justice, connection to homeland, and Indigenous empowerment in the contemporary world. This exhibition presents highlights from the collection by more than two dozen Indigenous artists from North America, Aotearoa, and Australia.
Gorman Museum of Native American Art
Davis, CA
On view through September 1, 2024
Sarah Sense, Hinushi, 2024
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
MoMA PS1 will present the first major solo exhibition of fourth-generation Navajo weaver Melissa Cody (b. 1983, No Water Mesa, Arizona), co-organized with the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP). On view from April 4 through September 2, 2024, Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies spans the last decade of her practice, showcasing over 30 weavings and featuring three major new commissions. Cody uses traditional methods, sophisticated patterns, and handmade dyes to underscore tapestries as potent technologies for visual storytelling, nodding to their influence on present-day digital automation. Honoring the medium’s histories, Cody’s works underscore critical conversations around placemaking and Indigenous futures through resilience and ingenuity.
MOMA PS1
Queens, NY
On view through September 2, 2024
Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies
Melissa Cody, World Traveler, 2014.
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans
Curated by artist, educator, editor, activist, and writer Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans highlights artworks by nearly 50 living Native artists that powerfully visualize Indigenous culture and knowledge of the land. Brought together by Smith, this multigenerational, diverse group of artists works across the United States and spans a range of practices, including weaving, beadwork, sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, performance, and video. Their means of making reflects the diversity of Native expression according to individual, regional, and cultural identities. At the same time, these works share a worldview informed by a reverence and concern for the land.
The Land Carries Our Ancestors is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where it was on view from September 24, 2023, through January 15, 2024. It was the first exhibition of Native art presented at the National Gallery of Art in 30 years and the first exhibition of contemporary Native art in 70 years.
The New Britain Museum of American Art
New Britain, CT
On view through September 12, 2024
Steven Yazzie, Orchestrating a Blooming Desert, 2003,
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Marie Watt: LAND STITCHES WATER SKY explores steel and glass—materials deeply tied to Western Pennsylvania’s industrial history—from Watt’s Indigenous perspective as a citizen of the Seneca Nation with German-Scot ancestry. This exhibition presents sculptures informed by the artist’s community collaboration and invites visitors to consider the layered histories and personal memories of familiar materials.
Carnegie Museum of Art
Pittsburgh, PA
On view through September 22, 2024
Marie Watt: LAND STITCHES WATER SKY
Marie Watt, Placeholder (Horizon), 2024
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Diné Textiles: Nizhónígo Hadadít’eh, They are Beautifully Dressed
Diné (Navajo) apparel design is constantly evolving, often in response to historical events. After Spanish colonists introduced Churro sheep to what is now the Southwest United States in the late 1500s, Diné developed a Navajo-Churro breed that produced wool ideal for weaving. By the 1800s, Diné women were creating wool blankets, mantas, and other forms of apparel. After the 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo subjected Diné to US federal government rule, forced assimilation, and American capitalism, Diné apparel transitioned from woven wool textiles to sewn commercial fabrics. As non-Natives began collecting Diné textiles, Diné weavers also created designs for hanging on walls.
–Sháńdíín Brown (Diné), Henry Luce Curatorial Fellow for Native American Art
RISD Museum
Providence, RI
On view through September 29, 2024
Cara Romero, NIKKI, 2014
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art
Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art examines the mid-century American art movement known as the Indian Space Painters and the relationship between those non-Native painters, the Indigenous visual and material culture that inspired them, and the artists from the modern Native art movement who expanded upon such creative explorations through their own visual heritage. Investigating these relationships for the first time, Space Makers reconfigures the history of American art and reveals its foundations in Indigenous space – aesthetically, geographically, and socio-politically. The free, focus exhibition features loans from the Charles and Valerie Diker collection, one of the nation’s preeminent collections of the underrecognized Indian Space Painting movement, and is guest curated by Christopher T. Green, PhD, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Bentonville, AR
On view through September 30, 2024
Benjamin Harjo, Jr., Honoring the Spirit of All Things, 2001
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Seneca artist Marie Watt uses humble materials to explore history, community, and storytelling through the legacies of Indigenous teachings.
Watt’s immersive installation at the Blanton features new and recent sculptural works from her Sky Dances Light series. Tens of thousands of tin cones sewn on mesh netting make up abstract cloud-like forms that hang from the ceiling. Known as “jingles,” these small metal bells historically made from rolled tobacco tin lids reference the Jingle Dress Dance. Today an important Native American pow-wow dance and regalia, the Jingle Dress Dance began as a healing ritual during the 1918 flu pandemic. According to Watt, “one version of the story is that a member of the Ojibwe nation had a sick granddaughter. They had this dream in which they were instructed to attach tin jingles to a dress and have women dance around this sick child while wearing the dress. The idea was that the sound would be healing. It’s assumed the medicine worked, because the dance was shared with other communities.”
To Watt, the Jingle Dress Dance’s origins as a healing rite connect to our present moment of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. The forest of jingle clouds invites us to create bonds across human history, generations, and with each other.
Blanton Museum of Art
Austin, TX
On view through October 20, 2024
Marie Watt
Installation view of Marie Watt, “Sky Dances Light: Solo XII,”
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The words ancestors and place have many connotations, but for Indigenous peoples, they are tied to all things. Place extends beyond a single location to encompass land, water, and sky. Ancestors are those not only human, but nonhuman too, that are living elements of a place. Some Native artists have used the collaborative medium of printmaking as a way of honoring these deeply connected concepts and reminding us that, though many Indigenous ancestral lands were lost to colonization, relationships to these places and the communities they nurtured endure.
Celebrating a growing area of the MFA’s collection, “Ancestors and Place: Indigenous North American Prints” features more than 30 works—most of them recent acquisitions—by Indigenous artists from the United States and Canada that explore nuanced ideas of stewardship. The works recognize place as a blessing but also something to take care of—for the past, present, and future. Mostly created through residencies at print studios such as Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, Tamarind Institute, and High Point, these prints show artists pushing their practices into new directions, experimenting with and reconceptualizing subjects significant to them and their communities.
Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Boston, MA
On view through October 14, 2024
Ancestors and Place: Indigenous North American Prints
Wendy Red Star, Yakima or Yakama—Not For Me To Say, 2015
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Cara Romero is an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, and was raised between the contrasting settings of the reservation in Mojave Desert, California and the urban sprawl of Houston, Texas. Romero’s identity informs her visceral approach to representing cultural memory, collective history, and lived experience from a female Native American perspective.
Romero is focused on researching historical and contemporary narratives of identity and heritage. By staging theatrical compositions infused with dramatic color, she takes on the role of storyteller, using contemporary photographic techniques to depict the modernity of Indigenous culture, illuminating Native worldviews alluding to the supernatural in everyday life.
The exhibition is divided into three sections—Native California, Imagining Indigenous Futures, and Native Woman.
Museum of Photographic Arts at San Diego Museum of Art
San Diego, CA
On view through October 20, 2024
The Artist Speaks: Cara Romero
Cara Romero, Naomi, 2017
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Native Prospects: Indigeneity and Landscape juxtaposes an Indigenous approach to the articulation of land with the American landscape paintings of Thomas Cole. The exhibition presents 19th-century paintings by Thomas Cole featuring Native figures, in context with Indigenous works of historic and cultural value, and artworks by contemporary Indigenous artists: Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa), Brandon Lazore (Onondaga, Snipe Clan), Truman T. Lowe (Ho-Chunk), Alan Michelson (Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River) and Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee).
Native Prospects is curated by Scott Manning Stevens, PhD / Karoniaktatsie (Akwesasne Mohawk), Associate Professor of Native American Studies and English at Syracuse University, where he is also Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program and Founding Director of the Center for Global Indigenous Cultures and Environmental Justice.
Thomas Cole National Historic Site
Catskill, NY
On view through October 27, 2024
Native Prospects: Indigeneity And Landscape
Truman T. Lowe (Ho-Chunk), Waterfall VIII, 2011
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The exhibition will highlight Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s works from the Museum collection. As one of the most celebrated contemporary artists of Indigenous heritage, this exhibition will span Smith’s career and draw attention to her work in St. Louis.
Across four decades and multiple media, Smith has developed a singular vision in contemporary art. Deploying a fragmentary aesthetic that layers text, found imagery, and the artist’s gestural brushstrokes, Smith advances Indigenous perspectives on land, history, and art.
The exhibition marks the SLAM debut for State Names Map: Cahokia and Trade Canoe: Cahokia, a recent painting and sculpture Smith created in 2023 for the Counterpublic triennial in St. Louis. Based on two of her long-running series, the painting and sculpture respond to deep histories of cross-cultural trade and Indigenous displacement associated with the St. Louis region. Early pastels by Smith and a series of prints from the mid-1990s, many of which the artist made in St. Louis at Washington University’s Island Press, provide a long view of the artist’s career.
St. Louis Art Museum
St. Louis, MO
On view through November 10, 2024
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, State Names Map: Cahokia, and Trade Canoe: Cahokia, 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Caroline Monnet: River Flows Through Bent Trees
For this new solo site-specific installation, Caroline Monnet (Anishinaabe/French) interweaves inspiration from eel trap pots made by Indigenous people of the Chesapeake Bay watershed along with traditional Anishinaabe longhouses. The artist responds to the Museum’s architecture as a departure point for her distinct aesthetic vocabulary, which inscribes traditional Anishinaabe motifs and cultural practices within contemporary forms and materials. Optically vibrating and resonating outwards, the forms forcefully claim space while also reflecting both a sense of reception and transmission. Through doing so, the artist and her work affirm the long-denied place of Indigenous people within the world of museums and the fabric of society at large.
Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum is a wide-reaching project that proposes Indigenizing interventions to address and refuse the oppressive hierarchies of coloniality that pervade the realm of culture and serve as the underpinning of museums. The project encompasses community engagement, a series of nine monographic and thematic exhibitions, institutional interventions, public programs, and an untraditional catalog.
Baltimore Museum of Art
Baltimore, MD
On view through December 1, 2024
Caroline Monnet, Kibwagawinigan, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) presents one new and two existing sculptural works from her Carry series. Each Carry piece, composed of a large copper bucket and ladle adorned with glass beads, bears extravagantly long fringe whose draping emulates arboreal root structures. Alongside the artist’s works, White Hawk selected historic Lakota belongings from the BMA’s collection. Through these works, White Hawk insists upon an interdependence between art and function—and by extension art and life—effectively calling into question art history’s tendency to devalue craft. These works operate as physical metaphors for the carrying of history, cosmology, generational teaching, and deep thought.
Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum is a wide-reaching project that proposes Indigenizing interventions to address and refuse the oppressive hierarchies of coloniality that pervade the realm of culture and serve as the underpinning of museums. The project encompasses community engagement, a series of nine monographic and thematic exhibitions, institutional interventions, public programs, and an untraditional catalog.
Baltimore Museum of Art
Baltimore, MD
On view through December 1, 2024
Dyani Whitehawk: Bodies of Water
Dyani White Hawk, Carry II, 2019
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Don’t wait for me, just tell me where you’re going
“Blood is a gift and the land is a gift and our past is a gift. In the questions they ask and in the wandering they do, the short films in this program uncover and explore generational memory. They give thanks to those who are gone and those who are yet to be born, and to those who are here living right now. They drift through time, movement, memorial, and landscape towards some unknown and neverknown place and serve as a much-needed reminder that we’ll all get there together, just not at the same time.” — Sky Hopinka, Guest Curator. Featured artists include: Lindsay McIntyre (Inuk), Olivia Camfield (Muscogee Creek), Woodrow Hunt (Cherokee, Klamath, and Modoc Tribes), Fox Maxy (Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians and Payómkawichum) and Miguel Hilari (Aymara/German)
Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum is a wide-reaching project that proposes Indigenizing interventions to address and refuse the oppressive hierarchies of coloniality that pervade the realm of culture and serve as the underpinning of museums. The project encompasses community engagement, a series of nine monographic and thematic exhibitions, institutional interventions, public programs, and an untraditional catalog.
Baltimore Museum of Art
Baltimore, MD
On view through December 1, 2024
Lindsay McIntyre, "seeing her" (still), 2020
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Illustrating Agency
This installation highlights the ways in which Native artists have increasingly asserted agency—the exertion of one’s own power—over representations of their communities and identities over time. In the early 20th century, white arts educators encouraged Native artists to create “authentic” art—as defined by settlers—that embraced traditional subject matter while often neglecting present realities. In the decades that followed, generations of artists have shrugged off settler expectations by depicting their community on their own terms. Such work illustrates the modern Native experience, problematizes harmful stereotypes, and pointedly challenges outsider understandings of Indigenous identity.
Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum is a wide-reaching project that proposes Indigenizing interventions to address and refuse the oppressive hierarchies of colonialism that pervade the realm of culture and serve as the underpinning of museums. The project encompasses community engagement, a series of nine monographic and thematic exhibitions, institutional interventions, public programs, and an untraditional catalog.
Baltimore Museum of Art
Baltimore, MD
On view through December 1, 2024
Julie Buffalohead. The Noble Savage, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Enduring Buffalo
This exhibition reflects upon the buffalo as essential to Indigenous lifeways on the Plains since time immemorial. Euro-American colonizers and the United States government attempted to eradicate the species in a calculated strategy to subdue Native people and force them onto reservations in the late 19th century. This effort fundamentally transformed Native artmaking, both historically and presently. The critical importance of the buffalo within Plains Indigenous cultures can be felt across artworks that pre- and post-date the attempted eradication of the species.
Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum is a wide-reaching project that proposes Indigenizing interventions to address and refuse the oppressive hierarchies of coloniality that pervade the realm of culture and serve as the underpinning of museums. The project encompasses community engagement, a series of nine monographic and thematic exhibitions, institutional interventions, public programs, and an untraditional catalog.
Baltimore Museum of Art
Baltimore, MD
On view through December 1, 2024
Bear’s Heart (Nockkoist), Cheyenne Hunting Buffalo
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Finding Home
This presentation speaks to Native people’s dynamic and powerful relationship with land, home, and sanctuary. While they have beliefs and practices as wide and vast as this continent, Native communities share a recognition that humans exist as part of a larger ecosystem that must stay in balance. As the pressures of colonization and contemporary life have assaulted traditional lifeways, the works in this exhibition demonstrate the resilience and versatility with which Native artists maintain their cultures, community connections, and sense of home.
Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum is a wide-reaching project that proposes Indigenizing interventions to address and refuse the oppressive hierarchies of coloniality that pervade the realm of culture and serve as the underpinning of museums. The project encompasses community engagement, a series of nine monographic and thematic exhibitions, institutional interventions, public programs, and an untraditional catalog.
Baltimore Museum of Art
Baltimore, MD
On view through December 1, 2024
Marie Watt, Blanket Stories: Beacon, Marker, Ohi-yo, 2015
EXHIBITION
Florence Hawley Ellis Museum of Anthropology at Ghost Ranch
Abiquiu, NM
On view through December 2024
Cara Romero: The Gathering
The Florence Hawley Ellis Museum of Anthropology at Ghost Ranch announces the opening of “Cara Romero: The Gathering”, an extraordinary exhibition by renowned Chemehuevi fine art photographer, Cara Romero. The exhibition is scheduled to open on Jan. 13, 2024, and will run through December 2024.
This groundbreaking show originates from an unusual request to Romero, a Santa Fe-based artist celebrated for her portrayal of contemporary Indigenous life. A collector approached her to participate in a commission interpreting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an idea initially at odds with Romero’s artistic vision. However, Romero reimagined this concept into a powerful portrayal of four Native women heralding a world reborn.
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The Coyote is a figure featured as a “trickster” across Native American storytelling. However, among the Maidu, the Coyote conveys benevolent teachings of the totality of human nature. Harry Fonseca: Transformations is the first exhibition dedicated to exploring Fonseca’s expressions of “queerness” through the reintroduction of his beloved character Coyote. Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu/Portuguese/Native Hawaiian) established liberatory expressions in contemporary Indigenous and queer art. The exhibition will feature works from the Heard’s fine art collection, such as Coyote in the Mission (1983) and Roxie-The Black Swan (1984), as well as a recent acquisition, Pow Wow Club (1981). Fonseca’s paintings explore Coyote as a metaphor for the transformations of self that defy Western conceptions of Indigeneity coded with a visual language that explores queer subcultures.
Heard Museum
Phoenix, AZ
On view through April 20, 2025
Harry Fonseca: Transformations
Harry Fonseca, Pow Wow Club, 1981
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Reclaiming El Camino: Native Resistance in the Missions and Beyond
Reclaiming El Camino aims to educate Los Angeles and its visitors about the potency of Native life and the rich history of activism in the California borderlands region. This exhibition repositions (and reclaims) the El Camino Real as the ancient and well-worn trade route for Native people long before the establishment of the Franciscan Missions in Baja and Alta California.
Autry Museum of the American West
Los Angeles, CA
On view through June 15, 2025
Katie Dorame, Mission Revolt, 2014
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
View extraordinary works by up-and-coming Indigenous artists who draw inspiration from their cultural traditions. Grounded by Our Roots features 13 pieces—including paintings, prints, clothing, and sculptures—that showcase contemporary Indigenous art inspired by rich visual arts traditions of the Northwest Coast.
The artists featured in the gallery are: Hawilkwalał Rebecca Baker-Grenier, Alison Bremner Naxhshagheit, SGidGang.Xaal Shoshannah Greene, Nash’mene’ta’naht Atheana Picha, Eliot White-Hill Kwulasultun.
The exhibition will be on view in the Contemporary Art Gallery, a rotating exhibition gallery in the Museum’s Northwest Coast Hall, and is included with all admission.
American Museum of Natural History
New York, NY
Ongoing
Grounded by Our Roots
Alison Bremner Naxhshagheit, Midnight at the Fireworks Stand
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
On This Ground: Being and Belonging in America
On This Ground: Being and Belonging in America explores how art can help us understand what it means to belong to family, community, and this place we now call America. Bringing two extraordinary collections of Native American and American art together for the first time in our institution's history, this long-term installation celebrates artistic achievements across time, space, and worldviews. Located in the Nancy and George Putnam Gallery and Barbara Weld Putnam Gallery, the 250 artworks on display span in time from 10,000 years ago to the present, and demonstrate a range of voices, modes of expression, cultures, and media including: sculpture, paintings, textiles and costumes, furniture, decorative arts, works on paper, installations, video, and a re-envisioned period room.
Peabody Essex Museum
Salem, MA
Ongoing
Will Wilson, David Weeden (Mashpee Wampanoag), From the “Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange” series, 2019
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
A portion of The Huntington’s American art collection is contextualized with contributions from contemporary artists in “Borderlands,” a new permanent collections installation that explores a more expansive view of American art history. To develop the reinstallation, The Huntington partnered with two contemporary artists, Enrique Martínez Celaya (2020–22 Huntington Fellow in the Visual Arts) and Sandy Rodriguez (2020–21 Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Fellow), and secured strategic loans to help re-imagine the historical collections from multiple perspectives.
The new installation is spread over 5,000 square feet of gallery space and highlights more than 70 works, including paintings, sculptures, decorative art objects, and video installations. It highlights artwork that dates from the 19th through the early 20th century, including works by such renowned artists as Mary Cassatt, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer. But, unlike previous installations, “Borderlands” is organized thematically. It also features an education room, where visitors can learn about locally sourced botanical- and mineral-based pigments.
The Huntington
Los Angeles, CA
Ongoing
Borderlands
Cara Romero, Hermosa, 2021
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
For the contemporary Indigenous artists featured in Knowledge Beings, clay is a living medium that gives form to knowledge about land, ancestors, language, and identity. The artists experiment with artistic traditions while carrying forward generations of expert skill, and their own words—written and spoken—convey the Indigenous artistry and values behind each work, or “knowledge being.”
Milwaukee Art Museum
Milwaukee, WI
Ongoing
Knowledge Beings
Jacquie Stevens, Woodweave Bowl, 1996.
UPCOMING
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Early Days: Indigenous Art from the McMichael Canadian Art Collection
Early Days: Indigenous Art from the McMichael Canadian Art Collection is the first survey of Canadian Indigenous art to be presented internationally. Organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in collaboration with current Indigenous stakeholders—scholars, traditional knowledge keepers, and living artists—the exhibition includes both historic and contemporary art from coast-to-coast.
Showcasing the diversity and vitality of Indigenous art in Canada, Early Days features objects ranging from eighteenth-century ceremonial regalia, to the work of the vanguard artists of the ’60s, ‘70s and ‘80s—such as Norval Morrisseau, Carl Beam and Alex Janvier— and leading contemporary Indigenous artists like Kent Monkman, Meryl McMaster and Rebecca Belmore. As the only museum in Canada devoted exclusively to Canadian art, the McMichael’s collection offers a definitive account of Indigenous art in Canada today, and the powerful tensions and continuities that exist between the present and the past. Early Days explores our relationship to the land, to our ancestors and to each other.
Chrysler Museum of Art
Norfolk, VA
May 24 – September 1, 2024
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, New Climate Landscape (Northwest Coast Climate Change), 2019
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
ReVOlt 1680/2180: Sirens & Sikas
n 1680, the Pueblo Revolt began. Decades before, Spanish colonizers had ravaged the landscape and decimated the Indigenous Pueblo population. Led by Po’pay, the members of this historic uprising were successful in expelling the colonizers from their homelands, and for twelve years after freeing themselves, the Pueblos of New Mexico lived free from Castilian rule and influence. In 1692, the Spanish returned with a vengeance and stole the lands again. In ReVOlt 1680/2180, a contemporary retelling of this history by visionary Cochiti Pueblo artist Virgil Ortiz, the 1680 rebels will have more resources and aid, and their territories will be secure once and for all.
ReVOlt 1680/2180 is part of the exhibition, Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology. This exhibition is among more than 60 exhibitions and programs presented as part of PST ART. Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science, both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit: pst.art
AutryMuseum of the American West
Los Angeles, CA
Opening July 2, 2024
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology
Future Imaginaries explores the rise of Futurism in contemporary Indigenous art as a means of enduring colonial trauma, creating alternative futures and advocating for Indigenous technologies in a more inclusive present and sustainable future. Over 50 artworks are on display, some interspersed throughout the museum, creating unexpected encounters and dialogues between contemporary Indigenous creations and historic Autry works. Artists such as Andy Everson, Ryan Singer and Neil Ambrose Smith wittily upend pop-culture icons by Indigenizing sci-fi characters and storylines; Wendy Red Star places Indigenous people in surreal spacescapes wearing fantastical regalia; Virgil Ortiz brings his own space odyssey, ReVOlt 1680/2180, to life in a new, site-specific installation. By intermingling science fiction, self-determination, and Indigenous technologies across a diverse array of Native cultures, Future Imaginaries envisions sovereign futures while countering historical myths and the ongoing impact of colonization, including environmental degradation and toxic stereotypes.
AutryMuseum of the American West
Los Angeles, CA
September 7, 2024 – June 21, 2026
Cara Romero, Three Sisters, 2022
PAST
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
This exhibition is the first New York retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an overdue but timely look at the work of a groundbreaking artist…brings together nearly five decades of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures in the largest and most comprehensive showing of her career to date.
CBS News reported on Smith’s show in a recent short, which can be viewed here.
Whitney Museum of American Art
New York, NY
April 19 – August 13, 2023
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Survival Map, 2021
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s-1970s
This is the first exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum to focus on modern Native American art. Expanding the narrative of midcentury abstraction, the exhibition highlights groundbreaking paintings, sculptures, textiles, and works on paper that challenged stereotypical expectations of Native American art during the postwar era.
St. Louis Art Museum
St. Louis, Missouri
June 24 – September 3, 2023
Fritz Scholder, New Mexico #40, 1966
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Organized by The Newark Museum of Art, this mid-career survey is the most comprehensive exhibition of Red Star to date and features more than 40 works, highlighting 15 years of her studio practice. Bringing the historical details of Crow and colonist history into the Technicolor present, Red Star uses photography, textiles and mixed media installation to explore themes of Crow history, the indigenous roots of feminism and contemporary life on the Crow Indian reservation in Montana where she was raised.
Columbus Museum of Art
Columbus, OH
April 21 – September 3, 2023
Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth
Wendy Red Star, Four Seasons, 2006
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Clearly Indigenous: Visions Reimagined in Glass
The groundbreaking, first-of-its-kind exhibition Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass celebrates Native artists working in a dynamic medium. Powerful, majestic, and stirring, the show features 115 works of art by 29 Native American artists and four Pacific Rim artists, including Wichita favorite Preston Singletary (Tlingit). It also includes work by legendary glass art innovator Dale Chihuly, who worked with artist and educator Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee) to set up the first hot shop at the Institute of American Indian Arts in 1974. Other notable artists include Larry Ahvakana (Inupiaq) and Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo).
Wichita Art Museum
Wichita, KS
June 11 – September 10, 2023
Preston Singletary and Joe David, Looks to the Sky, 2012
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe
The acclaimed exhibition Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe culminates its national tour in Oscar Howe's home state of South Dakota. Dakota Modern will be on view June 10, 2023–September 17, 2023 at the South Dakota Art Museum at South Dakota State University in Brookings. This retrospective exhibition celebrating the art of Yanktonai Dakota artist Oscar Howe was curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby and organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the Portland Art Museum. It opened at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in March 2022, in New York City, and traveled to the Portland Art Museum, where it closed May 14, 2023. The South Dakota Art Museum is the final stop for Dakota Modern.
South Dakota Art Museum
Brookings, SD
June 10 – September 17, 2023
Oscar Howe, Abstraction after Wakapana, 1973
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Desert Rider: Dreaming in Motion
The west is a landscape of constant motion—a place of unbroken horizons, staggering views, and changing borders. Certain modes of transportation have become linked to this region. Images of horses roaring across the land, cars cruising on busy streets and forgotten roads, and skaters gliding on pavement elicit feelings of freedom, power, and rebellion. Desert Rider: Dreaming in Motion focuses on self-identified Latinx and Indigenous artists who express identity, pride, and a sense of community by transforming vehicles associated with the Southwest. These transformations both challenge stereotypes and embody hope.
Denver Art Museum
Denver, CO
July 9 – September 24, 2023
Cara Romero, Liquid Sunshine (Sol Liquid), 2021
GALLERY EXHIBITION
Native American Art Now, curated by Leesa Fanning, will be our largest and most ambitious exhibition of the year. The established and emerging artists explore a wide range of subjects—land, place, nature and spiritual worldviews (including creation stories), the traumas of colonialism and racism—expressing resilience and hope. The work has emerged from customary practices and traditional meanings, forms, materials and techniques, as well as more contemporary subjects and alternative media and art-making processes. Native American Art Now celebrates the prominence and importance of contemporary Indigenous art as it becomes an increasingly integral part of the international art world and enters the mainstream art-historical canon.
Sundaram Tagore Gallery
New York, NY
September 7 – October 7, 2023
Native American Art Now
Richard Glazer Danay, Shake, Rattle & Roll, 2009-2012
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Fotografiska is pleased to present a selection of recent photographs by Cara Romero. In this body of work, Romero creates surreal and vibrant portraits that enact an Indigenous Futurity, tethered to Indigenous sciences and knowledges.
In the artist’s own words: “The work I’ve made within the genre of Indigenous Futurisms really came from a deep creative space of wanting to play, of wanting to be imaginative, of wanting to talk about those connections to time and the power of Indigenous women.”
Fotografiska
New York, NY
September 12 – October 11, 2023
Cara Romero: Indigenous Futurity
Cara Romero, Gikendaaso, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
A beloved artist, Rick Bartow, is featured in a show in his home state. In Our Shared Breath: Creativity and Community, we present the work of six artists to consider our own understandings of community, generosity, responsibility to the more-than-human world, and creativity in all its forms. Their prints, paintings, sculptures, and videos speak to individual and communal relationships with the land, water, and fellow living beings (human and non-human), and invite reflection on themes of reciprocity, storytelling, record-keeping, and lived experiences.
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
Eugene, OR
January 28 – October 22, 2023
Our Shared Breath: Creativity and Community
Rick Bartow, ‘Beach Hawk’ and ‘Gold Finch’, 1992
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Patterns of Knowing features works by three artists — Jordan Ann Craig, the late Benjamin Harjo Jr. and Jeri Redcorn — exploring how patterns sourced from Indigenous cultures embody a lineage of ideas. Through ceramics, paintings, prints and drawings, they consider the relationship between pattern and information. The exhibit highlights artworks in which rhythmic, repeated arrangements of shapes, colors and symbols carry knowledge across generations. The exhibition explores how Indigenous artistic principles continue to move and evolve between media, connecting ideas from past to present.
Oklahoma Contemporary
Oklahoma City, OK
May 18 – October 23, 2023
Patterns of Knowing
Jordan Craig, Sharp Tongues, 2021
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Jeffrey Gibson: The Spirits Are Laughing
Jeffrey Gibson’s practice mixes Indigenous aesthetic histories with the visual language of Modernism to explore culture, history, and identity. The artist works with garments, sculpture, performance, video, and painting to consider the complex and fluid narratives surrounding selfhood in this country. Gibson uses his surroundings as sources, mixing references from contemporary politics with pop culture and queer iconography to create unexpected connections within his world.
Aspen Art Museum
Aspen, CO
November 4, 2022 – November 5, 2023
Jeffrey Gibson, The Spirits Are Laughing, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Heckscher Museum of Art
Huntington, NY
June 10 – November 12, 2023
Courtney M. Leonard: Logbook 2003-2004
Leonard’s powerful work in ceramics, painting, video, and installation engages with Long Island’s colonial history; celebrates Indigenous knowledge and resilience; and addresses urgent ecological issues.
Courtney M. Leonard, Breach #2, 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Indian Theatre: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969
Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 is the first large-scale exhibition of its kind to center performance and theater as an origin point for the development of contemporary art by Native American, First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and Alaska Native artists, beginning with the role that Native artists have played in the self-determination era, sparked by the Occupation of Alcatraz by the Indians of All Tribes in 1969. Native artists then and now are at the vanguard of performance art practices and discourse. Featuring over 100 works by artists representing a range of perspectives and practices, including Dana Claxton (Lakota), Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee) and Eric-Paul Riege (Diné). This exhibit is curated by Candice Hopkins.
Bard College Hessel Museum of Art
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
June 24 – November 26, 2023
Eric-Paul Riege, jaatłoh4Ye’iitsoh [5-6], 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
This retrospective exhibition traces Marie Watt’s career in print from 1996-present. For the first time, Watt’s early work from her MFA program at Yale, and her collaborations with master printers at Crows Shadow Institute, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Tamarind Institute, and more recently Mullowney Printing Company are exhibited alongside the artists monumental scale textiles and sculpture. This exhibition also explores Watt’s evolving practice of convening sewing and printing circles with family, friends and community members.
Krannert Art Museum
Champaign, IL
August 31 – December 2, 2023
Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt
Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt, installation view
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Metaphor, Myth, & Politics: Art from Native Printmakers
Metaphor, Myth, & Politics: Art from Native Printmakers features 36 contemporary works on paper by 29 Native and Indigenous artists, all drawn from the C.N. Gorman Museum’s collection and touring through a partnership with Exhibit Envoy. This area of the collections was established early in the museum’s history and has been expanding since then through the generosity of artists, as well as collectors and museum members. The museum has also been honored to serve as a repository for several large print portfolios, organized by master printmaker and UC Boulder Professor Melanie Yazzie (Diné [Navajo]).
Gorman Museum of Native American Art
Davis, CA
On view through December 15, 2023
Joe Feddersen, Plateau Landscape, 2006
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Medicine Currents features a range of paintings, drawings and objects by Morrisseau that celebrate the artist’s storytelling vocabulary. His work is richly infused with divided circles that express balance, good and evil, day and night, and heaven and earth, black lines of movement and power, and an increasingly vibrant use of colour. It is grounded in his clear understanding of the relationships between all living entities. Medicine Currents offers a profound sense of the artist’s transformational and nurturing vision of land, sky and water. This exhibition unveils the healing aesthetic in and power embedded within Morrisseau’s work, which draws inspiration from the past, resonates in the present and envisions a transformative future.
Carleton University Art Gallery
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
September 17 – December 17, 2023
Norval Morrisseau: Medicine Currents
Norval Morrisseau, Ancestral Figure, c.1964-65
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The exhibition title, derived from text seen in My Country Tis of Thee by Tom Jones, references patriotism and endurance. Jones’s work presents historical images from popular culture through an Indigenous artistic lens, highlighting Native peoples’ involvement in the U.S. military. In the spirit of Jones’s work, this exhibition explores the representational power of color. Featured in the gallery is a wide spectrum, from the bright rainbow hues of a crayon box to the sepia tones of photographs and neutral tones of natural materials such as hide and wood. These works exemplify the richness and beauty of diversity and our shared history.
Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art
Overland Park, KS
June 2 – December 21, 2023
These Colors Will Not Run
Dyani White Hawk, Untitled (All the Colors), 2020
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living is the sixth iteration of the Hammer’s biennial exhibition highlighting the practices of artists working throughout the greater Los Angeles area. These practices embrace the value of craft, materiality, performance, and collectivity. The biennial situates art as an expanded field of culture that is entangled with everyday life; community networks; queer affect; and indigenous and diasporic histories. Native American artists Melissa Cody, Teresa Baker, Ishi Glinsky and Miller Robinson are on the roster.
Hammer Museum
Los Angeles, CA
October 1 – December 31, 2023
Made in LA: Acts of Living
Teresa Baker, Trace, 2021
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch
Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch celebrates more than a half century of Shelley Niro’s paintings, photographs, mixed-media works, and films. Accessible, humorous, and peppered with references to popular culture, Niro's art delves into the timeless cultural knowledge and generational histories of her Six Nations Kanyen’kehá:ka (Mohawk) community to provide purpose and healing.
National Museum of the American Indian
New York, NY
May 27, 2023 – January 1, 2024
Shelley Niro, The Rebel, 1987
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Early Days: Indigenous Art from the McMichael
Early Days is the first survey of Canadian Indigenous art of this scope to be presented internationally. Organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in collaboration with current Indigenous stakeholders—scholars, traditional knowledge keepers, and living artists—the exhibition includes both historical and contemporary art from coast-to-coast-to-coast. Showcasing the diversity and vitality of Indigenous art in Canada, Early Days features objects ranging from 18th-century ceremonial regalia to the work of the vanguard artists of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s—such as Norval Morrisseau, Carl Beam and Alex Janvier— and leading contemporary Indigenous artists like Kent Monkman, Meryl McMaster and Rebecca Belmore. As the only museum in Canada devoted exclusively to Canadian art, the McMichael’s collection offers a definitive account of Indigenous art in Canada today, and the powerful tensions and continuities that exist between the present and the past. Early Days explores our relationship to the land, to our ancestors, and to each other.
Heard Museum
Phoenix, AZ
On view through January 2, 2024
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, New Climate Landscape (Northwest Coast Climate Change), 2019
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers
Raven Halfmoon’s practice spans torso-scaled and colossal-sized stoneware sculptures, with some soaring up to twelve feet and weighing over eight hundred pounds. With inspirations that orbit centuries from ancient Indigenous pottery to Moai statues to Land Art, Halfmoon interrogates the intersection of tradition, history, gender, and personal experience. This exhibition will include a combination of new and borrowed works that vary in size and content from over the last five years. Halfmoon will also be creating some of her largest works to date commissioned by The Aldrich and Bemis Center. The artist’s first museum catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
Aldridge Contemporary Art Museum
Ridgefield, CT
June 25, 2023 – January 7, 2024
Raven Halfmoon
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Jean LaMarr’s colorful and seductive yet hard-hitting satirical artworks challenging long-held cultural stereotypes and preconceptions about Native American people and cultures will be on view in the exhibition The Art of Jean LaMarr at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts from August 18, 2023, through January 7, 2024. The Art of Jean LaMarr, organized by the Nevada Museum of Art (NMA), features more than 60 artworks including paintings, prints, and sculptures spanning from the 1970s to the present. Jean LaMarr (Susanville Indian Rancheria), an internationally recognized artist, educator, and Native American advocate with ancestral ties to Pyramid Lake, Nevada, and Susanville, California, sparks powerful and important conversations about racist imagery, representations of Native women, legacies of colonization, and environmental justice.
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts
Santa Fe, NM
August 18, 2023 – January 7, 2024
The Art of Jean LaMarr
Jean LaMarr, Vuarneted Indian Cowboy, 1984
EXHIBITION
The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation is pleased to present The House Edge, curated by Caitlin Chaisson. The exhibition features the work of sixteen artists who consider the economic dimensions of Indigenous sovereignty. Though capitalism seeks to define relations between subjects and places, the artists demonstrate how notions of land ownership, property, and consumerism are contested and rewritten through diverse Indigenous practices. Showcasing drawing, painting, print, sculpture, video, and photography, many works are being exhibited publicly for the first time. Featured artists include David Bradley, Jim Denomie, Joe Feddersen, Harry Fonseca, G. Peter Jemison, Chaz John, Matthew Kirk, Terran Last Gun, Rachel Martin, Kimowan Metchewais, Nora Naranjo-Morse, Duane Slick, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Bently Spang, Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, and Nico Williams.
Shelly and Donald Rubin Foundation at The 8th Floor
New York, NY
September 28, 2023 – January 13, 2024
The House Edge
Jim Denomie, The Posse, 1995
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now
Enter into the vivid worlds of Native photography, as framed by generations of First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and Native American photographers themselves. Presenting over 150 photographs of, by, and for Indigenous people, “In Our Hands” welcomes all to see through the lens held by Native photographers. Organized by a council of primarily Native artists, scholars, and knowledge sharers, in partnership with Mia curators, this sweeping exhibition traces the intersecting histories of photography and diverse Indigenous cultures from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Circle. Beautiful, complex, and surprising, these artworks celebrate the legacy of groundbreaking photographers and their influence on the medium today.
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Minneapolis, MN
October 22, 2023 – January 14, 2024
Cara Romero, TV Indians, 2017
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
We explore the impact of multiple generations of First Californian artists. Loosely translated, Huivaniūs Pütsiv in the Chemehuevi language means “stars with us/around us.” This honors the illumination, and inspiration, that these stellar artists have provided, influencing the Native American contemporary art field for more than six decades. ‘California Stars/Huivaniūs Pütsiv’ creates a dialog between iconic and lesser-known works from the Wheelwright Museum’s permanent collection with important loans and new works devised especially for the exhibition. Since the 1970s, the Wheelwright Museum has had an important role in Santa Fe, and beyond, in bringing attention to established and emerging Native artists in solo shows and group exhibitions.
Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian
Santa Fe, NM
February 11, 2023 – January 14, 2024
California Stars: Huivanius Pütsiv
Judith Lowry, Dao Lulelek, 2012
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans
Curated by artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, this unprecedented exhibition brings together works by an intergenerational group of some 50 living Native American artists practicing across the United States. Their powerful art reflects a shared worldview that draws on thousands of years of reverence, study, and concern for the land. Through diverse mediums—weaving, sculpture, beadwork, painting, performance, drawing, video, and more—these artists visualize Indigenous knowledge of land/landbase/landscape. Selected by Quick-to-See Smith, the dynamic presentation underscores the self-determination, survivance, and right to self-representation of Indigenous peoples.
National Gallery of Art
Washington D.C.
September 22, 2023 – January 15, 2024
Gerald Clarke Jr., Native American Art, 2019
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map
The Modern hosts the retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, an in-depth look at the work of a groundbreaking artist.
The largest and most comprehensive showing of her work to date, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map brings together nearly five decades of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures.
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Fort Worth, TX
October 15, 2023 – January 21, 2024
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Survival Map, 2021
EXHIBITION
New Terrains: Contemporary Native American Art
PhillipsX is pleased to present New Terrains, a watershed selling exhibition of important works of contemporary Native American art curated by Tony Abeyta, Bruce Hartman, and James Trotta-Bono. Exploring the influences of modernism, post-war and pop influences, the exhibit provides context for the evolution of contemporary Native art in the mid-to-late 20th and early 21st centuries. These artists evoke the rich diaspora of Native American tribal representation, including Canadian first nations people. Featuring over 50 artists, spanning seven decades, the works reflect the socio-political and artistic climates in which they were conceived. Native American art is continually expanding to embrace new ideas, expressions, and artistic mediums. Established, emerging, and under-recognized artists share their unique visions and stories of what it is to be an indigenous artist.
Phillips Auction
New York, NY
January 5 – 23, 2024
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Cosmama, 2023
EXHIBITION
Interference Patterns is a solo exhibition of new and recent work by multidisciplinary Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin. Rooted in his relationship to Land, Indigenous visual language, and thought, Galanin merges conceptual and material practices in his expansive creative approach. Utilizing numerous materials and processes, Galanin continues to build a vast creative vocabulary, reflecting on and speaking to the world from an Indigenous perspective.
SITE Santa Fe
Santa Fe, NM
October 6, 2023 – February 5, 2024
Nicholas Galanin: Interference Patterns
Nicholas Galanin, Unconverted/Converted, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
How do we remember on this campus? This is the central question asked in You’re Welcome, a dynamic three-part exhibition. The result of a multiyear collaboration with artist Cannupa Hanska Luger and nonprofit public art and history studio Monument Lab, You’re Welcome examines the foundational narratives of the land occupied by the University of Michigan and both national and global discourse on nationalism, land sovereignty, militarism, colonialism, and sites of memory.
University of Michigan Museum of Art
Ann Arbor, MI
September 22, 2023 — February 18, 2024
Cannupa Hanska Luger: You’re Welcome
Cannupa Hanska Luger, This Is Not A Snake / The One Who Checks & The One Who Balances, 2017-2020
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
For Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast such as Galanin (Lingít and Unangax̂), the totem pole is a ceremonial object used to celebrate events, depict stories, and document family lineage. In I Think It Goes Like This (Gold), a seemingly Indigenous-made totem pole is covered in gold leaf but lies dismantled on the ground. Contrary to the viewers original understanding of the object, this is not a cultural tool of memory making and community. It is a carving by an Indonesian artist created to sell as a souvenir to tourists in Alaska. Through his intervention of destruction and reassembly to the original carving and application of gold leaf, Galanin creates dialogue about the economy of cultural appropriation while reclaiming the work as Indigenous art.
RIT City Art Space
Rochester, NY
October 06, 2023–February 18, 2024
Nicholas Galanin: I Think it Goes Like This
Nicholas Galanin, I Think It Goes Like This (Gold), 2019
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
For her first solo exhibition at a New York museum, artist Natalie Ball (b. 1980, Portland, Oregon) presents a group of never-before-seen sculptural assemblages that deepen and destabilize understandings of Indigenous life in the United States. Drawn from various sources and including found, hunted, purchased, and gifted objects, Ball’s work explores how the lives and meanings of materials interconnect with the artist’s sense of self. By layering textiles such as quilt tops and T-shirts; animal hides and bones; and synthetic hair, shoes, beads, and newspapers, among other commercially produced items, Ball aims to channel her ancestors while reflecting her lived experience, including as a future ancestor.
Whitney Museum of American Art
New York, NY
November 17, 2023–February 19, 2024
Natalie Ball: bilwi naats Ga’niipci
Natalie Ball, Deer Woman's new Certificate-of-Indian-Blood-skin, 2021
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Exploding Native Inevitable is an exhibition of the work of thirteen contemporary Indigenous artists and one collaborative, accompanied by an ongoing program of dance, film, music, performance, readings, story-telling, and video by Indigenous artists from a land we now call America. Exhibiting artists range from emerging to elders. Exhibition co-curators Brad Kahlhamer and Dan Mills, who have known each other for over twenty years, began work on this project in late 2019. The exhibition title riffs on Andy Warhol’s 1966-67 Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a series of multimedia events–including performance, concerts, and film screenings–that accompanied and extended his exhibition. Likewise, the expansive and adventuresome project that is Exploding Native Inevitable will include a wide-ranging and ongoing series of events and programs. During the exhibition’s run at Bates, the project will explode beyond the museum across campus and into the community with collaborations that bring in performers, filmmakers, and writers from the surrounding region and throughout the nation.
Bates College Museum of Art
Lewiston, ME
October 27, 2023 – March 4, 2024
Exploding Native Inevitable
Norman Akers, Watchful Eye, 2023
Dreaming Our Futures: Ojibwe and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Artists and Knowledge Keepers marks the opening of the George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts and features work in a wide variety of painting media and esthetic approaches by 29 artists, including Frank Big Bear, David Bradley, Awanigiizhik Bruce, Andrea Carlson, Avis Charley, Fern Cloud, Michelle Defoe, Jim Denomie, Patrick DesJarlait, Sam English, Carl Gawboy, Joe Geshick, Sylvia Houle, Oscar Howe, Waŋblí Mayášleča (Francis J. Yellow, Jr.), George Morrison, Steven Premo, Rabbett Before Horses Strickland, Cole Redhorse Taylor, Roy Thomas, Jonathan Thunder, Thomasina TopBear, Moira Villiard, Kathleen Wall, Star WallowingBull, Dyani White Hawk, Bobby Dues Wilson, Leah H. Yellowbird and Holly Young.
George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts, University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN
January 16 – March 16, 2024
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Dyani White Hawk, Untitled (Quiet Strength III), 2018
Caroline Monnet’s first exhibition in a Toronto public gallery comprises a survey of her prolific production, centering on a new series of sculptures exploring language reclamation and intergenerational transmission. The title, Pizandawatc, comes from the traditional name of Monnet’s family before surnames were changed in Kitigan Zibi by the Oblates. Meaning “the one who listens” in Anishinaabemowin, the title also honours the artist’s great-grandmother, Mani Pizandawatc, who was the first in her family to have her territory divided into reserves. Exploring the notion of territory from the perspective of cultural attachment and ancestral memory, the exhibition articulates new visions that harken both to Indigenous legacies and futures.
Art Museum, University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario
January 17 – March 23, 2024
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Caroline Monnet, Kikinaham – To Sing Along With 02, 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
This exhibition surveys the artist’s singular vision and signature style over the second half of the artist’s career, from 2007 to 2022. Jim Denomie (Ojibwe, Lac Courte Oreilles Band, 1955–2022) drew inspiration from lived experiences, pop culture, Anishinaabe traditions, and American histories to tell compelling narratives that depict his experiences of being Native in America. Despite the emotional weight of his subject matter, the artist’s dry wit opened space for necessary conversations about the legacies of colonization and the nature of humanity. The exhibition examines Denomie’s creative process, tracing his ability to transform inspiration into monumental artworks.
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Minneapolis, MN
July 8, 2023 – March 24, 2024
The Lyrical Artwork of Jim Denomie
Jim Denomie, Four Days and Four Nites, Ceremony, 2020
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Strange Weather: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation features contemporary art works which illuminate and reframe the boundaries of bodies and the environment. The artworks included in the exhibition span five decades, from 1970-2020, and are drawn together for how they creatively call attention to the impact and history of forced migrations, industrialization, global capitalism, and trauma on humans and the contemporary landscape.
Artists include Carlos Almarez, Carlos Amorales, Leonardo Drew, Joe Feddersen, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, James Lavadour, Nicola Lopez, Hung Liu, Julie Mehretu, Wendy Red Star, Alison Saar, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, Charles Wilbert White, Kehinde Wiley, and Terry Winters. Concurrent with Strange Weather, a capsule exhibition of the works of Glenn Ligon from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation will be on view in the JSMA’s Artist Project Space.
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art
Eugene, OR
October 21, 2023 – April 7, 2024
Strange Weather
Wendy Red Star, Fall, 2006
EXHIBITION
Returning Home: A Contemporary Native Photography Exhibition
This groundbreaking exhibition will feature works by four contemporary Indigenous photographers, Kali Spitzer (Kaska Dena/Jewish), Dana Claxton (Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi Indian Tribe), and Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke (Crow)), along with a written commission by Bonney Hartley (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican), and archival records of local land transfers and the United States’ Indian boarding school history. The exhibition, centered around narratives of Indigenous families, particularly women and children, will delve into the experiences of Native peoples facing settler colonialism, focusing specifically on Indigenous child removal practices and policies.
Returning Home aims to highlight Indigenous representation, narrative, survivance, futurism, and resilience through contemporary Native art. The show will include pieces from the Forge Project’s collection, as well as a written commission from Institute of American Indian Arts MFA Candidate Bonney Hartley. An accompanying publication will provide in-depth contextualization of land dispossession in the U.S., forced removal of Native peoples in New York State, and the impact of Indian boarding schools.
The exhibition will fill various rooms within the historic Montgomery Place mansion, situated on Bard College’s 380-acre estate. While the estate is renowned for its ties to the Livingston family, Montgomery Place is committed to exploring marginalized histories, including the forced removal of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community and the estate’s use of enslaved African American labor.
Montgomery Place Mansion, Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
April 6 – 12, 2024
Dana Claxton, Headdress, 2016
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School places landscape paintings by the renowned, contemporary Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick in conversation with highlights from New-York Historical’s collection of 19th-century Hudson River School paintings. This artistic dialogue showcases the ways in which WalkingStick’s work both connects to and diverges from the Hudson River School tradition and explores the agency of art in shaping humankind’s relationship to the land. The exhibition celebrates a shared reverence for nature while engaging crucial questions about land dispossession and its reclamation by Indigenous peoples and nations and exploring the relationship between Indigenous art and American art history.
New York Historical Society Museum
New York, NY
October 23 – April 14, 2024
Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School
Kay WalkingStick, Niagara, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Mercedes Dorame's exhibition Where Sky Touches Water brings together a collection of new and recent work, combining photography and sculpture to explore the profound beauty of our natural world. Dorame's lens captures the vibrant tapestry of our Native ecology and its elusive peripheries, inviting reflection on the delicate balance between the familiar and what lies beyond.
Inspired by her field research on the Channel Islands, focusing on Pimugna (Catalina Island) and Limuw (Santa Cruz Island), the exhibition’s images and sculptural works explore the liminal spaces of our ecological environment as gateways and portals to consider alternate realms—unseen cultural histories, dimensions beyond our consciousness, concealed presence. In this environment, darkness as a contemplative space evokes the ceremonial, guiding us through an expanse where the earthly and celestial intersect.
The exhibition's sculptural works, dark skies and waters serve as anchors, embodying physical inversions and thresholds into the unknown, while allowing for movement between realms. Dorame invites us to find tranquility in these spaces that may not be easily understood; embracing the subtle borders beyond the familiar—where sky touches water.
Oxy Arts
Los Angeles, CA
February 8 – April 20, 2024
Mercedes Dorame: Where Sky Touches Water
EXHIBITION
Coast to Coast to Coast: Indigenous Art from the McMichael Canadian Art Collection
The Albuquerque Museum presents Coast to Coast to Coast; Indigenous Art from the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. This exhibition, originally presented as Early Days, is the first large-scale survey of Indigenous art from Canada to be presented internationally.
Coast to Coast to Coast: Indigenous Art from the McMichael Canadian Art Collection is the first large-scale survey of Indigenous art from Canada to be presented internationally. Organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in collaboration with Indigenous stakeholders—scholars, writers, knowledge keepers, and contemporary artists—the exhibition explores the powerful tensions and continuities that exist between the present and the past, and the artists’ relationships with the land, with their ancestors, and with each other.
Albuquerque Museum
Albuquerque, NM
January 27 – April 21, 2024
Dana Claxton (b. 1959), Headdress–Shadae, 2019
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Indeterminate Beauty presents a brief yet bold selection of works by influential Kiowa/Caddo artist T.C. Cannon. His artistic motivations were ignited by the sociopolitical atmosphere of America during the mid-20th century, illustrated by saturated colors juxtaposed with subjects that examine identity. The exhibition features five woodcut prints of Cannon’s oeuvre, acquired through a gift in memory of Gil Waldman, along with Moon and Stars over Taos (1974) an acquisition made possible thanks to the generosity of 18 supporters in memory of Gil Waldman.
Heard Museum
Phoenix, AZ
May 4, 2023 – April 22, 2024
T.C. Cannon: Indeterminate Beauty
T.C. Cannon, Moon and Stars Over Taos, 1974
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Past Forward: Native American Art from the Gilcrease Museum
Oklahoma’s Gilcrease Museum houses one of the best and most comprehensive collections of Native American art in the country, largely built by a collector who was himself a member of the Muscogee Nation. This unprecedented traveling exhibition emphasizes Indigenous art from the heartland from the late nineteenth century to the present day, supplemented by ancient stone carvings and by a handful of contrasting Euro-American works. Arranged into four stimulating sections exploring transhistorical themes of ceremony, sovereignty, visual abstraction, and identity, Past Forward amplifies Indigenous voices and affirms the centrality of Native American art to American art history.
Expand your engagement by visiting Ackland Upstairs, which will feature a selection from our own collection of Native American art, ranging from an eighteenth-century Cherokee jackal pipe to contemporary editions.
Ackland Art Museum
Chapel Hill, NC
February 16 – April 28, 2024
Stephen Mopope, Indian Gathering, 1933
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Preston Singletary: Raven and the Box of Daylight
The multi-sensory experience combines glass, video, and audio to tell the story of Raven, a creator figure in Northwest Coast Native American culture, who was the giver of the stars, moon, and sun. Raven takes visitors on a transformative journey through darkness into light. In addition to Singletary’s striking glass pieces, the exhibition features storytelling paired with original music, coastal Pacific Northwest soundscapes, and video.
Singletary’s work fuses time-honored glassblowing traditions with Pacific Northwest Indigenous art to honor his ancestral Tlingit heritage, a tribe in southern Alaska. Tlingit (KLING-kit) culture and oral tradition have a rich history of pairing objects with foundational stories and histories of tribal families. By drawing upon this method of visual storytelling, Singletary’s art creates a theatrical atmosphere in which each object follows and enhances the narrative.
Oklahoma City Museum of Art
Oklahoma City, OK
On view through April 28, 2024
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Margaret Jacobs creates steel sculptures and finely crafted jewelry, exploring the tensions and harmonies between the man-made and natural worlds. An enrolled member of the Akwesasne Mohawk tribe in upstate New York, Jacobs investigates cultural histories and identity. In Kinship, Jacobs examines the relationships connecting unexpected or contradictory elements, believing that materials have their own distinct narratives.
In her Old Growth Series, Jacobs melds forms of flora and medicinal plants with tools associated with early twentieth-century Mohawk ironworkers. Alongside the stark lines and unadorned metal of these steel sculptures, the artist’s colorful jewelry features botanicals – such as garlic, mint, and strawberry – arranged in groupings as “partner pieces” charged with a quiet strength and beauty.
Burlington City Arts
Burlington, VT
February 9 – May 11, 2024
Margaret Jacobs: Kinship
Margaret Jacobs, Old Growth Series Wild Rose, 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Native America: In Translation brings together the works of nine Native artists who explore aspects of community, heritage, and the legacy of colonialism on the North American continent. By posing challenging questions about land rights, identity, and the legacy of violence toward Native people perpetrated by settler governments, the artists probe the fraught history of photography in representing Indigenous populations. Representing diverse nations and affiliations, the artists reclaim complex personal and collective narratives to imagine new histories of image-making. “The ultimate form of decolonization is through how Native languages form a view of the world,” exhibition curator Wendy Red Star notes. “These artists provide sharp perceptions, rooted in their cultures.”
Native America: In Translation features works by Rebecca Belmore, Nalikutaar Jacqueline Cleveland, Martine Gutierrez, Duane Linklater, Guadalupe Maravilla, Kimowan Metchewais, Alan Michelson, Koyoltzintli, and Marianne Nicolson.
Native America: In Translation is curated by Wendy Red Star as she expands on her role as guest editor of the Fall 2020 issue of Aperture magazine. The exhibition is organized by Aperture and is made possible, in part, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Museum of Contemporary Photography
Chicago, Illinois
January 26 – May 12, 2024
Native America: In Translation
Rebecca Belmore, Matriarch