NATIVE ART PRESS
THE ART NEWSPAPER | APRIL 19 2024
The legacy and mystery of the display of Native American art at the 1932 Venice Biennale
By Claire Voon
In December 1931, the Italian commissioner of the 18th Venice Biennale penned a plea to organisers of the United States pavilion, who had yet to fully deliver their vision for the impending international art exhibition. “We should like some of your very great artists like Whistler,” he wrote, “and as for the living ones we should allow a room for [Paul] Manship as Sculptor, and [Maurice Sterne], or some others, as painters.”
The following January—four months before the exhibition’s opening—a reply arrived from New York. It confirmed that the US pavilion would feature, out of four rooms, one devoted to art by Native Americans, among them the Pueblo painters Fred Kabotie and Awa Tsireh. It would include neither Whistlers, nor Homers, nor Sargents—conspicuously setting aside the era’s assumed “great artists” to shine an international spotlight on lesser-known Indigenous names.
The resulting display was historic: it marked the first time that Native American artists represented the United States at the prestigious art exhibition, a distinction that has repeated only this month, with the Chocktow Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson’s takeover of the US pavilion at the 60th edition of the Biennale (until 24 November). Yet it has largely been forgotten, according to Jessica L. Horton, a professor of modern and contemporary Native American art at the University of Delaware.
HYPERALLERGIC | APRIL 19 2024
Glimpse Into Jeffrey Gibson’s Historic US Pavilion at the Venice Biennal
By Valentina De Liscia
“Birds flying high, you know how I feel …” The opening line of the song “Feeling Good,” popularized in the mid-1960s by Nina Simone as an anthem of Black joy and resilience in the wake of the signing of the Civil Rights Act, is the fitting title of one of multiple murals by Jeffrey Gibson for the United States Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Gibson, the first Native artist to represent the US in a solo capacity at the international contemporary art exhibition, likewise brings resounding echoes of resistance amid an enduring struggle for Indigenous autonomy across the American continents.
Jeffrey Gibson, Treat Me Right, 2024
NEW YORK TIMES | APRIL 18 2024
A Millennial Weaver Carries a Centuries-Old Craft Forward
By Patricia Leigh Brown
Spiders are weavers. The Navajo artist and weaver Melissa Cody knows this palpably. As she sits cross-legged on sheepskins at her loom, on one of the wooden platforms that boost her higher as her stack of monumental tapestries grows, the sacred knowledge of Spider Woman and Spider Man, who brought the gift of looms and weaving to the Diné, or Navajo, is right there in her studio with her.
It also infuses “Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies,” the first major solo exhibition of the artist’s work, which is on view at MoMA PS1 through Sept. 9. in a co-production with the São Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil (known as MASP).
Detail of “Power Up” (2023)
ARTSY | APRIL 18 2024
The 10 Best National Pavilions at the 60th Venice Biennale
By Jameson Johnson and Casey Lesser
The Palladian exterior of the U.S. pavilion has been concealed with vibrant swaths of color and geometric text boasting the title of Indigenous artist Jeffrey Gibson’s presentation, “the space in which to place me.” The title references a poem by Oglala Lakota Nation writer Layli Long Soldier that pushes at the limitations and colonial forces that Indigenous communities have been subject to. Instead, Gibson proposes a bold reclamation and celebration of Native and queer narratives by remixing text, patterns, colors, and histories through his signature technicolor style.
Jeffrey Gibson, exterior view of “the space in which to place me”
ARTNEWS | APRIL 17 2024
At the Venice Biennale’s Contemporary Showcase, Living Artists Examine Queer and Indigenous Legacies
By Maximilíano Durón
As the international art world has descended on La Serenissima this week, the 2024 Venice Biennale began the first of its preview days on Tuesday morning, with visitors heading to either (or both) of its main venues: the Arsenale and the Giardini. Curated this year by Adriano Pedrosa, the closely watched artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, the exhibition, titled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere,” focuses on Indigenous artists and artist from the Global South, highlighting the vastness of art that is out in the world today and, with the historical section, throughout the 20th century.
Emmi Whitehorse, Typography of Standing Ruins #3, 2024
ART BASEL | APRIL 15 2024
For these Native American creatives, fashion and art are inextricably linked
By Stephanie Sporn
Tradition versus innovation. Authenticity versus stereotype. Pride versus pain. To be a Native artist in today’s contemporary landscape is to constantly juggle centuries-old tensions, frequently echoed within the history of one’s chosen artistic medium. ‘The visual aesthetics of Indigenous communities are innately tied to alternative media that have often fallen into the category of “craft,”’ says John P. Lukavic, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts at the Denver Art Museum, one of the first American institutions to collect Indigenous arts.
For centuries, ‘Indigenous people have expressed many aspects of themselves through regalia, beadwork, embroidery patterns, animal skins, and feathers that also express family ties or clans, life accomplishments and spiritual beliefs,’ says Kent Monkman, a Canadian First Nations artist of Cree ancestry. The interdisciplinarian is known for his charged paintings critiquing colonization, as well as his performances as his gender-fluid alter-ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. ‘Art was not separate from other aspects of life, so creativity was and still is expressed through clothing and the creation of ceremonial and everyday objects.’
Kent Monkman, The Great Mystery, 2023
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE | APRIL 14 2024
Her large-scale photos speak thousands of words about Indigenous communities, identities
By Lisa Deaderick
Contemporary fine art photographer Cara Romero is thoughtful and deliberate in her work and particularly in her selection of photographs for her solo exhibition this month at the Museum of Photographic Arts at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park.
“The Artist Speaks: Cara Romero” is divided into three sections: Native California, Imagining Indigenous Futures, and Native Woman, and there’s a clear purpose to offer representations of her culture, history, and lived experience from her perspective as a Native American woman.
Cara Romero, 3 Sisters, 2022.
NEW YORK TIMES | APRIL 13 2024
Representing the U.S. and Critiquing It in a Psychedelic Rainbow
By Jillian Steinhauer
People in Venice might hear the jingle dress dancers before they see them. On April 18, some 26 intertribal Native American dancers and singers from Oklahoma and Colorado will make their way through the winding streets and canals of the Italian city. Wearing brightly colored shawls, beaded yokes and dresses decorated with the metal cones that give the dance its distinctive cshh cshh rattling sound, they’ll make their way to the Giardini, one of the primary sites of the Venice Biennale. There, they’ll climb atop and surround a large red sculpture composed of pedestals of different heights and perform.
The jingle dress dance, which originated with the Ojibwe people of North America in the early 20th century, typically takes place at powwows. In Venice, it will inaugurate the exhibition in the United States Pavilion on April 20. Titled “the space in which to place me,” the show is a mini-survey of the rapturous art of the queer Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson.
MVSKOKE MEDIA | APRIL 12 2024
Ofuskie projects his passion for painting and Indigenous people through acrylics
By Braden Harper
Artist George Alexander (Mvskoke) has come a long way from growing up on the Mvskoke Reservation in Mason. Alexander goes by the name Ofuskie, an homage to Okfuskee, the county he grew up in. Although Alexander has been making art his entire life, his hard work and dedication has culminated into owning his own art studio where he produces original paintings. Alexander was named as one of this year’s National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development’s 40 under 40 honorees for contributions to his community.
George Alexander, What’s That Over There?
SURFACE | APRIL 12 2024
Rose B. Simpson’s Sentinels Are Standing Guard
By Ryan Waddoups
Madison Square Park is coming under a watchful eye. Yesterday, the Santa Clara Pueblo sculptor Rose B. Simpson unveiled “Seed,” a group of seven 18-foot-tall sentinel figurines standing guard in circular formation around a much smaller bronze bust of a female form bearing the rippling fingerprints of an artist’s touch. “They transform the nature of a hectic and scary city, in a sense, to a place that’s really safe,” Simpson said at the installation’s unveiling, as reported by Hyperallergic. “They become these protectors of what they’re looking out for, so that [the inner sculpture] can close her eyes, so she doesn’t have to be worried or on.” They also spark reflection by invoking the Lenape, an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands who were the first settlers of Manhattan before European settlers arrived in the 1800s.
ART NEWS | APRIL 11 2024
Recipients of the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship Announced, Including Nicholas Galanin, Lorraine O’Grady, and More
By Daniel Cassady
A diverse group of 188 artists, scholars, and cultural creators were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships this year from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Among the winners are 50 artists including Jessica Blinkhorn, Nicholas Galanin, Lorraine O’Grady, Arvie Smith, and Ada Trillo.
The Guggenheim Fellowships is among world’s most prestigious awards, and this year alone had over 3,000 applicants. It total, 52 scholarly disciplines and artistic practices are represented in four broadly considered categories: the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and creative arts.
Nicholas Galanin, The American Dream Is Alie and Well, 2012.
HYPERALLERGIC | APRIL 10 2024
Rose B. Simpson’s Soaring Metal Sentinels Watch Over Madison Square Park
By Elaine Velie
Santa Clara Pueblo artist Rose B. Simpson’s first New York City solo public artwork has arrived in Manhattan. Seven 18-foot-tall figures surround a bronze female form in Seed, on view in Madison Square Park through September 22. The installation’s weathered steel sentinels are the artist’s tallest sculptures yet.
“They transform the nature of a hectic and scary city, in a sense, to a place that’s really safe,” Simpson said at the work’s unveiling today, April 10. She explained that they mimic the energy of the park, a place people go to reconnect with their humanity. “They become these protectors of what they’re looking out for, so that [the inner sculpture] can close her eyes. So she doesn’t have to be worried or on.”
ART BASEL | APRIL 9 2024
The transformative rise of Indigenous and First Nations artists
By Alex Greenberger
At the Venice and Sydney Biennales, they highlight the importance of stories and perspectives rooted in land and sea.
The wave of Indigenous and First Nations artists exhibiting in national pavilions for the first time is undoubtedly the Venice Biennale’s most significant development in recent years. In 2019, the Isuma collective became the first Inuit artists to occupy the Canadian Pavilion, with Zacharias Kunuk’s film, One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (2019), recounting the forced relocation of Inuit people in Canada. Then the Nordic Pavilion transformed into ‘The Sámi Pavilion’ in 2022, with artists Pauliina Feodoroff, Máret Ánne Sara, and Anders Sunna illuminating an Indigenous community stretching from Norway to Russia, as Yuki Kihara became the first Pacific, Asian, and fa’afafine artist to represent Aotearoa New Zealand.
Eric-Paul Riege and his installation at the Sydney Biennale
ART IN AMERICA | APRIL 9 2024
Kay WalkingStick’s Layered Landscapes Get Under the Genre’s Surfaces
By Alex Greenberger
A member of the Cherokee Nation who is also of European descent, WalkingStick has been exploring relationships between people and the earth for five decades. Diptychs are her signature format: often, she pairs landscapes with abstractions. Since the 1960s, her output has been marked by impressive range. During the ’70s, at the height of the feminist art movement, she painted brightly hued images of her nude form. In the decades following, she took up various triumphs of Native American culture alongside tragedies of Native history. Among her few sculptures is Tears (1990), representing a traditional Plains Indian funerary scaffold, but this version is embossed with a poem identifying the structure as a memorial to those lost, and to those never born. It’s a piece about Native grief that WalkingStick made in anticipation of the quincentennial of Columbus’s 1492 voyage.
Below, WalkingStick discusses her approach to painting—and probing— landscapes, all the while looking past the land’s surface to unearth its wounds.
Kay WalkingStick: Farewell to the Smokies (Trail of Tears), 2007.
PHILLIPS | APRIL 4 2024
Phillips’ Dropshop Announces Kent Monkman as Featured Artist for April
Phillips is pleased to announce Kent Monkman as the featured artist for the upcoming April Dropshop. Following the highly acclaimed Cree artist’s recent showcase in the PhillipsX Exhibition New Terrains: Contemporary Native American Art, Monkman will be offering six unique works from his latest series, Portraits of a Legend, along with How the West Was Won, a watercolor hand-painted etching available in a limited edition of 30. These exclusive pieces, priced at $15,000 each for the paintings and $1,500 for each etching, will be available for purchase via dropshop.phillips.com at 10am ET on 9 April. Recognized as one of the foremost Indigenous artists in North America, Monkman's oeuvre confronts themes of colonization and resilience against the backdrop of classical European and American art.
Kent Monkman, Study for The Fun Is in The Chase, 2024
ART IN AMERICA | APRIL 4 2024
Raven Chacon Summons Earthy and Ethereal Sounds from Landscapes and Guns
By Andy Battaglia
Drawing on music, video, and installations that evoke the presence of environmental sights and sounds, Raven Chacon is a composer and artist whose work focuses in part on land and its many different inhabitants. Born in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, and currently based in Upstate New York and New Mexico, Chacon (Diné) has created compositions and artworks inspired by a distinctive sense of place, however specific or impressionistic that sense may be.
He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022 and was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2023. His current exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York, touted as his first major institutional solo show, features 11 works dating back to 1999 and is accompanied by companion show sharing the same title—“A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak”—at Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum in Tromsø, Norway. (The New York exhibition is on view through April 14; the Norwegian show continues through September 1.)
Raven Chacon, American Ledger No. 1 (Army Blanket), 2020.
THE BROOKLYN RAIL | APRIL 2024
Art In Conversation: Kay WalkingStick with Patricia Marroquin Norby
Kay WalkingStick is currently enjoying a moment of tremendous recognition, with multiple solo exhibitions and international group shows on the near horizon. If her stars have aligned, it’s not because WalkingStick has done anything different. As the artist says in the interview that follows, she hasn’t changed. On the occasion of her exhibition at Hales Gallery in New York, WalkingStick met with curator Patrica Marroquin Norby to discuss her love for materials, especially paint, her admiration for the bridges of New York City, and her deep appreciation for geometry and drawing.
Kay WalkingStick, Tepee Form, 1974
FRIEZE MAGAZINE | MAR 27 2024
Roundtable: Indigenous Artists at the Venice Biennale
Dare Turner talks with Jeffrey Gibson, Archie Moore and Inuuteq Storch about working within the settler colonial framework of American, Australian and Danish pavilions.
Dare Turner: “I wanted to start by reflecting on the theme of this year’s biennial, ‘Foreigners Everywhere’. In his official statement, curator Adriano Pedrosa described the title as having ‘a dual meaning. First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are, you will always encounter foreigners […] Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner’. Is this something that resonates with you?”
Jeffrey Gibson, Archie Moore, Inuuteq Storch, Dare Turner
Jeffrey Gibson, AMERICAN HISTORY, 2015
HYPERALLERGIC | MAR 24 2024
Can We Find Our Way to Indigenous Joy?
By Brian Johnson
As part of Hyperallergic’s Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators, Brian Johnson explores the de-colonial practices of Indigenous and Native American poster designers.
In a world that is currently grappling with what it means to be racially and culturally aware without appropriating from other cultures, we are still lacking Indigenous and Native American self-representation in the sphere of design.
New Red Order, The World’s Unfair series, 2023
HYPERALLERGIC | MAR 24 2024
Rose B. Simpson’s Antidote to “Postcolonial Stress Disorder”
“I didn’t want to be an artist,” Rose B. Simpson told me over the phone from her studio at Santa Clara Pueblo, an Indigenous community just outside of Española, New Mexico. “I wanted to fly airplanes and helicopters. I only did art as a kind of default.” The artist, who works across large-scale ceramic sculpture, custom cars, fashion, and performance, as well as music, has been featured in some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions, including the Denver Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and SITE Santa Fe. She had a recent solo show at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery, and is one of several Indigenous artists exhibiting in this year’s Whitney Biennial alongside Demian DinéYazhi’, Cannupa Hanska Luger, and Kite. For an artist who was reluctant to start, Simpson’s career is on a powerful path.
By Erin Joyce
Installation view Rose B. Simpson, “Daughters: Reverence” (2024)
Rose, Rina, Roxanne And Rose B. Simpson: Four Generations Of Santa Clara Ceramics At Norton Museum Of Art
FORBES | MAR 21 2024
Rose B. Simpson was hoping for a break. A rest from her busy schedule of exhibitions, commissions, gallery shows and installations nationwide.
As one of the most in demand contemporary artists working today, Simpson says “no” more often than “yes”–her gallerists, Jessica Silverman and Jack Shainman on her behalf, anyway–but some opportunities remain too good to pass up. Like presenting her work alongside her mother’s, grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, FL on view March 23 through September 1, 2024.
By Chadd Scott
DEPAUW MAGAZINE | MAR 15 2024
Ashley Holland’s Art Bridges: Redefining American Art
Holland is a DePauw alum who majored in art history and went on to do her graduate degree in museum studies, then her PhD in Oklahoma. She described how she was unable to express her indigenous identity – from her mother’s side of the family – because she didn’t live in an environment that emphasized the significance of Native women. Only when she encountered a Cherokee artist, Kay Walkingstick, during her graduate degree program, she realized what she wanted to do: become a curator of Native art.
By Osama Mirza
HYPERALLERGIC | MAR 11 2024
A True and Exact History of Queer Indigenous Sovereignty
Spanning two volumes, both richly illustrated with Monkman’s paintings, The Memoirs is an exercise of queer Indigenous sovereignty. It neither shies away from the devastating reality of colonialism nor placates settler readers with a vision of reconciliation. Through wit, fabulation, and a clear sense of ethics, the work is anchored in ninêhiyawak (Cree peoplehood) and wâhkôhtowin (the relational bonds of kinship).
By Joseph Pierce
Arts News: Former Nerman Museum executive director Bruce Hartman co-curates important New York City exhibition of Native American art
KC STUDIO | MAR 6 2024
In January, Bruce Hartman, former executive director of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and a noted expert on Native American art, co-curated an exhibition by more than 60 contemporary Native American artists at Phillips auction house Park Avenue headquarters in New York City. Dine artist Tony Abeyta and gallerist James Trotta-Bono joined Hartman as co-curators of the selling exhibition.
“James, Tony and I drew upon many decades of seeking, studying and collecting Native American art to organize such an expansive exhibition, featuring numerous tribal affiliations, modes of expression and artistic mediums,” Hartman said.
By Libby Hanssen
The Met Announces 2025 Contemporary Commissions by Jennie C. Jones & Jeffrey Gibson
FAD MAGAZINE | FEB 28 2024
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has revealed the artists for its 2025 commissions. Jennie C. Jones will produce her first multi-work outdoor sculptural installation for the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. For The Met Fifth Avenue facade, Jeffrey Gibson (born 1972, Colorado Springs, Colorado), a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, will create four figurative sculptures—works that he refers to as ancestral spirit figures.
By Mark Westall
BLOOMBERG | FEB 21 2024
Prices of Contemporary Indigenous American Art Have Risen More Than 1,000%
It’s a decent rule that if you have to explain someone is famous, they probably aren’t. This is usually the case in the art world, where fame is niche, subjective and often fleeting. But even in this realm, insiders were surprised when the Native American contemporary artist Jeffrey Gibson was chosen to represent the US in the 2024 Venice Biennale, an art-world Olympics where about 70 countries present exhibitions around the canal city.
By James Tarmy
Kay Walkingstick, Durand’s Homage to the Mohawks, 2021
THE BROOKLYN RAIL | FEB 2024
Marking Resilience: Indigenous North American Prints
Marking Resilience: Indigenous North American Prints is the first of two temporary exhibitions planned by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston to showcase recent acquisitions of prints by Indigenous artists of the United States and Canada. Organized by Marina Tyquiengco, Ellyn McColgan Assistant Curator of Native American Art and Edward Saywell, Chair, Prints and Drawings, with consulting co-curator, artist, and Rhode Island School of Design professor Duane Slick (Meskwaki/Ho-Chunk Nation), the show spotlights Indigenous resistance and “survivance” through printmaking.
By Davida Fernández-Barkan
Dyani White Hawk, Wókaǧe, 2019
Phillips's selling show of contemporary Indigenous art reflects surge in curatorial interest
THE ART NEWSPAPER | FEB 9 2024
“It’s extraordinary what’s happening, this tide,” says James Trotta-Bono, a California-based dealer who co-curated New Terrains. “Institutions were very aware that the American art canon was fragmented at best in terms of its narrative, and they’ve been making a very concerted effort to increase the exposure and awareness of Native American artists, both historic and contemporary.”
Trotta-Bono co-curated the exhibition with Bruce Hartman, the executive director and chief curator of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas, and Tony Abeyta, a Diné (Navajo) artist from New Mexico whose work was included in the show, along with that of his father, Narciso Abeyta. Joining the Abeytas was an increasingly in-demand lineup featuring Gibson, Quick-to-See Smith, Oscar Howe, Kent Monkman, Marie Watt and Teresa Baker.
By Carlie Porterfield
Kent Monkman, Death of Adonis, 2009
NEW CITY ART | FEB 6 2024
Voices of the Americas: A Review of “Native America: In Translation” at MoCP
Aperture and the Museum of Contemporary Photography have teamed up on this powerful exhibition exploring Indigenous issues. Curated by Wendy Red Star, who guest-edited the fall 2020 issue of Aperture magazine, the show touches on the countless matters surrounding the forceful colonization of what is now called America. Through their work, the nine Native artists discuss land rights, identity, gender and the devastating wrongs perpetrated on Indigenous people in this country. It is a history fraught with violence, misunderstanding and heinous crimes against humanity.
Films like “Killers of the Flower Moon” bring to light the horrors we as American students never learned about in school, leaving us shocked and ashamed. This exhibition allows a dialogue to emerge, feelings and beliefs to be shared. There can be no more saying “we didn’t know”—truth and the remnants of all that have happened spill from these artists in an articulate way, impossible to ignore, necessary and critical if there is to be reparation, or at least acknowledgment, on the part of our country as a whole.
By Susan Aurinko
Koyoltzintli, “Spider Woman Embrace,” 2019
MPR NEWS | FEB 1 2024
‘Dreaming’ big: Minnesota exhibit explores connections and rich history of Indigenous painters
Historian Brenda J. Child stares at a buttery yellow sky framed by converging treelines reflected upon a lake. The scene is a painting by Duluth-based artist Jonathan Thunder and it’s called “On the Grave of the Giant.” Below the sky’s glow is a couple harvesting wild rice from a canoe. On the lake bottom are the skeletal remains of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox.
The painting is on public view for the first time as part of the new exhibition “Dreaming Our Futures: Ojibwe and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Artists and Knowledge Keepers” at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota.
It is the inaugural exhibition of the George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts, an “interdepartmental study center to support the creation, presentation and interpretation of Indigenous art in all its forms.”
Child is the founder of the new center, which was sparked by the success of the 2016 Nash gallery exhibition that she curated, “Singing Our History: People and Places of the Red Lake Nation.”
By Alex Cipolle
HIGHBROW MAGAZINE | JAN 31 2024
Kay WalkingStick: A Native American Artist for the Ages
History has shown that being an artist and a woman is no easy task. And being a woman and an artist and of biracial Cherokee-Scottish heritage is a mountainous undertaking on the road to success. Lucky for us, at 88, Kay WalkingStick is still up to the challenge—she has proven she can move mountains and seas and everything in between with the stroke of a brush.
The current exhibition at the New York Historical Society, Kay WalkingStick/Hudson River School, puts contemporary paintings from WalkingStick’s six-decade career in a vital and lively conversation with the museum’s signature landscapes by Cole, Bierstadt, Durand, and John Frederick Kensett, among others.
By Sandra Bertrand
Kay WalkingStick, Niagara, 2022
HYPERALLERGIC | JAN 28 2024
Caroline Monnet’s Indigenous Worldbuilding
By Erin Joyce
The past few years have been busy for multidisciplinary Anishinaabe, French and Canadian artist Caroline Monnet, from completing a feature film in 2021 to 11 exhibitions in 2023 — of which four were solo shows — to having her artwork featured on the cover of An Indigenous Present (2023), edited by artist Jeffrey Gibson.
Clearly, the Montreal-based artist’s multifaceted practice is sparking interest. “I see the work of artists a bit like [that of] sociologists,” Monnet shared over Zoom from her Montreal studio. “I think our responsibility and our role is to respond to the world around us and offer new avenues for conversations.”
Installation view of WORKSITE featuring works by Caroline Monnet (photo by Greg Carideo, courtesy the artist)
Artist Jeffrey Gibson on Native American Histories, the Pet Shop Boys, and the Call of Community
ARTNET | JAN 26 2024
“I’ve been thinking a lot about how time unfolds, how culture unfolds,” said Jeffrey Gibson, in a conversation in the UBS lounge at Art Basel Miami Beach this past December. “We live in a time right now where we can look in retrospect and try to understand how one thing led to the next. But looking into the future, it’s nearly impossible to determine what happens next.”
Behind Gibson, his triptych JUST WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT IT (2023) could be seen, radiating with electric colors in the otherwise neutral lounge, a chromatic beacon of sorts. The recent work—comprising three acrylic-on-canvas paintings with glass bead adornments—had been commissioned for the UBS Arena in Elmont, New York, but was on view in the ultra-exclusive lounge along with other recent acquisitions to the UBS Art Collection including the works of Nick Cave, Awol Erizku, and Deana Lawson. Gibson’s triptych occupied a central wall in the room, and had a nearly immersive quality, as he’d installed the work on a colorfully patterned wallpaper, Ancestral Superbloom (2023), also of his design.
By Katie White
THE NEW YORK TIMES | JAN 26
Whitney Biennial Names Its ‘Dissonant Chorus’ of Artists to Probe Turbulent Times
On Thursday the museum revealed the names of artists who will participate in the Biennial, titled “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” It is relatively compact, with 69 artists and two collectives spread across the gallery exhibition, the accompanying film and performance programs — and the global map: 20 of the artists, many filmmakers, live or work outside the United States.
For Iles and Onli, the focus is less on the state of American art than on America itself at a raw, vulnerable time. They were drawn to artists who explored how people carried and processed society’s wounds in their bodies and minds — and what creative regeneration that sparked.
Not surprisingly New York City is well represented: 13 artists in the galleries and seven in the film and performance programs live here. Twelve artists in total are based in Los Angeles. Four, as it turns out, live in New Mexico: Hammond, who moved there in the 1980s; the Indigenous artists Rose B. Simpson and Cannupa Hanska Luger; and the painter Maja Ruznic, who was born in Bosnia and is influenced by mysticism and psychoanalysis.
By Siddhartha Mitter
Cannupa Hanska Luger, “Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta”, 2021
HYPERALLERGIC | JAN 24 2024
New-York Historical Society Appoints First Native Chief Curator
Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto has been named vice president and chief curator of the New-York Historical Society (NYHS), marking the first time a Native person has served on the leadership team of the 220-year-old Manhattan institution. Ikemoto, who is Native Hawaiian, was formerly the senior curator of American Art and joined the NYHS in 2018 as an associate curator.
Facing Central Park on the Upper West Side, the New-York Historical Society was founded in 1804 by 11 men with names such as “Bleecker” and “Stuyvesant” — the kind that are still spelled out on NYC road signs to this day. The group wanted to preserve the history of the settlement they helped shape. Over two centuries later, the NYHS houses an astounding 14 million objects, a research library, a children’s museum, a women’s history center, extensive educational and public programming, and permanent and rotating exhibitions. In recent years, the institution’s shows have increasingly explored histories that dissent from the tales printed in textbooks.
By Elaine Velie
ART & ANTIQUES | JAN 2024
Native Perspectives
ARTSY | JAN 22 2024
Creative Capital announces the recipients of the 2024 “Wild Futures” art awards
Creative Capital, an organization dedicated to funding innovative artworks and promoting diversity, has announced the recipients of its 2024 “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Award. This year, the organization selected 50 projects from 54 artists, 80% of whom are artists of color.
Each winner will receive up to $50,000 in direct project funding, advisory services, mentorship, and community-building opportunities.
Among the awardees, 20% were Native or Indigenous artists, including Dyani White Hawk—a recent recipient of the MacArthur “genius grant.” She was awarded the prize for her project, “Love Language: see, honor, nurture, celebrate,” an immersive exhibition at the Walker Art Center. White Hawk’s work, deeply rooted in her Sičáŋǧu Lakota heritage, aims to create a nurturing space that acknowledges the Dakota homelands on which the museum stands.
By Maxwell Rabb
via @creative_capital
MPLS ST. PAUL | JAN 14 2024
This 14.5-foot-by-30-foot-9-inch mosaic is entitled Nourish. The name comes from its creator: painter and multidisciplinary artist (and MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient) Dyani White Hawk. The Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned the mosaic from White Hawk after her piece Wopila | Lineage (Wopila is a Lakota word that expresses tremendous gratitude), an 8-foot-by-14-foot fully beaded work on aluminum panel, became one of the stars of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, the museum’s showcase of the most exciting voices in the contemporary global art world. Wopila | Lineage’s repeating triangles of browns, blues, whites, and greens are reminiscent of the same forms in Nourish. White Hawk keeps returning to these shapes and colors whether she’s working in tile mosaic, large-scale beadwork, or painting that represents porcupine quillwork, her artistic process pulling from the two histories of abstraction she’s most connected to—the traditions of both Lakota artwork and European easel painting—an effort that she hopes will reframe and expand the definition of abstraction itself.
By Steve Marsh
Dyani White Hawk: Expanding Abstraction
Phillips Exhibition Sale Another Sign of Rising Market Interest in Contemporary Native And Indigenous Art
ARTNEWS | JAN 10 2024
Hot off the heels of several major Indigenous art exhibitions last year and the selection of Jeffrey Gibson as the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, Phillips auction house has opened a selling exhibition of contemporary Indigenous and Native art at its New York headquarters on Park Avenue. The show, which runs through January 23, is just the latest sign that the art market has taken increasing interest in works by such artists, while also acting as a reminder of how many Native and Indigenous artists have been undervalued, marginalized, and misunderstood for decades.
“They have been making good work, showing their work, sometimes with galleries, sometimes not, but in other situations, doing their work consistently, for a long time,” Mary Sabbatino, vice-president and partner of Galerie Lelong, told ARTnews.
By Karen Ho
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, My Heart Belongs to Daddy, 1998
ART NEWS | JAN 5 2024
In New Show, Tlingít Artist Nicholas Galanin Shows What Decolonization Actually Looks Like
In Galanin’s experience, posing that envisioned future forces those who believe it impossible into quantitative conversations about why. Suddenly you’ve proven what has actually been taken or removed from those Indigenous communities, and that’s where the real conversation begins.
In the case of Indigenous objects and human remains—both of which became central to the national conversation this year, following investigations into the Smithsonian Institute, the American Museum of Natural History, and other institutions—Galanin provides maps for what has been taken in his “Architecture of Return” series, begun in 2021. Those works display architectural blueprints of the aforementioned institutions painted onto deer hides, with escape routes and the objects in question also depicted. On a nearby plinth rests Purchase (2022), a set of copper lock picks handmade and engraved by Galanin with text from provenance cards of Indigenous objects at AMNH.
By Harrison Jacobs
BARRON’S / PENTA | JAN 4 2024
Contemporary Native American Art Is Hot. Phillips Will Show Why in a Huge Exhibition.
Phillips is bringing an expansive selling exhibition of contemporary Native American art to New York beginning on Friday that will showcase a diversity of expression from more than 60 artists practicing since the middle of the 20th century.
The show of more than 120 works of painting, sculpture, photography, video, jewelry, pottery, and weaving at Phillip’s Park Avenue gallery arrives at a time when the market for art by Native Americans and Canadian First Nations people “is so fast moving,” says Bruce Hartman, a curator of the exhibition, who retired as executive director of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kan., in 2021.
By Abby Schultz
Kent Monkman, Death of Adonis, 2009
SURFACE | JAN 4 2024
Surface Approved: A Landmark Indigenous Art Exhibition Opens at Phillips
On Jan. 5, Phillips will host its first major exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art: “New Terrains” includes works from more than 50 Indigenous and First Nations artists. The show’s curation charts the influences of the modernist, post-war, and Pop movements on the evolution of Native American visual art from the late-20th to the early-21st centuries. Major contributions in the lot come from the likes of Kay Walkingstick, Dana Claxton, Oscar Howe, and Kent Monkman (work pictured). The latter’s inclusion comes on the heels of a momentous fall season in which his work was included in Art Toronto, the publication of his two-volume book The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, and a reading at the Met.
MEDICINE MAN GALLERY | JAN 3 2024
Another big year for Native art in New York begins at Phillips Auction House.
Phillips auction house starts the new year with “New Terrains,” a watershed exhibition of important works of contemporary Native American art. Exploring the influences of modernism, post-war and Pop art, 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.
By Chadd Scott
George Morrison, Summer Spectrum II, 1958
LITTLE ROCK SOIRÉE | JAN 1 2024
Raven Halfmoon’s work is hard to miss.
Her imposing sculptures purposefully take up space, the clay often shaped into humanistic forms and baked into neutral earth tones cut with searing splashes of red, each with echoes of her Caddo Nation citizenship.
The Oklahoma-based, nationally-acclaimed sculptor recently completed an artist in residence program at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts where she worked on new pieces and participated in museum programming throughout the fall.
“Raven Halfmoon’s work explores identity and inclusivity, and she is an important voice in contemporary American art,” AMFA Executive Director Dr. Victoria Ramirez says, noting that during her residency, Halfmoon spent time “sharing her practice, sparking important conversations and inspiring the next generation.”
Soirée sat down with Halfmoon to talk contemporary heritage, her time in Arkansas and her latest artwork acquired for the AMFA Foundation Collection.
By Jess Ardrey
The Uncommon Practice of Raven Halfmoon
ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL | DEC 17 2023
Running 'Interference': Nicholas Galanin challenges the legacies, consequences of colonization through art
You can hear the screams at Site Santa Fe.
Multidisciplinary Tlingit and Unangax artist Nicholas Galanin’s solo exhibit “Interference Patterns” features a neon sign reading “Take a knee and scream until you can’t breathe.”
“There’s been a lot of participation,” said curator Brandee Caoba. “We had to put up a lot of warning signs saying, ‘You may hear screaming in the building.’ ”
Galanin’s show includes installations, sculpture, video and sound celebrating Indigenous knowledge challenging the legacies and consequences of colonization and occupation. Some works read inherently political; others are poetic but unflinching in their critique and disruption of the dominant culture.
By Kathleen Roberts
WVXU NEWS | DEC 15 2023
Cincinnati Art Museum exhibit highlights contemporary Indigenous glass artists
Glass artwork created by Indigenous artists is on display now through early April at the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass comes to Cincinnati from The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It features 120 pieces from 33 artists, showcasing new takes on traditional stories, along with current issues affecting tribal nations.
"It features 29 Native American artists from the United States and Canada, as well as four artists from the Pacific Rim — from New Zealand and from Australia," explains curator Letitia Chambers, Ed.D. "Adding the Indigenous artists from other countries helped illuminate the story that American Indian artists and other Indigenous artists bring to this new medium of glass art."
By Tana Weingartner
Virgil Ortiz, Incubators, 2016
HYPERALLERGIC | DEC 14 2023
[Nani Chacon] addresses how a secure home is essential.” This the phrase, from the press release for Chacon’s exhibition +Home+ at Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, forced me to pause. With the climate crisis impacting our shared home of the earth, continually increasing unhoused populations, and ongoing military onslaughts against the people of Gaza, I was eager to turn to an Indigenous artist, a Diné woman, and engage with her critical and creative perspectives on home.
The exhibition is a mediation on notions of home through the lens of Chacon’s ancestors, lived experience, and the legacies we leave for future generations. She began by asking questions — What does the idea of home actually mean? What do we really need? — and examining the different facets and nuances of home, from the familiar and comforting to the potential of a sacred transformative space or the body as home. The show also reflects on oral traditions and creation stories as narratives of survivance.
By Joelle E. Mendoza
Nani Chacon Finds the Essence of Home
Nani Chacon, “Transformational Space: Walking clockwise/counterclockwise”, 2023
ART DAILY | DEC 13 2023
Phillips announces additional artists for 'New Terrains: Contemporary Native American Art'
Phillips has announced additional artists in the upcoming exhibition New Terrains: Contemporary Native American Art, which was previously announced in September, with added details on the show. On view from 5 – 23 January 2024, the exhibition, curated by Bruce Hartman, James Trotta-Bono, and Tony Abeyta, traces the influences of Modernism, Post-War, and Pop Art, contextualizing the evolution of contemporary Native American art from the mid-20th to early 21st centuries. Showcasing over 60 artists across seven decades, the works reflect the socio-political and artistic periods of their creation. Embracing new ideas and expressions, Native American art continues to evolve, with established, emerging, and under-recognized artists sharing their unique visions of Indigenous artistic identity. The exhibition will feature the artists highlighted below, with a comprehensive artist list following.
Phillips
Cara Romero, Water Memory, 2015
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO NEWS | DEC 12 2023
Acknowledging the land: Showcasing Indigenous artists, voices and experiences
A new art installation inside the University of Toronto’s Simcoe Hall is shining a spotlight on some of Canada’s most respected Indigenous artists while giving the community an opportunity to reimagine the concept of public space.
The exhibition, acknowledging the land, honours Indigenous continuity, resilience and self-determination. The long-term installation occupies space previously reserved for paintings of U of T leaders who have shaped the university over its 196-year history – a gesture acknowledging the importance of making space for Indigenous voices and presence.
By Mariam Matti
Catherine Blackburn, But there’s no scar? II
DENVER GAZETTE | DEC 11 2023
Denver Art Museum a world leader in North American Native arts
By Colleen Smith
The Denver Art Museum, owing to visionary curation beginning in 1925, proudly houses one of the world’s largest collections of North American Indigenous arts. The DAM initiated the collection early in its institutional history, recognizing the aesthetic merits of Native arts when other museums deemed such works as mere artifacts.
“Our collection never put a premium on collecting things just because they were old,” said John Lukavic, who works at his dream job as the DAM’s Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts.
Cara Romero, Gaea, 2021
THE NEW YORK TIMES | DEC 7 2023
Best Art of 2023
By Roberta Smith and Holland Cotter
“Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art and Self-Determination Since 1969” at the Hessel Museum, Bard College, was, hands down, the most stimulatingly inventive contemporary group show I saw this year. It was part of a surge in visibility for new Native American art, one that began in the spring with the Whitney Museum’s stirring five-decade-career survey of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and that continues with “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans,” organized by Smith at the National Gallery of Art.
MVSKOKE MEDIA | DEC 5 2023
Art exhibition highlights the three reservations that call Tulsa home
A recent art exhibition at the Gathering Place celebrated the existence and persistence of the three Native American Nations that call the region home. The exhibition “WeAre.” featured artists from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the Cherokee Nation, and the Osage Nation. It ran from Nov. 4 -26 during National Native American Heritage Month at the ONEOK boathouse.
“WeAre.” featured a variety of forms including photography, sculpture, pottery, paintings, textiles, and woven paper. The exhibition showcased 13 artists and featured the art of Mvskoke artists Anita Fields, Yatika Fields, Jimmie C. Fife, Kenneth Johnson, Bobby C. Martin, and Melinda Schwakhofer.
While the exhibition closed Nov. 26, it can be viewed at their website WeAre.
By Meredith Johnson
Lloyd Kiva New Documentary Highlights the Late Designer’s Influence on Indigenous Fashion and Southwest Culture
SOUTHWEST CONTEMPORARY | DEC 4 2023
Although Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee) had a significant influence on arts and culture in the Southwest during the mid-20th century—his work ranged from fashion design to arts education—his name isn’t widely known in mainstream culture. Filmmaker Nathaniel Fuentes (Santa Clara Pueblo) and a creative team are working to change that through a documentary Fuentes wrote and directed. NEW: ART is Culture, Culture is ART explores the creative life and legacy of the artist (1916-2002) with archival interviews and photographs as well as reflections by contemporary curators and historians.
NEW: ART is Culture, Culture is ART is scheduled to be screened on December 7, 2023, at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts in Scottsdale, Arizona, where the Oklahoma-born artist spent two decades of his creative career and established an artist studio in the 1940s that drew Native artists to the region. Today, the city markets itself as a hub for Native American and Western art.
By Lynn Trimble
Archival photo of a Lloyd Kiva New design
THE BROOKLYN RAIL | DEC 2023
Nicholas Galanin: In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra
It poured in Brooklyn Bridge Park the morning I visited Nicholas Galanin’s (Lingít and Unangax̂) temporary installation, In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra (2023), the sky almost the same translucent gray as the adjacent East River. Maybe it was the weather that made the monumental capital letters spelling out “LAND” appear particularly foreboding that day. While on sunny days, the sculpture, sponsored by the Public Art Fund, provides a backdrop for cheery revelers and picknickers, that morning I felt a resonance between the thirty-foot-tall, steel-tubed structures—the same height and material as the United States-Mexico border wall—and a prison.
By Davida Fernández-Barkan
W MAGAZINE | NOV 29 2023
You will represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the upcoming Venice Biennale. As the first Indigenous artist chosen to do so, do you feel a sense of responsibility?
I was daunted by what it means to represent the United States, all the complications with Native American history in this country, and all of the oppression we suffered. My goal is to create an atmosphere where everyone is invited, not to create a new hierarchy or form of exclusion.
By Camille Okhio
For Jeffrey Gibson, Beauty Has a Purpose
Jeffrey Gibson with his work “Ancestral Superbloom”, 2023
THE GLOBE AND MAIL | NOV 25 2023
Kent Monkman: Fighting Myth with Myth
By Gisèle Gordon
Our future is determined by our history. Canada’s history, like most colonial nations, is based on misinformation, with the perspectives, experiences and wisdom of entire peoples redacted. Today, Canadian society often pays lip service to reconciliation and decolonization, but how can any of that work be done when the majority of the population is unaware of the truth of our shared history?
Cree artist Kent Monkman has been challenging outdated and often untrue colonial narratives in his paintings for decades through the lens of his alter-ego, the shape-shifting, time-travelling, gender-fluid legendary being, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Fully realizing the power of paintings to communicate emotional narratives and elicit change more effectively than history books or newsfeeds, Kent responds to the paintings of Albert Bierstadt and other 19th-century artists who painted “empty” landscapes, encouraging settlement under the aegis of manifest destiny, and Paul Kane and George Catlin, who painted romantic depictions of Indigenous peoples as a “dying race.”
More Than Just a Milestone: the National Gallery’s First Show of Contemporary Native American Art in 70 Years
ART NEWS | NOV 17 2023
A quiet revolution is taking place within the walls of the National Gallery of Art, where a group of nearly 50 Native American artists has assembled to expose the land that constitutes Washington, D.C.—and most other parts of this country—as stolen.
By Alex Greenberger
Edgar Heap of Birds, Native Host for Washington D.C., 2022
SEE GREAT ART | NOV 8 2023
Saint Louis Art Museum receives major gift of Native American Art
The Saint Louis Art Museum has received a promised gift of 100 works from the William P. Healey Collection of Native American Art, which includes drawings, paintings and sculpture by 62 Indigenous artists.
Focused on 20th-century works from artists based primarily in Oklahoma and New Mexico, the gift will introduce 55 new artists to the museum collection including major names in the field such as Fred Kabotie, Stephen Mopope, Pop Chalee and Allan Houser. The Healey gift will make it possible for the museum to present greater continuity in the history of Native American art.
By Chadd Scott
Tony Abeyta, “Church of this Earth”, 2013
THE NEW YORK TIMES | NOV 1 2023
Now, the Whitney Museum of American Art is rebooting its restaurant spaces with commissioned artworks by two top contemporary makers, Rashid Johnson and Dyani White Hawk, and their works are also entering the museum’s collection.
White Hawk’s work, a wall of colorful ceramic tiles called “Nourish,” will be installed in a space that was formerly Studio Bar. But the cafe won’t open until sometime in 2024. (Both cafes are designed by the New York architectural firm Modellus Novus.)
White Hawk, a Minneapolis-based artist, won a MacArthur Foundation award, known as the “genius grant,” in early October. She said in an interview that “Nourish” represented a series of firsts: It’s her largest work to date (more than 30 feet wide), her first work in ceramic tile and her first commission for a permanent installation in a museum. She collaborated with Mercury Mosaics, a Minneapolis ceramics specialist.
By Ted Loos
Setting a Table at the Whitney with Art
HYPERALLERGIC | OCT 29 2023
Shining a Light on First California Artists
By Erin Joyce
California Stars: Huivaniūs Pütsiv, currently on view at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, is an impactful exhibition of works by 14 prominent First California artists including Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Jamie Okuma (Luiseño/Shoshone-Bannock), Rick Bartow (Mad River Band of the Wiyot Tribe), and Jacob Meders (Mechoopda Indian Tribe of Chico Rancheria/Maidu). The show creates a platform of visibility and representation for Indigenous communities and artists in California — communities that have undertaken a long and sustained fight for recognition — while simultaneously highlighting the Wheelwright’s history of collaboration with California artists, including its early exhibitions of works by Fritz Scholder (Luiseño), Harry Fonseca (Nisenan/Maidu/Native Hawaiian/Portuguese), and James Luna (Luiseño/Puyukitchum/Ipai/Mexican).
Judith Lowry, "Dao Lulelek", 2012
How the Gochman Family Collection Aims to Support Contemporary Indigenous Artists—and Reshape the Mainstream Art World
ARTNEWS | OCT 25 2023
Over the past year or so, the home of collector Becky Gochman and her family has become a locus of sorts for the New York art world. Any given month might see the 12-room apartment host cocktail receptions for nonprofits, tours for museum curators, visits with artists, and maybe even as the setting for a forthcoming artwork.
Located a block from the Guggenheim Museum and boasting views of Central Park, the apartment is filled with work by contemporary Indigenous artists, including a beaded punching bag by Jeffrey Gibson, a multipart installation of a red-painted totem pole that has been broken into pieces by Nicholas Galanin, and paintings by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Kay WalkingStick, and George Morrison. Also on view are sculptures by Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger, woven pieces by Tyrrell Tapaha and Venancio Aragon, drawings by Shuvinai Ashoona, photographs by Jeremy Dennis, mixed-media works by Teresa Baker and Beau Dick, and the original cutout from James Luna’s famed 1991 work Take a Picture with a Real Indian.
By Maximilíano Durón
Cannupa Hanska Luger’s “Midéegaadi: Fire Bison”, 2022.
BMA to Launch Expansive Initiative Centering the Voices and Work of Native Artists and Leaders in April 2024
BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART | OCT 19 2023
In April 2024, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) will launch Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum, a series of exhibitions and projects that centers the work, experiences, and voices of Native artists. Preoccupied explores the vital cultural contributions of Native people through the presentation of historical objects as well as works created by a breadth of contemporary makers, including Julie Buffalohead, Dana Claxton, Nicholas Galanin, Wendy Red Star, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Marie Watt, and Dyani White Hawk, among others. Unfolding over the course of ten months, the initiative features focus solo presentations, thematic explorations, and a film series curated by Sky Hopinka. Preoccupied will also include interventions in the display and labeling of certain objects across the museum that depict Native subjects and espouse colonialist perspectives. Together, these projects and forthcoming public programs will significantly increase the presence of Native artists in the BMA’s galleries and actively subvert the colonialist tendencies and hierarchies upon which museums have been built. The initiative will continue through January 2025.
T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo). Self Portrait in the Studio. 1975. © The Estate of T.C. Cannon; Tia Collection
María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Raven Chacon Are Among the Artists Who Won the 2023 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grants
ARTNET | OCT 10 2023
In 2022, Chacon won the Pulitzer Prize for music, the first Native American so honored. Working with themes of the violent colonial history of the United States, the Diné-American composer and artist creates experimental music, performances, and sound installations, as well as drawings and video work. His work was included in “Quiet as Its Kept,” the 2022 biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
White Hawk, who is also an Indigenous artist, of Lakota descent, was featured in last year’s Whitney Biennial as well. There, Artnet News national art critic Ben Davis called her “beautifully beaded shimmering geometry” a standout work in the show that “is intimately engaged with Lakota craft traditions but also explicitly presented as a reminder of how the heavies of mid-century Abstract Expressionism took inspiration from Native American art.”
By Sarah Cascone
Artist Dyani White Hawk
BOMB MAGAZINE | SEP 26 2023
Marie Watt Interviewed by Tess Bilhartz
Marie Watt and I met to discuss Chords to Other Chords (Relative) (2023), the monumental neon sculpture that she made for Converge 45’s biennial exhibition Social Forms: Art as Global Citizenship in Portland, Oregon. In Watt’s words, the neon text is meant to “blaze like a sunrise.” There is an element of surprise in this blazing sunrise that glows inside of a turn-of-the-century building. Visitors take in the scene with the unsteadiness of that surprise, and their understanding of the walls, the room, the building, and the land around it might shift or soften. Watt told me that water flows in an underground stream beneath the site of her installation: the ground is alive with movement and sound.
Marie Watt, “Chords to Other Chords (Relative)”, 2023
HYPERALLERGIC | SEP 20 2023
Inuit Culture Comes to Life in Shuvinai Ashoona’s Drawings
By Rhea Nayyar
Celebrated Inuk artist Shuvinai Ashoona has debuted a large swath of new work in her solo exhibition Looking Out, Looking In, on view through November 4 at the Fort Gansevoort gallery in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Hailing from a family of Inuit artists in Kinngait (formerly Cape Dorset), located in present-day Canada’s Nunavut territory, Ashoona layers day-to-day experiences of Inuit culture in the Arctic with fantastical scenes of an imagined universe through colored pencils and oil pastels.
Shuvinai Ashoona, "Polar bear sketching people", 2023
NEW YORK TIMES | SEP 5 2023
The Artistry of Her Baskets Is Complex. So Is the Story Around Them.
The Native American baskets sold in the early 1900s out of Abe Cohn’s Emporium, a men’s clothing store in Carson City, Nev., were exceptional. They were woven by Dat So La Lee, said to be a “princess” from the nearby Washoe people whose royal status permitted her alone to utilize a special weaving style.
The truth was less exciting. Dat So La Lee preferred her English name, Louisa Keyser. She was a Washoe woman, but the tales Cohn and his wife, Amy, spun about her — her esteemed heritage, her meeting with the Civil War general John C. Frémont — were myths.
By Marc Tracy
Dat So La Lee, Our Ancestors Were Great Hunters, 1905
NEW YORK TIMES | AUG 25 2023
‘A Wound That Is On the Mend’: Indigenous Art Today
AN INDIGENOUS PRESENT, edited by the Cherokee-Choctaw artist Jeffrey Gibson, challenges the outsider’s destructive fascination with Indigenous cultures, inverting and inviting it into a new perspective authored by Indigenous artists themselves. “History is always on trial in the Indigenous present,” the Dakota scholar Philip J. Deloria writes in the book; and that present is “more than survival, more than resistance: a core continuity of wit, irony, fearlessness, endurance and future-forward possibility.”
By Lauren Christensen
Dana Claxton, Lasso, 2018
NEW YORK TIMES | AUG 10 2023
On the Hudson, Visions for a New Native American Art
A MAGA-style baseball cap, scarlet and sloganeering, sits on a shelf, as if for sale, surrounded by other promotional retail: T-shirts, totes, lighters. “Make Amerika Red Again” is embroidered on the front of the cap, which is also stitched with pretty bead work and topped by a yellow feather.
Where are we? Apparently in the merchandise section of what looks like a combination campaign headquarters, tech showroom, surveillance center and stage set. It’s furnished with desks, chairs, posters and multiple digital screens all belonging to something called the New Red Order, a self-declared “public secret society” of artists and filmmakers seeking to lay bare the “open secret” of Western expansion. Want to know more, maybe join? Call l 1-888-NEW RED1 on the (red) office rotary phone (or your cellphone) for details.
By Holland Cotter
James Luna, Make Amerika Red Again, 2018