NATIVE ART EVENTS AND EXHIBITIONS
CURRENT
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
PUBLIC ART INSTALLATION
Through installation, sculpture, video, and performance, artist Cannupa Hanska Luger foregrounds Indigenous knowledge and culture as critical to our collective survival. A multi-channel video series featuring the artist adorned in vibrant regalia, Midéegaadi is Luger’s invitation to envision the regeneration and return of the North American bison — an animal that once ranged the American plains in abundance before settler colonialism rendered them nearly extinct. Enacting the ancestral technologies of the Northern Plains, Midéegaadi calls bison back onto the land through dance and reverence.
The videos and the regalia are part of the artist’s larger Future Ancestral Technologies project, an ongoing series of speculative fiction works in various formats that includes We Survive You, his billboard for LANDBACK.Art and For Freedoms in 2021. Luger’s first artbook, SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide published by Aora Books will debut this year with an exhibition and performance in Summer 2025 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC in partnership with For Freedoms.
Times Square
New York, NY
On view through April 30, 2025
Cannupa Hanska Luger: Midéegaadi
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Library Street Collective is pleased to present Warp and Weft: Technologies within Textiles, a group exhibition curated by Allison Glenn, Artistic Director of the Shepherd. Warp and Weft considers how artists experiment with new technologies, interrogate materials, and embed innovative, inherited, familial, or ancestral epistemologies into their practices, to foreground narrative and allegory. From the invention of and subsequent improvements to the Jacquard loom, to the reframing of traditional weaving styles, and the incorporation of computers and other forms of mechanization, there is a long history of technologies located within, and born of, deep engagements with textiles. Warp and Weft: Technologies within Textiles brings together a wide spectrum of styles, histories, and approaches. Many artists in Warp and Weft have primarily textile-based practices, while others incorporate textiles and fabrics into largely experimental bodies of work. This range speaks to the materials’ expansiveness.
the Shepherd Art Center
Detroit, MI
On view through May 3, 2025
Warp and Weft: Technologies within Textiles
Patrick Dean Hubbell, Your Spiritual Light Taught Us The Resilience To Overcome Our Faults, 2024
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Co-curated by Dana Claxton and Curtis Collins, the Curve! exhibition sheds light on a lesser-explored facet of Northwest Coast art—women’s contributions to the rich tradition of carving wood and argillite.
The exhibition features 127 works of art that include poles, panels, masks, bowls, and other sculptures all intertwined with traditional knowledge. These works will be on loan from public and private collections across Canada and the United States. The exhibition will focus on a selection of carvers active from the 1950s to present day, highlighting the pivotal role of women artists within the larger tradition of indigenous carving along the coast of British Columbia.
Audain Art Museum
Whistler, BC
On view through May 5, 2025
Curve! Women Carvers on the Northwest Coast
Dale Marie Campbell, Woman who Brought the Salmon, 2021
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 May 11, 2025
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, State Names Map: Cahokia, and Trade Canoe: Cahokia, 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The New Mexico Museum of Art presents a landmark exhibition, Off-Center: New Mexico Art, 1970-2000, a survey of the last three decades of the twentieth century, a pivotal time in which numerous artists relocated to New Mexico, drawn by its distinctive climate and landscape, its rich diversity of cultures, and its strong reputation as a center for the visual arts. Scheduled from June 8, 2024, to May 4, 2025, at the New Mexico Museum of Art Vladem Contemporary, Off-Center explores the depth and complexity of this period through a series of relevant and topical themes.
During this time, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos continued to be important destinations for contemporary artists, but other communities developed in cities and towns infrequently identified with the visual arts such as Galisteo, Gallup, Las Cruces, Roswell, and Silver City. The exhibition will undergo five partial rotations over the course of the year to capture as much of the thematic breadth and as many of the influential artists as possible. With over 125 artists on view, Off-Center presents a compelling range of artistic approaches and a diverse range of experiences that will be organized into three major thematic groupings: Place, Spectacle, and Identity.
New Mexico Museum of Art
Santa Fe, NM
On view through May 18, 2025
Off-Center: New Mexico Art, 1970-2000
David Bradley, El Farol: Canyon Road Cantina, 2000
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Celebrating the innovative vision of Hopi carver Mavasta Honyouti, Carved Stories presents 30 of his more recent works and 16 panels from a new series, never before exhibited, and linked to the publication Coming Home. Carved Stories by Mavasta Honyouti has been developed in dialogue with the Honyouti family and with noted designer Kevin Coochwytewa (Hopi/Isleta Pueblo).
This is the first museum exhibit dedicated to Honyouti’s work.
Mavasta Honyouti (b.1979) is a multi-disciplinary award-winning artist from the village of Hotevilla on the Hopi Reservation, Arizona. His wood carving, painting, digital drawing, and fashion works have gained critical acclamation. Carved Stories highlights Honyouti’s creative practices, how he draws from his family and Hopi lifeways, and his keen interest in mainstream popular culture.
Wheelwright Museum
Santa Fe, NM
On view through May 24, 2025
Carved Stories by Mavasta Honyouti
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Eternal Testament is an exhibition reaffirming that Sag Harbor, including this “church,” occupies the traditional homelands of the Montaukett and Shinnecock Nations. By featuring works by Native artists regionally and from across the country that incorporate wit, irreverence, and playfulness —tools for survival and healing— the exhibition asserts Indigenous presence and sovereignty as artists reclaim space, “temporarily transforming a site of forced assimilation into one of resistance and refusal,” according to Roberts.
Juxtaposing themes of whaling, indenture, land loss, and Western religious and spiritual iconography with playful yet pointed commentary, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider their perceptions of the Eastern Long Island, raising critical questions about how we engage with Indigenous history and the land we occupy. Featuring Natalie Ball, Jim Denomie, Denise Silva Dennis, River Garza, Elisa Harkins, Emily Johnson, Chaz John, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Rachel Martin, David Bunn Martine, New Red Order, Jaune Quick To See Smith, Adrienne Terry, Tyrell Typaha, Marie Watt, and additional artists and programs, to be announced. Curated by Jeremy Dennis and Meranda Roberts, Ph.D.
The Church
Sag Harbor, NY
On view through June 1, 2025
Eternal Testament
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Trade Canoe: Don Quixote in Sumeria, 2005
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Cara and Diego Romero: Tales of Futures Past brings together artwork by acclaimed contemporary artists Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) and Diego Romero (Cochiti). Organized by the Figge Art Museum, this nationally traveling exhibition features 18 of Diego Romero's thought-provoking pottery pieces and lithographs, 20 of Cara Romero's evocative photographs, including from her Indigenous Futurism series, and a new collaborative piece created exclusively for this exhibition.
This powerful exhibition explores the diversity of Indigenous identity through the distinct yet interconnected practices of Cara and Diego Romero. While maintaining individual studio practices, their work shares themes of evolving Indigenous identity. Drawing from personal perspectives and popular culture, they confront colonialism, celebrate resilience, and address social and environmental justice through culturally rooted imagery. Much of their work exists in a supernatural realm, creating empowering spaces for marginalized voices.
Organized by the Figge Art Museum, Cara and Diego Romero: Tales of Futures Past will travel nationally to the Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, CA), the Albuquerque Museum (NM), and another venue through summer 2026.
Figge Art Museum
Davenport, IA
On view through June 8, 2025
Cara and Diego Romero: Tales of Futures Past
Cara Romero, 3 Sisters, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Reconsidering Bierstadt: Kent Monkman is the latest in an ongoing series of curatorial projects which highlight the relationships between cutting-edge contemporary art and the outstanding permanent collection of the Timken Museum of Art. Previous projects have looked at Rembrandt through the eyes of Dutch photographer/videographer, Rineke Dijsktra, and at the portrait practice of Anthony van Dyck through the vibrant work of Kehinde Wiley.
Beginning March 26 and running through June 8, 2025, the Timken’s American Gallery will be transformed by a staged encounter between the 19th-century American painter Albert Bierstadt and the First Nation (Cree) Canadian artist, Kent Monkman. In this season of renewal and rebirth, Reconsidering Bierstadt. . . offers visitors the opportunity to freshly compare one of the Timken’s most beloved works, Cho-looke, The Yosemite Fall (1864) with The Fourth World, a recent, challenging depiction of California’s historical landscape by Monkman.
Timken Museum of Art
San Diego, CA
On view through June 8, 2025
Reconsidering Bierstadt: Kent Monkman
Kent Monkman, The Fourth World, 2012
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Echoes: Selections from the Wheelwright Museum’s Permanent Collection highlights the landmark exhibitions that the Wheelwright Museum has organized since the 1970s, representing the work of established and emerging artists, and those who have risen to prominence today. The new curators of the collection, Will Riding In (Santa Ana Pueblo/Pawnee) and Hadley Welch Jensen, have selected rich works that reflect in diverse media ranging from jewelry and fashion to sculpture, textiles, and ceramics.
“The Wheelwright has promoted and supported the work of generations of artists in the Southwest and beyond, and this is a moment to reflect on its focus and impact as an institution that seeks to honor Native voices through art. We are excited to remind our community of the importance of this history,” says Executive Director, Henrietta Lidchi.
Wheelwright Museum
Santa Fe, NM
On view through June 8, 2025
Echoes
T.C. Cannon, Hopi with Manta, ca. 1977.
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
Kenojuak Ashevak: Highlights from the Dr. Ronald M. Haynes Collection
In the first of two installations showcasing artworks from the Dr. Ronald M. Haynes Collection, 14 prints by renowned Inuit artist Kenojuak Ashevak (1927–2013) are featured, including The Woman Who Lives in the Sun, one of the most iconic and recognizable works in Inuit art history. Hailing from Kinngait (previously known as Cape Dorset) Nunavut, Ashevak is famous for her fluid graphic storytelling and stunning skill with stonecut printing, and widely known as the “grandmother of Inuit art.” Curated by Renée van der Avoird, AGO, Associate Curator of Canadian Art, these works are all promised gifts to the AGO.
About the Dr. Ronald M. Haynes Collection: Based in Toronto and originally from England, Haynes began collecting in the 1970s, acquiring works from various Toronto galleries and auction houses. Haynes passion for modern Canadian art, finds expression in his dedication to Inuit sculpture and works on paper. In addition to these prints by Kenojuak Ashevak, his holdings include remarkable artworks by Nooveya Ippellie, Jessie Oonark, Joe Talirunili, Lucy Tasseor, and Pitaloosie Saila.
Art Gallery of Ontario
Toronto, Ontario
On view through June 18, 2025
Kenojuak Ashevak, The Woman Who Lives in the Sun, 1960
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Best known for her research-based, large-scale paintings, Jordan Ann Craig’s (Northern Cheyenne) A-i-R ’19 striking geometric abstractions and delicate dot drawings in My Way Home blend traditional influences with modern forms and dynamic explorations of color. Craig’s Hard–edge paintings draw inspiration from the designs of Northern Cheyenne and other Plains Indian art practices, including beadwork, hide painting (parfleche), weaving, and basketry patterns. Complementing these are her meditative dot drawings, which incorporate repetition and abstraction to evoke the landscapes of New Mexico, captured from memory. Her use of repetition and meticulously painted patterns also connect to deeper, contemplative art practices such as beading, stitching, and weaving.
While Craig’s work develops out of an investigation of abstraction, it also analyzes themes of identity and memory and reflects on the relationship between tradition and modernity, blending cultural motifs with contemporary techniques. Craig’s art creates a visual language that bridges past and present, offering a reimagining of Indigenous aesthetics within the context of modern abstraction.
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts
Santa Fe, NM
On view through June 29, 2025
Jordan Ann Craig: My Way Home
Jordan Ann Craig, Sharp Tongue II, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
War clubs were instruments of combat, created with the stock of a gun, and used by tribes of the plains and eastern woodlands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Osage mother-son duo, Anita and Yatika Fields, have utilized this weapon as a symbol of resistance through their collaborative, Oklahoma-based project, WAR CLUB. In a series of panels that began in 2017, multi-generational Native artists, scholars, and activists were gathered to discuss issues of social justice for Indigenous communities that are visible through their artwork and practice.
WAR CLUB: Native Art & Activism is the culminating exhibition of Anita and Yatika Fields’s project delving into Native artwork and ephemera from important historical and contemporary moments of resistance. Pointing to the #NoDAPL Movement in 2016 and the Red Power Movement, which was a moment of political protest from the 1960s to the 1980s that included groups like the American Indian Movement and the National Indian Youth Council, this exhibition reveals the fight for cultural sovereignty—one that continues to this day. Experience powerful reminders of these movements, including the logbook from the Occupation of Alcatraz, and see how intergenerational Native artists use their paintings, photography, sculpture, and more as powerful tools to investigate, inform, and empower all in the fight for human rights.
Philbrook Museum
Tulsa, OK
On view through June 29, 2025
War Club: Native Art and Activism
Yatika Starr Fields and Anita Fields, WAR CLUB, 2021
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
This exhibit celebrates the sophisticated social, political, and creative systems developed by Indigenous peoples prior to and during their interactions with European settlers. Turtle Island is the name given to the North American continent by Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and other First American and Canadian First Nations peoples, referencing the origin story of a landmass built on the back of a great turtle.
From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, French and English colonists forged meaningful relationships with Indigenous sovereign nations, fortified through the exchange of gifts and knowledge. Indigenous objects, overwhelmingly created by women, were prized possessions and emissaries, defining and representing their cultures in distant lands. Scottish officer Alexander Farquharson obtained many such objects during his military travels through New York and Canada during the French and Indian Wars. He sent them back to his family estate where they remained until the early twenty-first century, when they were acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art.
Return to Turtle Island commemorates this homecoming. This exhibition honors the remarkable journey these relatives have charted as ambassadors of their own communities, and we welcome them home to Turtle Island.
Toledo Museum of Art
Toledo, OH
On view through June 29, 2025
Return to Turtle Island: Indigenous Nation-Building in the Eighteenth Century
Ancestral Great Lakes Artist, Quilled Headband
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless explores and amplifies the problematic colonial history and the concept of cargo cults from an Indigenous perspective. Cargo cults developed as a result of Western military campaigns that sent crated, often airdropped, supplies to foreign lands inhabited by Indigenous peoples. During World War II, the US had a major military presence in the South Pacific. To many who lived there these objects falling from the sky seemed like wonderous gifts from the gods. Cults formed around the provisions that arrived from above, when in fact they were from the very forces that were colonizing Indigenous lands.
The exhibition features several monumental works by the artist, including The Keep, a large-scale radio tower made of pine trees, hand-made paper feathers, and found objects as well as two of the artist’s Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure (TIPI) works. Speaker towers, made from ceramic components, punctuate the installation and with the radio tower, represent tools of colonial power. Also included are eleven large Native American bustles, a traditional part of Native American powwow regalia, nine of which were created as part of Luger’s recent residency at Dieu Donné in New York, along with an immersive video, Future Ancestral Technologies: ++ a generation of new myth ++.
Nasher Museum of Art
Durham, NC
On view through July 6, 2025
Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless
Cannupa Hanska Luger, Wealth, 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Exploding Native Inevitalbe
Exploding Native Inevitable is a traveling exhibition, originally organized by Brad Kahlhamer and Dan Mills for Bates College Museum of Art, that features the work of twelve contemporary Indigenous artists and two collaboratives from lands we now call America.
The title of the exhibition riffs on Andy Warhol’s 1966–67 series of multimedia events Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which included concerts, film screenings, installations, and performance. Like both the Bates exhibition and its namesake, Sheldon’s version of Exploding Native Inevitable will include a wide-ranging series of events and programs.
Sheldon Museum of Art
Lincoln, NE
On view through July 13, 2025
Sarah Rowe, Post, 2022-2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Sublime Light: Tapestry Art of DY Begay
Sublime Light: Tapestry Art of DY Begay celebrates more than three decades of innovation by fiber artist DY Begay (Diné [Navajo], b. 1953). Begay’s tapestry art is at once fundamentally modern and essentially Diné, each work an exploration of the artist’s passion for experiencing and interpreting her world. The primary world that Begay explores is Tsélaní, her birthplace and homeland on the Navajo Nation reservation. From this firm foundation, her innate and lifelong curiosity has motivated her to investigate the expressive power of color and design in developing her distinctive aesthetic.
Begay creates unique artworks that bridge her traditional Diné upbringing and experimental fiber art practice. Through her embrace of color, passion for design, and innovative handling of fiber, Begay creates art that expresses a non-Western way of being to a contemporary audience. Sublime Light is the first retrospective of Begay’s career, showcasing 48 of her most remarkable tapestries.
National Museum of the American Indian
Washington, D.C.
On view through July 13, 2025
DY Begay, Intended Vermillion, 2015
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland
Through the perspectives of four collaborating artists with connections to Zhegagoynak—Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent), Kelly Church (Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Tribe of Pottawatomi/Ottawa), Nora Moore Lloyd (Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe), and Jason Wesaw (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi) —Woven Being explores confluences that are continuing to shape Indigenous creative practices in the region and beyond.
The Chicagoland region is a longstanding cultural and economic hub for Indigenous peoples, including the Council of Three Fires— the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa—as well as the Menominee, Miami, Ho-Chunk, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, and Illinois nations. People from many Indigenous nations call the region home today, and the city of Chicago has the third-largest urban Indigenous population in the United States.
Despite this rich history, Indigenous voices have often been excluded from Chicago's art histories. This silence is harmful. Guided by Indigenous collaborations, priorities, and voices, the exhibition foregrounds the perspectives of Indigenous artists currently based in the city and those from nations forcibly displaced from the area in the nineteenth century.
Block Museum
Evanston, IL
On view through July 13, 2025
Andrea Carlson, The Indifference of Fire, 2023
EXHIBITION
Indigenous people are central to the story of popular culture in the Western Hemisphere, and popular culture is important to many Indigenous people and experiences. This exhibition, drawn from the Newberry’s growing collections for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, shares four centuries of Indigenous creators, athletes, activists, and fans engaged with pop—from pamphlets to comic books, and from daguerreotypes to video games.
The Newberry
Chicago, IL
On view through July 19, 2025
Native Pop!
Holly Young, 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Beadwork is a eloquent and innovative form of contemporary Native / Indigenous art, and Radical Stitch brings its beauty, creativity and cultural significance into focus. This trailblazing exhibition invites visitors to explore the political, artistic and cultural dimensions of bead art, illuminating its journey from customary practices to bold, modern expressions.
Featuring an extraordinary range of works, from customary designs to cutting-edge creations, Radical Stitch highlights the unique styles and ideas of top Native / Indigenous artists from across North America, also known as Turtle Island by many Indigenous peoples. This exhibition showcases the evolving art of beadwork, demonstrating how it connects past and present while pushing artistic boundaries and redefining what bead art can be.
Eiteljorg Museum
Indianapolis, IN
On view through August 3, 2025
Radical Stitch
Nico Williams, Aaniin, 2002.
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light) explores the narrative artistic practice of Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero. Spanning the past decade of her work, this exhibition presents a thematic examination of Romero's complex and layered images, which celebrate the multiplicity, beauty, and resilience of Native American and Indigenous experiences. Accompanied by a catalogue of the same title and debuting at the Hood Museum in January 2025, this is Romero's first major solo exhibition.
Hood Museum
Hanover, NH
On view through August 10, 2025
Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)
Cara Romero, Zenith, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
This spring, MoMA PS1 presents a retrospective of artist, activist, and musician Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki, b. 1932), one of Canada’s most renowned filmmakers. The exhibition spans six decades of her multidisciplinary practice, bringing together a selection of films, sculptures, and sound, as well as rarely seen ephemera that sheds light on their production. The Children Have to Hear Another Story features early works such as Christmas at Moose Factory (1971), a short animated film that depicts the afflictions of residential schools through children’s drawings, as well as prized documentaries like Kanehsatake: 270 years of Resistance (1993), which charts the Mohawk resistance against the expansion of a golf course into sacred burial lands. Tracing her lasting contributions to social change, The Children Have to Hear Another Story brings Obomsawin’s innovative model of Indigenous cinema into focus.
MOMA PS1
Queens, NY
On view through August 25, 2025
Alanis Obomsawin: The Children Have to Hear Another Story
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Knowing the West is a travelling exhibition that embraces and examines perceptions of the American West to be more inclusive, complex, and reflective of the diverse peoples who contributed to art and life in and about the West.
Americans often feel they “know the West,” whether informed by direct experience or popular culture. Visions of landscapes and people tangle with ideas of conflict, freedom, and nostalgia. Knowing the West embraces preexisting impressions of the American West and presents a wide variety of artwork from diverse makers from the 19th to early 20th centuries to add richness to what is often a flattened and simplified view of the American West.
Knowing the West is organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, and co-curated by Mindy N. Besaw and Jami C. Powell with influence and input from a curatorial advisory council.
Cummer Museum
Jacksonville, FL
On view through August 31, 2025
Knowing the West
Nellie Two Bear Gates, Suitcase, 1880 – 1910
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Cochiti Pueblo artist Virgil Ortiz continues his REVOLT 1680/2180 saga at Hickory Museum of Art with a brand new chapter. The artist draws inspiration from the most successful Indigenous uprising against a colonizing power in North American History, the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. Ortiz keeps Cochiti pottery traditions alive but transforms them into a contemporary vision that embraces his Pueblo history and culture and merges it with apocalyptic themes, science fiction, and his own storytelling.
Virgil Ortiz brings his narrative to life at HMA through immersive projection and sound, augmented reality, traditional Cochiti pottery, monumental contemporary pottery, and surprises being debuted at our Museum. This exhibition encourages repeat visitation as you engage with the story and meet the rebellion’s protagonists.
Ortiz has developed 19 groups of characters that represent the 19 Pueblos that still remain. HMA’s storyline highlights Tahu, leader of the Blind Archers. The beautiful, evocative Tahu reflects the strength, power, and resilience of the Pueblo women.
Hickory Museum of Art
Hickory, NC
On view through August 31, 2025
Virgil Ortiz: Indigenous Ancestral Memory
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The solo-exhibition features the artwork of Harry Fonseca drawn from the Shingle Springs Band Collection. Embracing the lifework of this tribal citizen, the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians acquired an important collection of works spanning his career.
The exhibition considers multiple series and stylistic shifts from his earliest pieces reflecting his Nisenan Maidu heritage, the Coyote series for which he is most recognized, the influences of rock art in Stone Poems, the political views of Discovery of Gold and Souls in California, to the abstraction and examination of painting in the Stripes and Seasons series.
Gorman Museum of Native American Art
Davis, CA
On view through August 31, 2025
Olé Ham Nees: We Call Him Coyote
Harry Fonseca, Coyote Dancer with Flute #III, 1983
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Indigenous understandings of time are cyclical and relational, in contrast to Western perceptions of time, which are often linear and commodified. The intersection of memory and time in contemporary Native artistic practices reveals how temporality shapes perceptions of self, culture, and reality, as well as how the past is continually remembered and reimagined. Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time highlights some of the most influential Native artists working over the last sixty years, with many of these works never before exhibited on the East Coast. It explores the nuanced layering of past, present, and future in works by twenty-two artists—Native American, Alaska Native, First Nations, and Métis—who carry forward the artistic lineages of their ancestors while simultaneously sparking new visions of the future.
The exhibition title is borrowed from the poem “Smoke in Our Hair” by Ofelia Zepeda (Tohono O’odham). She writes: “Smoke, like memories, permeates our hair,/ our clothing, our layers of skin./ The smoke travels deep/ to the seat of memory./ We walk away from the fire;/ no matter how far we walk,/ we carry this scent with us.” Using the scented smoke of burning wood as a metaphor, Zepeda reminds us that Native memory is both fluid and indelible.
Hudson River Museum
Yonkers, NY
On view through August 31, 2025
Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time
Cara Romero, Sand & Stone, 2020
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Made literally from land, Pueblo pottery is one of America’s most enduring art forms. The innovative exhibition Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery connects a remarkable group of Pueblo ceramics to contemporary Indigenous knowledge.
The exhibition features more than 100 clay works with a range of forms, surface treatments, and materials. Dating from precontact to the present day, vessels and sculptures represent communities spanning from New Mexico’s Río Grande Pueblos to Ysleta del Sur in West Texas to the Hopi tribe of Arizona.
Curated by the Pueblo Pottery Collective and organized by the School for Advanced Research and the Vilcek Foundation, the exhibition prioritizes Pueblo voices. The Pueblo Pottery Collective includes 60 individual members of diverse ages, backgrounds, and professions, who represent 21 source communities. The curators’ firsthand knowledge of pots and potters, family rituals, traditional materials, and daily use grounds viewers in a powerful sense of people and place. At the same time, a thread of ancestral memory connects individual pots to the living legacy of Pueblo peoples.
Grounded in Clay is a collaborative exhibition curated by the Pueblo Pottery Collective, organized by the School for Advanced Research and the Vilcek Foundation, and hosted by the Saint Louis Art Museum.
St. Louis Art Museum
St. Louis, MO
On view through September 14, 2025
Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery
Tesuque Pueblo artist; Tesuque jar, c.1870–1880
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch is the first large-scale touring retrospective of Shelley Niro’s prolific career. It features close to 70 works that span early student work to recent creations by the artist. Remai Modern is the final stop on this five-venue tour of the exhibition. We’re deeply honoured to showcase Niro’s multifaceted artistry.
Working across genres that include photography, painting, film, video, printmaking and beadwork, Niro offers a contemporary perspective on cultural history intertwined with personal narratives, frequently highlighting the experiences of Indigenous women and girls. Other central themes include representation, matriarchy, and the resilience, complexity and beauty of Mohawk culture.
Remai Modern
Saskatoon, SK
On view through September 21, 2025
Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch
Shelley Niro, The Rebel, 1987 (reprinted 2022)
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Oklahoma Contemporary presents the first major retrospective of Oklahoma City-based artist Edgar Heap of Birds (b. 1954, Wichita, Kansas; Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation), who is known internationally for conceptual artwork that addresses Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and relationships to place. Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds: HONOR SONG is a landmark for American art, for the region, and for the city: the artist’s first institutional survey in his home-state of the last forty years. The exhibition spans over four decades of art production, tracing Heap of Birds’s trajectory from the 1970s to the present through colorful prints, abstract paintings, drawings, glassworks, sculptures, and public works.
The campus-wide installation takes over Oklahoma Contemporary’s indoor galleries and outdoor spaces, and includes archival materials, original printing plates, and new works commissioned for a workshop this fall leading up to the show that is part of Getty's Paper Project initiative for curatorial innovation in the graphic arts. The totality of work reveals a through-line: Heap of Birds harnesses conceptual art approaches to address the treatment of Native American communities and advocate for the agency of Indigenous identity toward stewardship of the earth we all share.
Oklahoma Contemporary
Oklahoma City, OK
On view through October 20, 2025
Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds: HONOR SONG
Edgar Heap of Birds, Was Told 12 Times, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
In her large-scale and colorful paintings, Judith Lowry (Mountain Maidu/Pit River/Washoe) chronicles the stories of her family and the legends, traditions, and complexities of her Indigenous ancestry. Born to a Euro-Australian mother, and a father who traced his roots to Native Northern California and Scots-Irish cultures, Lowry’s works reflect the Indigenous creation stories her father shared. She considers her paintings a modern extension of storytelling and a way of recording the oral histories of her family and community.
This retrospective exhibition features Lowry’s paintings alongside a concurrent exhibition featuring highlights from Lowry’s personal art collection that she recently donated to the Nevada Museum of Art. The conversations that unfold in Lowry’s paintings and the work of her friends and colleagues represent a lifetime of dialogue about ideas and issues that have shaped her life.
Nevada Museum of Art
Reno, NV
On view through November 16, 2025
The Art of Judith Lowry
Judith Lowry, Welgatim’s Song, 2001
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The Lowry Croul Collection of Contemporary Native American Art
This special exhibition features highlights from the personal collection of Judith Lowry, an accomplished Native American artist and enrolled member of the Pit River Tribe, who recently donated over 125 artworks to the Nevada Museum of Art.
Assembled over many decades by Lowry and her husband Brad Croul, the Lowry Croul Collection of Contemporary Native American Art includes paintings by prominent Native American contemporary artists with a West Coast and Great Basin focus.
The collection contains works by some of the West Coast’s most noted Native American artists, including paintings by Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu/Hawaiian/Portuguese), Frank LaPena (Nomptipon Wintu), and Frank Day (Konkow Maidu). Important and rare story paintings by Dalbert Castro (Maidu) are also included, along with works by Jean LaMarr (Northern Paiute/Pit River) and George Longfish (Seneca and Tuscarora). An exceptional selection of photography by Lowry’s cousin Dugan Agular (Northern Paiute/Maidu/Pit River) is included, as well as many traditional beaded and woven works by Lorena Gorbet (Mountain Maidu), Shiwaya Peck (Maidu), and Tiffany Adams (Chemehuevi/Koyoomk’awi/Nisenan).
This exhibition is presented in conjunction with The Art of Judith Lowry.
Nevada Museum of Art
Reno, NV
On view through November 16, 2025
Harry Fonseca, Stone Poem, 1990
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Bob Haozous: A Retrospective View is the first major retrospective for the artist Bob Haozous (Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache, b. 1943). The exhibition brings together six decades of his work including sculpture, painting, prints, and jewelry. The exhibition will examine the timely social commentary embedded in Haozous’s work and his overlooked contributions to the field of contemporary art through the presentation of more than 75 works.
Throughout his career, Haozous has shaped current dialogues about the complicated reality of American Indian creative expression as art, commodity, and cultural practice. Haozous uses satire and irony to reconsider figurative traditions within Indigenous art while contemplating the philosophical meaning of being Indigenous in the postmodern world.
Heard Museum
Phoenix, AZ
On view through November 30, 2025
Bob Haozous: A Retrospective View
Bob Haozous, Portable Apaches #4, 1990
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
This exhibition, curated by the renowned artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), provides a provocative survey of contemporary Native American art across media. A prolific curator, Quick-to-See Smith has curated over thirty shows, including The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C (2023). Indigenous Identities features ninety living artists that represent over fifty distinct Indigenous nations and communities from across North America and includes painting, works on paper, photography, ceramics, beadwork, weaving, sculpture, installation, and video.
Featuring works made within the last fifty years by both well-established artists and recent MFA graduates, the exhibition crosses several generations and examines themes with historic and continuing relevance to Indigenous communities in the United States including stolen lands, genocide, lost languages and cultures, and invisibility. A celebration of Indigenous survivance, resistance, and community, the exhibition provides a provocative and visually stunning view of contemporary art.
Zimmerli Art Museum
New Brunswick, NJ
On view through December 21, 2025
Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always
G. Peter Jemison, Red Power, 1973
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
A relatively unknown early piece of work by Bob Haozous (born 1946, Warms Springs Chiracahua Apache) is a tiny bronze sculpture. Emerging on the surface is a small woman with long flowing hair, legs and arms bent, her naked form idealized. She appears to be falling, or floating, a tiny female Icarus.
Trained in western and classical traditions, Haozous has throughout his career returned to the female form using this to articulate a set of philosophical concerns. Although this focus has at times troubled the feminist viewer, for Haozous the female nude carries two symbolic charges. She is a contemporary iteration of Native femininity. She also stands for the human desecration of Mother Earth.
In celebration of Haozous’s 2025 retrospective at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Memo to the Mother brings together sculptures, monoprints and wearable sculpture that represent Haozous’s decades-long thinking about the environment.
Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian
Santa Fe, NM
On view through January 10, 2026
Memo to the Mother: Bob Haozous’s Messages to Mother Earth
Bob Haozous, Bronze belt buckle of woman falling, 1976
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains celebrates the full expression of narrative art among Native nations of the Great Plains. The exhibition juxtaposes historical hides, muslins, and ledger books with more than 50 contemporary works commissioned by the museum. Illustrating everything from war deeds and ceremonial events to family life, Native identity, and pop culture, the artworks are as diverse as the individuals who created them.
National Museum of the American Indian
Washington D.C.
On view through January 20, 2026
Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains
Lauren Good Day, A Warrior’s Story, Honoring Grandpa Blue Bird, 2012
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Ghost Writing is a compelling, mid-career retrospective showcasing work by Jaque Fragua, a contemporary artist from Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico. Fragua works in a diverse array of media, including digital painting, sculpture, installation, and public art. His distinct style is characterized by bold colors and mark-making as well as thoughtful approach to appropriation. Through his art, Fragua addresses critical issues faced by Indigenous communities in the United States. He centers Indigenous narratives with the aim of fostering dialogue around identity, heritage, and resilience.
Drawing inspiration from the “Ghost Dance”—a spiritual movement believed to restore traditional Indigenous lands and ways of life—Fragua’s art reclaims and reinterprets cultural iconography that has been historically misappropriated by non-Native entities. His practice is rooted in punk, graffiti, and traditional Indigenous knowledge. Fragua’s concept of ghostwriting also reflects the anonymity of graffiti culture, where the author often remains unknown. He infuses his own interpretation, suggesting that a guiding spirit influences the graffiti and symbolism in his art. Throughout his work, he connects deeply to ancestral energy, incorporating symbols, prayers, and motifs that convey Indigenous stories in contemporary contexts.
Plains Art Museum
Fargo, ND
On view through March 15, 2026
Jacque Fragua: Ghost Writing
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Nicholas Galanin: I Think It Goes Like This (Gold)
For Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast such as Galanin (Tlingít 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.
Michael C. Carlos Museum
Atlanta, GA
On view through April 5, 2026
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT
Jeffrey Gibson’s POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT is a newly commissioned immersive installation that will occupy MASS MoCA’s signature Building 5 gallery and follows Gibson’s highly celebrated United States representation at the 60th edition of La Biennale di Venezia. Gibson is known for creating installations, performances, paintings, and sculpture that elevate and provide visibility to queer and Indigenous communities, whose cultural narratives have been historically marginalized. Throughout the run of the exhibition, the project will host a series of performances by Indigenous creatives from across North America.
Mass MOCA
North Adams, MA
On view through May 2026
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
In 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
Autry Museum of the American West
Los Angeles, CA
On view through June 21, 2026
ReVOlt 1680/2180: Sirens & Sikas
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Wendy Red Star is known for photographing herself within elaborately constructed scenes, engaging the viewer directly and foregrounding her presence within narratives of her own design. In Stirs Up the Dust, from a series of celestial couture garments titled Thunder Up Above, Red Star reimagines the regalia associated with powwow, a circular dance celebration found throughout Indigenous Plains cultures including Red Star’s Crow Nation, in futuristic terms.
A powerful form of self-expression, powwow regalia has itself been morphing over time, from buckskin, beadwork, and feathers to embrace satin, lamé, and sequins. In Stirs Up the Dust, Red Star brings a feminist lens (women have only been allowed to dance in powwow circles since 1953) to this iconic look, using candy-colored streamers, an elaborate bustle, and a conceptual headpiece reminiscent of the outlandish headgear seen on high fashion runways. Performed within a Martian landscape, Red Star’s regalia projects the wearer into the future, bringing her high-style, cosmic powwow to outer space and worlds beyond.
Autry Museum of the American West
Los Angeles, CA
On view through June 21, 2026
Stirs Up the Dust
Wendy Red Star, Stirs Up the Dust, 2011
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 Neal 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.
Autry Museum of American Art
Los Angeles, CA
On view through June 21, 2026
Cara Romero, Three Sisters, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
This exhibition brings together two of the 20th century’s greatest painters—Rita Letendre (1928–2021) and Norval Morrisseau (1932–2007). Demonstrating the expressive potential of bold colour and line, these two artists pushed the boundaries of painting. During a career that spanned over sixty-five years, Letendre used brush, airbrush, palette knife, and her hands to make her work. Vibrating with physical and emotional energy, her paintings, —five of which are on view here, —embody her ongoing quest for connection and understanding.
Morrisseau’s six-panel masterpiece, Man Changing into Thunderbird (1977), illustrates the theme of transformation, an idea central to Anishinaabe philosophy. This painting records the artist’s personal evolution into Miskwaabik Animiiki, or “Copper Thunderbird”, a name he received in a healing ceremony. The name carries connotations of protection, healing, mystery, and power, and Morrisseau used it as his signature. Merging personal narrative with intense colour and elaborate design, Morrisseau called this work, “the ultimate picture for me,” - it is featured here alongside two other works by him from the 1970s.
Art Gallery of Ontario
Toronto, Ontario
On view through July 2026
Letendre/Morrisseau
Rita Letendre. Tabori, 1976
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
“Homelands” showcases contemporary art by 17 Native artists to emphasize the enduring ties between Native Nations and Knox County. As a result of the exhibition, the museum has acquired 22 new works for its permanent collection.
Museum visitors will see interpretive text panels, paintings, ceramics, textiles and other media displayed in the renovated gallery space. Many of these works were created specifically for this project by notable artists, including Johnnie Diacon, Cherokee National Treasure Jane Osti and many others. Each artist’s work is accompanied by a direct quote about their piece, giving visitors insight into the personal and cultural significance behind the art.
McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture
Knoxville, TN
On view through December 2027
Homelands: Connecting to Mounds Through Native Art
Starr Hardridge, Story of the Land, 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
For over half a century, the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) has fostered an environment where emerging Indigenous artists have had the freedom to develop the means to tell their own stories in their own ways. The unique format of jewelry has played a large role in storytelling as it is a deeply human practice that gives people the tools to carry their histories and identities—a powerful reminder to ourselves and to others who we are.
The Stories We Carry features contemporary jewelry created by more than 100 Indigenous artists across decades stewarded by the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) permanent collection. Guest curated by IAIA Assistant Professor Brian Fleetwood (Mvskoke Creek) ’12, the exhibition explores the extraordinarily diverse recent history of Indigenous jewelry and its enduring relationship with IAIA. Many of the works were made by IAIA students, faculty, alumni, and artists-in-residence presenting another side to the IAIA’s rich story. The Stories We Carry is part of the Making History anniversaries celebration.
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts
Santa Fe, NM
On view through March 2028
The Stories We Carry
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
SUSTAINED! The Persistent Genius of Indigenous Art
SUSTAINED! The Persistent Genius of Indigenous Art explores how Indigenous peoples’ resilience, diversity, and creativity have sustained them throughout time. The exhibition centers Indigenous voices, perspectives, and artistic expressions past and present, and is a celebration of Indigenous contributions to the arts and the museum over the past 100 years.
SUSTAINED! was developed in conjunction with a panel of seven Indigenous community members who, through a series of meetings, shared with the museum’s Native Arts curatorial team what type of exhibition would be meaningful to themselves and their communities. This exhibition combines historic and contemporary works from DAM’s permanent collection to investigate the ways in which Native people have been sustained by beauty, by connections, and by spirituality, tracing these themes through fashion, family, ancestors, and the reasons people gather, such as games, ceremonies, and dance.
Denver Art Museum
Denver, CO
Ongoing
Rhonda Holy Bear, Cheyenne Doll - Woman in War Honor Dress, 1997
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
T.C. Cannon, Indian with Beaded Headdress, 1978
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Interwoven Power: Native Knowledge / Native Art
Interwoven Power: Native Knowledge / Native Art is a fresh reinstallation of Montclair Art Museum’s renowned collection of Indigenous art from North America. Foregrounding Native perspectives, the exhibition explores the transformative power of Indigenous knowledge to address pressing social issues. Themes include relationships to the earth and its beings, gender and family, sovereignty and justice, and the power of art itself.
This long-term exhibition revisits two newly restored historical galleries through a collaborative process with many Indigenous colleagues. The exhibition features 50 historical, modern, and contemporary works by artists from more than 40 Native nations, including numerous new commissions and recent acquisitions, among them a significant site-specific installation by Holly Wilson (Delaware Nation) that engages MAM’s neoclassical architecture and sculpture.
The exhibition design is inspired by Native fiber arts. Media include sculpture, basketry, textiles and dress, photography, ceramics, beadwork, works on paper, painting, and more, with emphasis on Lenape, Haudenosaunee, and other artists from Northeastern nations as well as women and queer and two-spirit artists and contributors.
Through this important reimagining and restorative work, we also examine the Museum’s history, collection, and other legacies of European colonization in the Americas to help forge new ways of thinking and relating in a changing world.
Montclair Art Museum
Montclair, NJ
Ongoing
Rose B. Simpson and Roxanne Swentzell, Detail of Untitled (Timeline Necklace), 2019
UPCOMING
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors is the first major show in the U.S. for celebrated artist Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree Nation, born 1965). Based in New York City and Toronto, Canada, Monkman is known for his provocative interventions into Western European and American art history. Through his painting, Monkman pushes forward an understanding of the lived experiences of Indigenous people today while confronting colonial injustices.
Featuring 41 monumental works, History is Painted by the Victors draws from the DAM’s extensive collection of Monkman’s work alongside newly created works and loans from other institutions and private collections. These works explore Kent Monkman’s use of history painting as a contemporary genre to highlight relevant issues such as climate change and environmental protection, the impact of governmental policies on historically marginalized communities, generational trauma, and Two-Spirit and other queer identifying communities’ visibility and pride.
This presentation is in partnership with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and will be on view from April 20, 2025, through August 17, 2025. Entry is included in general admission.
Denver Art Museum
Denver, CO
Opening April 20, 2025
Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors
Kent Monkman, mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People): Resurgence of the People
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Encompassing works from the Indigenous Seven, works on display include paintings of the land and family inspired by the mountains of Jasper; views of the Boreal Forest like no other, and images of strength and resistance, which enlighten us to the natural world and ceremony. Imagination and abstraction are shared ideas in the journey of seven artists who, with their inspiration and wisdom, changed the canon of Indigenous art in Canada and continue to inspire future generations of Indigenous artists. Art, color, culture, and spirituality filled the early conversations of the Indigenous Group of Seven followed with decades of painting and activism. They created art to awaken a troubled world, with colors from the quantum reality.
Whyte Museum
Banff, Alberta, Canada
Opening May 3, 2025
The Ancestors are Talking – Paintings by the Indigenous Seven
Norval Morrisseau, Attitude and Attention, Punk Rockers, Circa 1991
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The Broad presents Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me, a special exhibition of the artist’s multidimensional work, adapted from its original presentation at the U.S. Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, where Jeffrey Gibson was the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States with a solo exhibition. Gibson’s first single-artist museum exhibition in Southern California, The Broad’s presentation includes over thirty artworks joyously affirming the artist’s radically inclusive vision. The exhibition will highlight Gibson’s distinct use of geometric design and saturated color alongside references to 19th and 20th century foundational American documents and modern music, critiquing systemic injustices and imagining a more equitable future. The show will be on view in the museum’s first-floor galleries from May 10 through September 28, 2025.
The Broad
Los Angeles, CA
Opening May 10, 2025
Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me
Jeffrey Gibson, if there is no struggle there is no progress, 2024
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
VALUE: Rebecca Belmore at the Museum of Anthropology highlights selected works by the Anishinaabe artist that confront colonial silencing, alienation, and violence inherent in the commodification of land, Indigeneous bodies, and material culture. Each work represents Belmore’s response to colonial dynamics of specific places and events. Detached from their original circumstances these objects present the possibility of insight into the present context of the colonial legacy of the Museum.
As part of this exhibition, four works, from different periods in Belmore’s career, will be displayed throughout MOA’s galleries and existing exhibitions. Taken together, these installations critically engage with dominate understandings of value as defined by contemporary social structures and colonial institutions such as MOA.
Museum of Anthropology
Vancouver, BC
Opening May 15, 2025
VALUE: Rebecca Belmore
Rebecca Belmore, I AM WORTH MORE THAN ONE MILLION DOLLARS TO MY PEOPLE, 2010
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Black Earth Rising presents radically beautiful artworks by contemporary African diasporic, Latin American, and Native American artists who are engaging with the splendor of the natural world with a parallel consciousness of its fragility. Each painting, sculpture, and film demonstrates a form of resistance and reclamation as the exhibition addresses social and environmental inequalities and justice against the historical backdrop of European settlement of the New World and the legacy of colonialism.
Among the artists featured are Firelei Báez, Alejandro Piñero Bello, Teresita Fernández, Sky Hopinka, Tyler Mitchell, Wangechi Mutu, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Yinka Shonibare.
The exhibition takes its title from terra preta, Portuguese for “black earth,” which refers to a type of fertile soil created by ancient Indigenous civilizations in the Amazon basin thousands of years ago. Recently rediscovered by scientists, it remains more fertile than ordinary land and also is exceptionally good at binding carbon and nitrogen into the soil.
Baltimore Museum of Art
Baltimore, MD
Opening May 18, 2025
Black Earth Rising
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Echo Map 1, 2000
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The first major retrospective of the artist’s work, Jeremy Frey: Woven presents a comprehensive survey of Frey’s prolific career spanning more than two decades. A seventh-generation Passamaquoddy basket maker and one of the most celebrated Indigenous weavers in the country, Frey learned traditional Wabanaki weaving techniques from his mother and through apprenticeships at the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. While Frey builds on these cultural foundations in his work, he also pushes the creative limits of his medium, producing conceptually ambitious and meticulously crafted baskets that reflect not only his technical skill as a weaver but also his profound ecological knowledge of and connection to the Passamaquoddy ancestral territory of the Northeastern Woodlands. His work relies heavily on natural resources from the region—notably black ash—many of which have come under threat due to climate change and invasive species. Frey’s work takes on new stakes against these looming environmental crises, celebrating an endangered art form and preserving its legacy for future generations.
Bruce Museum
Greenwich, CT
Opening June 5, 2025
Jeremy Frey: Woven
Jeremy Frey, Blue Point Urchin, 2016
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass is a groundbreaking exhibition that gives overdue recognition to a wide range of contemporary Native American and Indigenous Pacific-Rim artists working in the medium of glass.
The featured artworks embody the intellectual content of Native traditions, newly illuminated by the unique characteristics that can only be achieved through glass. Whether re-interpreting traditional stories and designs or expressing contemporary issues affecting tribal societies, Native glass artists have melded the aesthetics and properties inherent in glass with their cultural ways of knowing.
Chrysler Museum of Art
Norfolk, VA
Opening June 13, 2025
Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass
Susan Point, Beaver Woman Transformation Spindle Whorl, 2000
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Preston Singletary: Raven and the Box of Daylight is an immersive exhibition that tells the Tlingit story of Raven and his transformation of the world. Featuring works from internationally acclaimed artist Preston Singletary (Tlingit American, b. 1963), the exhibition will take visitors on a multisensory odyssey through the transformation of darkness into light, brought to life through narration, original music, coastal Pacific Northwest soundscapes, and stunning projected images.
Preston Singletary: Raven and the Box of Daylight is organized by Museum of Glass, Tacoma, Washington and Preston Singletary.
Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture
Spokane, WA
Opening June 28, 2025
Preston Singletary: Raven and the Box of Daylight
Preston Singletary, White Raven, 2017
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Born in Chippewa City, a remote Native American village on the shore of Lake Superior in northern Minnesota, George Morrison overcame innumerable challenges—poverty, a life-threatening childhood illness, social isolation, racial and cultural barriers—to become a leader of the Abstract Expressionist movement, which he collaboratively defined both publicly and behind the scenes.
Morrison’s influence as an abstract expressionist painter began in 1943 when he traveled from rural Minnesota to New York City to study at the Art Students League on a scholarship. Immersing himself in the city’s vibrant cultural scenes, he studied painting and drawing, contributed to numerous exhibitions and publications, and openly challenged the mainstream art establishment of his generation.
In New York, Morrison formed meaningful connections with artists including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Lois Dodd, and Louise Nevelson, among others. His deep appreciation for urban life—specifically, industrial landscapes, jazz, and literature—permanently shaped his artistic practice and imagery.
This exhibition explores how Morrison’s aesthetic inspiration and future trajectory drew from his love of New York, which he called a “Magical City.” Featuring 25 of his most important paintings and drawings from this early period, the exhibition culminates in his Horizon series. It also features rare archival materials that place Morrison at the heart of the Abstract Expressionist movement in 1940s and 1950s New York.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, NY
Opening July 17, 2025
The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York
George Morrison, The Antagonist (detail), 1956
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Linda Lomahaftewa of the Hopi Nation in Arizona is the Council of 100’s Distinguished Woman Artist for 2025. A practicing Native American artist since 1964, her exhibition at the Fresno Art Museum concentrates on the years 1965 through 1976, when she left her homeland to live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area. On exhibit will be major paintings accomplished over this period when her use of Native iconography and abstract desert landscapes starkly contrasts with the Bay Area Figurative Movement which at that time dominated the Northern California art scene. In addition to the significant early paintings exhibited in the Lobby Gallery, recent prints will be shown in the Concourse Gallery.
Fresno Art Museum
Fresno, CA
Opening August 9, 2025
Linda Lomahaftewa: The San Francisco Years: Paintings 1965 through 1976 and Recent Prints 2020 through 2024
Linda Lomahaftewa, Pandemic Blue II, 2020
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
This exhibition brings together two seemingly distinct art forms: Pueblo pottery and classic cars. In 2014, Rose B. Simpson, a mixed-media artist from Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, refurbished a 1985 Chevy El Camino, transforming it with a black-on-black Tewa pottery motif. Simpson titled her work Maria in honor of renowned artist Maria Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo, 1887–1980), who popularized the distinctive black-on-black style. Ten years later, this exhibition debuts Simpson’s second customized car, a 1964 Buick Riviera painted in vibrant polychrome. Both cars are presented against an expansive geometric design, evoking the environment of the Southwest and transforming Wilsey Court into a bold, contemporary expression of Pueblo pottery traditions. Through this use of scale and space, Simpson forges connections between the ancestral and contemporary, and forms a new visual vocabulary, or lexicon, to assert her cultural heritage and its continuity.
de Young Museum
San Francisco, CA
Opening August 30, 2025
Rose B. Simpson: LEXICON
Rose B. Simpson, Maria, 2014. 1985
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation celebrates the enduring cultures and creative achievements of approximately 60 US-based Anishinaabe artists. These artists represent a continuation of Anishinaabe creativity, which has been ongoing for centuries. One of the largest presentations of contemporary Native American art in the Midwest and the first major Native American exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 30 years, this exhibition challenges perceptions about what Native American art can be, how it should be seen, and how it can be interpreted.
A diverse scope of about 100 works — basketry, beadwork, birchbark artistry, clothing, film, graphic design, jewelry, painting, pottery, sculpture, and woodwork — highlights the unique histories and perspectives of the Anishinaabe people. The exhibition's gallery labels will be translated into Anishinaabemowin, an original language of the Great Lakes region and North America.
Thoughtfully curated with the guidance of an advisory council of artists from the Chippewa (Ojibwe), Ottawa, and Potawatomi tribes, Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation includes creatives such as multimedia artists George Morrison, Jim Denomie, and Maggie Thompson; sculptors Edmonia Lewis and Jason Quigno; and black ash and fiber artist Kelly Church.
Detroit Institute of Art
Detroit, MI
Opening September 28, 2025
Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation
Jonathan Thunder, Basil’s Dream, 2024
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Rooted in intergenerational knowledge, Dyani White Hawk’s (Sičáŋǧu Lakota, b. 1976) art centers on connection—between one another, past and present, earth and sky. By foregrounding Lakota forms and motifs, she challenges prevailing histories and practices surrounding abstract art. Featuring multimedia paintings, sculpture, video, and more, Love Language gathers 15 years of the artist’s work in this major survey.
The exhibition unfolds across four sections named by the artist to speak to Indigenous value systems: See; Honor, Nurture; and Celebrate. See introduces visitors to White Hawk’s worldview. Opening with early pieces that combine quillwork, beadwork, and painting, the artist examines, dissects, and reassembles elements of her own Sičáŋǧu Lakota and European American ancestries. Visitors will encounter Lakota forms and teachings that inform her practice, alongside works addressing urgent issues of settler colonialism and oppression.
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, MN
Opening October 18, 2025
Dyani White Hawk: Love Language
Dyani White Hawk, Wókaǧe | Create from the Takes Care of Them suite, 2019
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The creation of Native American works involves a deep understanding of cultural protocols, history and culture. Featuring selected works from the Autry’s Native American collections and the promised collection of Lora and Robert U. Sandroni, Creative Continuities explores the cultural meanings, histories and concepts embedded into three aspects of Native cultural items: “Knowing,” “Create” and “Transference.” Three Native culture bearers and artists will each curate a section of the exhibition, framing works from the Autry’s collection that originated within their respective communities behind one of the three concepts at the heart of the exhibition. Through this unique combination of cultural items and stories about Native American art and culture told by contemporary Native artists and culture bearers, Creative Continuities aims to educate visitors on the diversity of Native American culture, history and traditions that cross tribal boundaries, past and present.
Autry Museum
Los Angeles, CA
Opening November 2025
Creative Continuities: Family, Pride, and Community in Native Art
John Pepion, Our Land, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Water’s Edge is the first major retrospective of the acclaimed Ho-Chunk artist. Lowe’s elegant, minimalist sculptures made of willow branches, feathers, and other organic materials evoke the rivers, streams, and waterfalls of the Wisconsin woodlands where he was raised and the canoes used to traverse them. His sculptures and sensitively rendered pastel and charcoal drawings reflect on cultural traditions, memory, and human relationships to place. Water’s Edge features 50 of Lowe’s sculptures, drawings, and paintings that explore the evolution of and themes within the artist’s work throughout his career. The exhibition brings to light rarely seen monumental works, significant pieces from public and private collections, including 28 from the National Museum of the American Indian’s collection. A companion catalogue offers a range of new perspectives, chronicling the artist’s life and development of his work with scholarly essays and reflections by artists whose work has been impacted by Lowe.
National Museum of the American Indian
Washington, D.C.
Opening October 24, 2025
Water’s Edge: The Art of Truman Lowe
Truman Lowe, Feather Canoe, ca. 1993
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Cara and Diego Romero: Tales of Futures Past includes the work of photographer Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) and potter Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo). Focusing on the artistic dialogue between these two leading artists, the exhibition explores themes concerning the complexities and the evolutionary nature of Indigenous identity. While they are husband and wife and maintain individual studio practices, their work shares a broader visual dialog. They fuse elements of popular culture, ancestral traditions, and the supernatural to portray protagonists powered by their Indigeneity as they, and the world, continue to change. Through their visionary works, the Romeros strive to establish agency through storytelling, and to address the past, the present, and the future of Indigenous lifeways.
Albuquerque Museum
Albuquerque, NM
Opening October 24, 2025
Cara and Diego Romero: Tales of Futures Past
Cara Romero, Water Memory, 2015
PAST
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
it takes a long time to stay here: Paintings by Jordan Ann Craig
Artist Jordan Ann Craig’s (Northern Cheyenne) solo exhibition at The Block Museum is her largest institutional exhibition to date and her first in the Chicago area. Her large-scale abstract paintings reflect her engagement with Indigenous, especially Northern Cheyenne, aesthetic traditions and her dynamic and innovative exploration of color, line, and geometric form. Craig’s practice often begins with research in museum collections and archives—studying, learning from, and engaging in a dialogue with traditional Indigenous artistic forms, such as beadwork, pottery, and textiles. She also draws inspiration from the landscape of what is now the Southwestern United States, where she lives and works.
The exhibition’s title, it takes a long time to stay here, comes from the poem "spinning air" by m.s. RedCherries (Northern Cheyenne), and evokes ideas of grounding and reflection. The exhibition invites a deep exploration of the seven paintings, shown together for the first time, highlighting the introspective quality of Craig’s work. As one spends extended time with each painting, its meaning is shaped by the interplay of Craig’s enigmatic and playful titles, her intricate compositions, and the perspectives of each viewer.
Block Museum
Evanston, IL
January 25 – April 13, 2025
Jordan Ann Craig, Too Slow, Go Back to Crow, 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Rose B. Simpson has envisioned a site-specific project for the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ames Family Atrium titled Strata. Simpson’s installation was commissioned specifically for the expansive, light-filled space. According to the artist, Strata is inspired by time spent in Cleveland, “the architecture of the museum, the possibility of the space, tumbled stones from the shores of Lake Erie,” as well as her own Indigenous heritage and the landscape of her ancestral homelands of Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, where she was born and raised and where she lives and works.
Strata comprises two monumental figural sculptures constructed from the artist’s signature clay medium, in addition to metalwork, porous concrete, and cast bronze. The figures’ layers mimic rock eroded through geologic time and the structural materiality of man-made architecture. Intricate welded metal structures mounted to the heads of each figure, intended to cast shadows, mimic the structures of the mind in relationship to time and space.
Cleveland Museum of Art
Cleveland OH
July 14, 2024 – April 13, 2025
Rose B. Simpson: Strata
Rose Simpson, Strata (detail, installation view), 2024
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
American Sunrise: Indigenous Art at Crystal Bridges
American Sunrise: Indigenous Art at Crystal Bridges examines the beauty and intricacy of art from Crystal Bridges’ flourishing collection of Indigenous art, including new acquisitions. Guided by three themes, Indigenous Futurism, Place, and Kinship, American Sunrise celebrates the historical and ongoing relationships Indigenous peoples carry between the land; intergenerational artistic expressions; and the resilience of kinship between Indigenous artists and place.
Poet Laureate of the United States Joy Harjo (Muscogee) wrote American Sunrise (2019), the volume of poems that inspired this exhibition’s title. Her words open a dialogue with American history through the lens of Indigenous Nation’s relationships to the land through past, present, and future timelines.
The diverse range of innovative and technically mastered mediums including basketry, beadwork, paintings, photography, and pottery showcases the achievements of more than 30 prominent artists from what is now known as the United States and Canada, spanning 150 years of creativity.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Bentonville, AR
November 9, 2024 – March 23, 2025
Martine Gutierrez, Queer Rage, Imagine Life-Size, and I’m Tyra, p66-67, from Indigenous Woman, 2018,
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue
Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue, curated by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez, features large-scale installation, sculpture, video, and a robust programming line-up celebrating the work and ideas of 23 artists who have contributed to Dunnill's Broken Boxes podcast. The exhibition celebrates ten years of the podcast of the same name and amplifies the collective strength of contemporary artists.
Focusing on interviews over the past four years, the exhibition features large-scale installations by renowned artists and includes floating metal “jingle clouds,” a vibrant parade float honoring matriarchs, a colossal wolf forged from community care, brilliant mirrored tapestries honoring lives lost, a monument to Trans rights, and much more. Each of the featured artists engages their own cultural experience and elevates activism within diverse communities.
Albuquerque Museum
Albuquerque, NM
September 7, 2024 – March 2, 2025
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The Western formation of what has become the Americas was born through water.
The symbolic birth of a nation, nor its often violent formation, is never a one-time event. It is a process of taking, extracting, and dispossessing. Take—a verb meaning to lay hold of, to displace things or people from where they belong.
A Nation Takes Place examines the ways seafaring imaginaries are connected to the lethal technologies of enslavement, colonialism, genocide, dispossession, and extraction. This unique perspective invites us to rethink our understanding of these historical events and their water connections.
The exhibition draws together a collection of artwork by 38 artists and from over 20 lending partners to help us comprehend the complexity of America’s formation, a project unthinkable without waterways, conquest, and slave ships.
While the archive, with its limitations, provides some access to the past, some histories have been erased, others remain inaccessible to language, and others are resistant to being written. In these gaps, the artists in A Nation Takes Place invite us to interpret and understand these spaces where words cannot.
Minnesota Marine Art Museum
Winona, MN
August 21, 2024 – March 2, 2025
A Nation Takes Place
Kent Monkman, Saving the Newcomers, 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Nicholas Galanin: Exist in the Width of a Knife's Edge
Nicholas Galanin’s (Lingít and Unangax̂) exhibition presents existing works alongside new work inspired by his continued critical examination of cultural appropriation, colonization, and the complexities of Indigenous identity in the contemporary world. His work in Baltimore finds root in his conversations with the local Native community, which sparked directions for his sculptural installations and interventions.
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
September 1, 2024 – February 16, 2025
Nicholas Galanin, We Dreamt Deaf, 2015
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Rick Bartow: Animal Kinship, an exhibition from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation by one of Oregon’s most celebrated artists, will open September 20, 2024 at the High Desert Museum. This is the third art exhibition in a yearlong series of collaboration with the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation exploring the complex relationships between humans, animals and the world we share. The first was Andy Warhol’s Endangered Species, followed by Near, Far, Gone, which is open now through September 8, 2024.
Artist Rick Bartow (Mad River Band of the Wiyot Tribe, d. 2016) was born in Newport, Oregon, where his family’s roots run deep, and grew up with close ties to the Siletz community. Though he traveled the world extensively in his lifetime, Bartow always returned to his family’s coastal home, and it was here that he eventually became one of the Northwest’s best-known and most celebrated artists. Nearly two dozen artworks, including two-dimensional and sculptural pieces, have been selected for the exhibition. The works span the final three decades of Bartow’s career. Drawing from Indigenous stories and his interests as an amateur naturalist, Bartow moves freely between human and animal representations in his depictions.
High Desert Museum
Bend, OR
September 20, 2024 – February 9, 2025
Rick Bartow: Animal Kinship
Rick Bartow, Little Kestrel on the Ground, 2013
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).
Florence Griswold Museum
Old Lyme, CT
November 16, 2024 – February 9, 2025
Native Prospects: Indigeneity and Landscape
Kay WalkingStick, Thom, Where Are the Pocumtucks (The Oxbow), 2020
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent, b. 1979; based in northern Minnesota and Chicago, IL) considers how landscapes are shaped by history, relationships, and power. Her artworks imagine places that are “everywhere and nowhere,” visualizing these shifting yet ever-present dynamics. Grounded in Anishinaabe understandings of space and time, the works in this exhibition reflect on how land carries memories of colonial expansion and violence, as well as Indigenous presence and resistance.
Across painting, video, and sculpture, Carlson organizes imagined landscapes around one constant—the horizon. This line is reminiscent of her homelands on Lake Superior. It is also a significant art historical trope that artists have employed to depict territories as vast and vacant, ripe for the taking. Carlson’s prismatic works are not empty: they are densely layered with an abundance of motifs, making reference to the tactics of colonialism as well as her family and peers, Ojibwe culture, and Indigenous sovereignty. Confronting ongoing histories of erasure and dispossession, Carlson proposes that what appears to be lost can be remade, reimagined, or otherwise regained.
Andrea Carlson is the 26th artist to participate in Chicago Works, a solo exhibition series at the MCA that features artists who are shaping contemporary art in the city and beyond. The exhibition is presented in the MCA’s Turner Gallery, on the museum’s fourth floor.
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Chicago, IL
August 3, 2024 – February 2, 2025
Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons
Andrea Carlson, Perpetual Genre, 2024
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The first major traveling exhibition to focus on the coexistence of art created between 1785 and 1922 by Native American and non-Native American artists, Knowing the West celebrates the American West as inclusive, complex, and reflective of the diverse peoples who contributed to art and life there.
Americans often feel they “know the West,” whether informed by direct experience or popular culture. Knowing the West embraces these impressions and expands ideas of art of the West by presenting more than 100 artworks including textiles, baskets, paintings, pottery, sculpture, beadworks, saddles, and prints. This exhibition recontextualizes historic artwork, encourages deeper exploration of a familiar topic, and celebrates the rich cultures that reflect the complexity of the American West.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Bentonville, AR
September 14, 2024 – January 27, 2025
Knowing the West
Nellie Two Bears Gates, Suitcase, 1880–1910
Mary Sully—born Susan Mabel Deloria on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota—was a little-known, reclusive Yankton Dakota artist who, between the 1920s and 1940s, created highly distinctive work informed by her Native American and settler ancestry. This first solo exhibition of Sully’s groundbreaking production highlights recent Met acquisitions and loans from the Mary Sully Foundation, works that complicate traditional notions of Native American and modern art.
Working without patronage, in near obscurity, and largely self-taught, Sully produced intricately designed and vividly colored drawings. They mix meaningful aspects of her Dakota heritage with visual elements observed from other Native nations as well as the aesthetics of urban life. Euro-American celebrities from popular culture, politics, and religion inspired some of her most striking works, which she called “personality prints”— abstract portraits arranged as vertical triptychs. Featuring 25 rarely seen Sully compositions, as well as archival family material and other Native items from The Met collection, Mary Sully: Native Modern offers a fresh and complex lens through which to consider American art and life in the early 20th century.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, NY
July 18, 2024 – January 12, 2025
Mary Sully: Native Modern
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Part of Getty’s region-wide initiative PST ART: Art and Science Collide, the Hammer presents Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice, organized by guest co-curators Glenn Kaino and Mika Yoshitake. The exhibition considers environmental art practices that address the climate crisis and anthropogenic disasters and their inescapable intersection with issues of equity and social justice. Breath(e) features works by more than 20 artists, including works by Mel Chin, Ron Finley, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Garnett Puett, and Lan Tuazon, commissioned specially for this exhibition.
Breath(e) was conceived during the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic and America’s racial reckoning in 2020, and as such explores pressing issues related to the ethics of climate justice, while proposing pragmatic and philosophical approaches to spur discussion and resolution. The exhibition strives to challenge and deconstruct polarized political attitudes surrounding climate justice in America and offers new perspectives around land and indigenous rights of nature.
Hammer Museum
Los Angeles, CA
September 14, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice
Cannupa Hanska Luger at the artist’s studio, 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Native Fashion features traditional garments, powwow regalia, streetwear, accessories, haute couture, photography, and contemporary art by national and local Indigenous designers alongside examples from the Spencer Museum's collection. The exhibition highlights the artistic richness of wearable artworks and their connection to historical and contemporary culture as expressions of tribal and personal identity. An accompanying runway show will showcase the talent of contemporary makers and remind visitors that display cases are not the natural context for Indigenous apparel. The exhibition examines the role fashion and adornment play in Indigenous lifeways through four themes that were developed in collaboration with a team of Native community advisors.
Spencer Museum of Art
Lawrence, KS
September 1, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Native Fashion
Chris Pappan, Bless All Those Who Walk Here, 2010
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Exploding Native Inevitable is an exhibition of the work of twelve contemporary Indigenous artists and two collaboratives, accompanied by a program of dance, film, music, performance, readings, storytelling, and video by Indigenous artists from a land we now call America. Exhibiting artists range from emerging to elders. “They are amazing voices, make compelling art, and have important things to say,” said co-curator Brad Kahlhamer. “The artists build on cultural traditions, push new creative boundaries, and represent some of the extraordinary work being created by Indigenous artists across the land.”
Kahlhamer and co-curator Dan Mills, who have known each other for more than twenty years, began work on this project in late 2019. “This has been a remarkable multiyear collaboration with Brad Kahlhamer,” Mills said. “Brad is a Native American artist who is respected in contemporary Indigenous circles, and who has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad. He brings deep knowledge and keen insights to this project.”
The exhibition title riffs on Andy Warhol’s 1966–67 Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a series of multimedia events—including performances, 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.
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
Scottsdale, AZ
August 10, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Exploding Native Inevitable
Tyrrell Tapaha, Áshkii Gáamalii: The Boy Who Lives in Two Worlds, 2021
Native America: In Translation, curated by artist Wendy Red Star, assembles the wide-ranging work of nine Indigenous artists who offer contemporary perspectives on memory, identity, and the history of photography. “I was thinking about young Native artists and what would be inspirational and important for them as a road map,” said Red Star.
This road map spans intergenerational image makers representing various Native nations and affiliations, and working in photography, installation, multimedia assemblage, and video. Among them, the late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais investigates landscape and language through his evocative Polaroids. And the stylish self-portraits of Martine Gutierrez pose as fashion ads and question conceptions of ideal beauty.
Together, their work confronts the historic, and often fraught relationship between photography and the representation of Native Americans, while also reimagining what it means to be a citizen in North America today.
Blanton Museum of Art
Austin, TX
August 4, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Native America: In Translation
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Rebecca Belmore, matriarch, 2018
This exhibition puts Laura Ortman’s (White Mountain Apache) My Soul Remainer into conversation with a historic Apache violin by Amos Gustina. Ortman’s video work features the artist playing the violin against the dramatic backdrop of the Southwestern landscape, while her collaborator Jock Soto (Diné) assumes reverential postures. Ortman’s original score builds upon then radically departs from the overwhelmingly white, male canon of classical music—her score samples a classical Mendelssohn piece, which bleeds into an atmospheric and ethereal composition. The pairing of the piece with the Apache violin insists upon the ingenuity and enduring community traditions of the Southwest.
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
July 17, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Laura Ortman: Wood that Sings
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Laura Ortman, My Soul Remainer, 2017.
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Dana Claxton (Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations) presents a solo exhibition of her large-scale, backlit, color transparency photography, which she terms “fireboxes.” Works from her Lasso and Headdress series, including a newly commissioned Headdress portrait, draw together contemporary Native subjects with regalia and items from the subject’s own cultures. The exhibition situates many of the objects depicted in the firebox images alongside objects from the BMA’s historic Native art collection. Together, they recognize cultural belongings as extensions of the people who made them, provoking a consideration of personal and institutional care. Other featured artists whose names are known to us include: Kim Soo Goodtrack (Hunkpapa Lakota, b. 1955, Wood Mountain, SK, Canada) and Butch Thunder Hawk (Húnkpapȟa Lakȟóta, b. 1946, Cannonball, ND).
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
August 4, 2024 – January 5, 2025
Dana Claxton: Spark
Dana Claxton, Lasso, 2018
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Joe Feddersen: Earth, Water, Sky showcases the breadth of the artist’s 40-year career, including printmaking, glass, weaving, and ceramics. Moving fluidly among media, Feddersen has cultivated a visual vernacular that draws upon recognizable signs, symbols, and forms. He transforms the familiar into a world of juxtapositions that confront how we see, use, and treat the natural world. In so doing, Feddersen foregrounds his Plateau-Native viewpoint that values our interconnected relationships in the landscape. From miniatures to wall-sized installations, the exhibition features over 100 works and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue.
Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture
Spokane, WA
On view through January 5, 2025
Joe Fedderson: Earth, Water, Sky
Joe Feddersen, Rugged Trail 2
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
May 12 – December 1, 2024
Dyani White Hawk: Bodies of Water
Dyani White Hawk, Carry II, 2019
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
May 12 – December 1, 2024
Caroline Monnet, Kibwagawinigan, 2022
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
May 12 – December 1, 2024
Lindsay McIntyre, "seeing her" (still), 2020
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
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
May 12 – December 1, 2024
Illustrating Agency
Julie Buffalohead. The Noble Savage, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
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
May 12 – December 1, 2024
Enduring Buffalo
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
May 12 – December 1, 2024
Marie Watt, Blanket Stories: Beacon, Marker, Ohi-yo, 2015
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Generations: The Sobey Family and Canadian Art tells the story of one family’s visionary engagement with Canadian and Indigenous art, braiding together works by early European newcomers like Cornelius Krieghoff; titans of Canadian 20th century art, the Group of Seven, Tom Thomson, David Milne and Emily Carr; a rich display of works by the Quebec Impressionists, as well as Automatiste painters Jean Paul Riopelle and Paul-Émile Borduas; and works by trail-blazing artists of today, including contemporary Indigenous artists Kent Monkman, Brenda Draney, Brian Jungen and Annie Pootoogook, as well as leading international artist Peter Doig. A recurring theme in the exhibition is the North Atlantic, its role in history, and its impact on artists’ imaginations.
Art Gallery of Greater Victoria
Victoria, British Columbia
June 29 – October 27, 2024
Generations: The Sobey Family and Canadian Art
Kent Monkman, Study for “mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People): Resurgence of the People,” (Final Variation) (detail), 2019
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Museum of Photographic Arts at San Diego Museum of Art
San Diego, CA
April 27– October 20, 2024
The Artist Speaks: Cara Romero
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.
Cara Romero, Naomi, 2017
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 9, 2024
Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies
Melissa Cody, World Traveler, 2014.
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
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
October 28, 2023 – August 17, 2024
Oscar Howe: Ikíćiksapa
Oscar Howe, Ritual Dancer, 1965
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
March 2 – July 28, 2024
Virgil Ortiz, Convergence, Defenders Descend from Portal to Pueblo, 2023
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
February 23 – July 14, 2024
George Morrison, Ephemeration, 1962
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.
May 25, 2023 – June 2, 2024
Robert Houle: Red Is Beautiful
Robert Houle, Red is Beautiful, 1970
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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