NATIVE ART EVENTS AND EXHIBITIONS
CURRENT
EXHIBITION
Florence Hawley Ellis Museum of Anthropology at Ghost Ranch
Abiquiu, NM
On view through December 24, 2024
Cara Romero: The Gathering
The Florence Hawley Ellis Museum of Anthropology at Ghost Ranch announces the opening of “Cara Romero: The Gathering”, an extraordinary exhibition by renowned Chemehuevi fine art photographer, Cara Romero. The exhibition is scheduled to open on Jan. 13, 2024, and will run through December 2024.
This groundbreaking show originates from an unusual request to Romero, a Santa Fe-based artist celebrated for her portrayal of contemporary Indigenous life. A collector approached her to participate in a commission interpreting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an idea initially at odds with Romero’s artistic vision. However, Romero reimagined this concept into a powerful portrayal of four Native women heralding a world reborn.
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
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
On view through 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
On view through January 5, 2025
Native Fashion
Chris Pappan, Bless All Those Who Walk Here, 2010
Native America: In Translation
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
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
On view through January 5, 2025
Rebecca Belmore, matriarch, 2018
Laura Ortman: Wood that Sings
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
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
On view through January 5, 2025
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
On view through 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
What it Becomes
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
As an act of direct mark making, drawing offers an immediate and spontaneous way for ideas to unfold and images to come into being. Informed by the medium’s potential to illustrate change, this exhibition brings together works from the Whitney’s collection by artists who use drawing as an act of transformation. In their hands, drawing presents a tool to reveal the unseen and make the familiar unrecognizable, or as the artist Toyin Ojih Odutola has remarked, “What it becomes is what I’m interested in.”
Although the works in this exhibition range from the graphic arts to photographs and videos, the processes inherent to drawing play a fundamental role in the creation of each of them. Certain artists employ techniques like inscribing and erasure to alter or reclaim existing images, as seen in works by Ojih Odutola and Wendy Red Star. Others, such as David Hammons and Maren Hassinger, emphasize the tactility of the medium by using their own bodies as drawing tools or surfaces to transform their likeness. All the works bear a close relationship to the figure, ranging from traditional modes of portraiture to more abstract graphic records of human gesture. Harnessing the relationship between drawing, touch, and formation, the artists explore the malleable nature of identity and the possibility of shaping and redefining oneself.
Whitney Museum of American Art
New York, NY
On view through January 12, 2025
Rick Bartow, Autobiographical Hawk, 1991.
Mary Sully: Native Modern
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
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
On view through January 12, 2025
Driving the Market: Award Winning Native Contemporary Art
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Driving the Market will spotlight award-winning artists and pieces from prestigious Native art markets, including those hosted by the Southwestern Association of Indian Arts (SWAIA) in Santa Fe, the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, and the Heard Museum in Phoenix.
Each art market has its own unique character, offering attendees a chance to experience a wide array of contemporary Native art, meet the artists, and purchase their works directly. These markets are more than just commercial events; they are cultural gatherings where artists collaborate, innovate, and draw inspiration, fostering a dynamic sense of community.
Museum of Indian Arts and Culture
Santa Fe, NM
On view through January 18, 2025
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Suspended and spinning in the Price Family Community Gallery are newly commissioned works by Vancouver-based artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, who created and popularized the graphic style of Haida manga. The style incorporates a mixture of North Pacific Indigenous narratives, frame lines, and Japanese cartooning. Posing timely and necessary questions about culture, identity, and histories past and present, the works in this exhibition avoid simple categorization and instead, to quote Yahgulanaas, take as their subject “the spaces in between.”
Commissioned by MOCA for the Ground Floor, Yahgulanaas has created Daalkaatlii Diaries – a work that began as a book is newly reimagined as 26 large-scale panels in the form of an accordion, and has been designed with consideration of MOCA’s unique and historic space. As visitors enter Daalkaatlii Diaries, they are greeted by Flesh Tones, a pair of new experimental kinetic sculptures.
MOCA Toronto
Toronto, Ontario
On view through January 26, 2025
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas: Diaries After a Flood
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Red: A Haida Manga, 2009
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
On view through January 27, 2025
Knowing the West
Nellie Two Bears Gates, Suitcase, 1880–1910
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
On view through February 9, 2025
Native Prospects: Indigeneity and Landscape
Kay WalkingStick, Thom, Where Are the Pocumtucks (The Oxbow), 2020
Vivarium: Exploring Intersections of Art, Storytelling, and the Resilience of the Living World
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
Albuquerque Museum presents Vivarium, Exploring Intersections of Art, Storytelling, and the Resilience of the Living World. It features multiple works by seven distinguished artists: Nathan Budoff, Patrick McGrath Muñíz, Steven J. Yazzie (Diné/Laguna), Eliza Naranjo Morse (Tewa, Kha’p’o Owingeh), Stanley Natchez (Shoshone-Tataviam), Julie Buffalohead (Ponca Tribe Indians of Oklahoma), and Eloy Torrez. The exhibition also includes a selection of works from the Tia Collection including paintings by Nanibah Chacon (Diné/Chicana), Julio Larraz, and more.
By exploring the delicate balance within nature through a variety of visual languages and cultural lenses, Vivarium invites viewers into a vibrant exploration of diverse environments. Latin for "place of life," the title Vivarium encapsulates the convergence of each artist's unique perspective to form a dialogue about how the non-human living world strives to survive even when human constructs threaten its existence.
Albuquerque Museum
Albuquerque, NM
On view through February 9, 2025
Eliza Naranjo Morse, A Prayer Making Its Way, 2024
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
On view through February 9, 2025
Rick Bartow: Animal Kinship
Rick Bartow, Little Kestrel on the Ground, 2013
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
On view through February 16, 2025
Nicholas Galanin, We Dreamt Deaf, 2015
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
On view through March 2, 2025
A Nation Takes Place
Kent Monkman, Saving the Newcomers, 2023
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The traveling exhibition Arctic Highways features 12 Indigenous artists from Sápmi (cultural region traditionally inhabited by the Sámi people) and North America, sharing stories of Indigenous people who live on different continents yet regard themselves as kindred spirits. Artworks explore what it means to be unbounded, pointing to the restrictions of political borders, often arbitrarily drawn without regard to landscapes that have been used by Sápmi and North American Indigenous cultures for thousands of years.
Arctic Highways includes photography, duodji (Sámi handicraft), sculpture, fiber art, and videos, offering viewers an opportunity to learn more about international Indigenous art and issues at play in Sápmi and the Arctic. Even though these artists hail from the far North, their art touches on themes that resonate deeply with many of MoCNA’s Native American communities in the Southwest. From border issues to land loss, to threats to the environment, and language and cultural preservation, these artists use their art to shed light on shared experiences and concerns.
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts
Santa Fe, NM
On view through March 2, 2025
Arctic Highways: Unbounded Indigenous People
Meryl McMaster (Plains Cree), What Will I Say to the Sky and the Earth II, 2019
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
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.
The exhibition features the following 23 local and international artists, nine of whom are creating new work: Tanya Aguiñiga • Natalie Ball • CASSILS • Autumn Chacon • Raven Chacon • India Sky Davis • Jeremy Dennis • Kate DeCiccio • Amaryllis R. Flowers • Cannupa Hanska Luger • Sterlin Harjo • Elisa Harkins • Christine Howard Sandoval • Tsedaye Makonnen • Guadalupe Maravilla • Laura Ortman • Katherine Paul (Black Belt Eagle Scout) • Joseph M. Pierce • SWOON • Chip Thomas • Marie Watt • Saya Woolfalk • Mario Ybarra Jr.
Albuquerque Museum
Albuquerque, NM
On view through March 2, 2025
Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
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
On view through March 23, 2025
American Sunrise: Indigenous Art at Crystal Bridges
Martine Gutierrez, Queer Rage, Imagine Life-Size, and I’m Tyra, p66-67, from Indigenous Woman, 2018,
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
On view through April 13, 2025
Rose B. Simpson: Strata
Rose Simpson, Strata (detail, installation view), 2024
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 April 12, 2025
Carved Stories by Mavasta Honyouti
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The Coyote is a figure featured as a “trickster” across Native American storytelling. However, among the Maidu, the Coyote conveys benevolent teachings of the totality of human nature. Harry Fonseca: Transformations is the first exhibition dedicated to exploring Fonseca’s expressions of “queerness” through the reintroduction of his beloved character Coyote. Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu/Portuguese/Native Hawaiian) established liberatory expressions in contemporary Indigenous and queer art. The exhibition will feature works from the Heard’s fine art collection, such as Coyote in the Mission (1983) and Roxie-The Black Swan (1984), as well as a recent acquisition, Pow Wow Club (1981). Fonseca’s paintings explore Coyote as a metaphor for the transformations of self that defy Western conceptions of Indigeneity coded with a visual language that explores queer subcultures.
Heard Museum
Phoenix, AZ
On view through April 20, 2025
Harry Fonseca: Transformations
Harry Fonseca, Pow Wow Club, 1981
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
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 4, 2025
Off-Center: New Mexico Art, 1970-2000
David Bradley, El Farol: Canyon Road Cantina, 2000
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
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
Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains
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
Lauren Good Day, A Warrior’s Story, Honoring Grandpa Blue Bird, 2012
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’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
Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT
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 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
Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology
Cara Romero, Three Sisters, 2022
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
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
Interwoven Power: Native Knowledge / Native Art
Rose B. Simpson and Roxanne Swentzell, Detail of Untitled (Timeline Necklace), 2019
UPCOMING
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
The Hood Museum of Art will present the first major solo museum exhibition of photographs by Chemehuevi artist Cara Romero, titled Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light). The exhibition will be on view at the Hood Museum from January 18 through August 10, 2025, and will feature over 50 works, including several never-before-seen photographs, and site-specific installations that will invite the viewer behind the scenes to experience the sets of Romero's most iconic photographs.
Hood Museum
Hanover, NH
January 18 – August 10, 2025
Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)
Cara Romero, Zenith, 2022
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
Opening February 1, 2025
Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always
G. Peter Jemison, Red Power, 1973
MUSEUM EXHIBITION
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
Opening February 15, 2025
Kenojuak Ashevak: Highlights from the Dr. Ronald M. Haynes Collection
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 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
Opening February 7, 2025
Jordan Ann Craig
Jordan Ann Craig, Sharp Tongue II, 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
Opening February 15, 2025
Letendre/Morrisseau
Rita Letendre. Tabori, 1976
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
Opening April 4, 2025
Bob Haozous: A Retrospective View
Bob Haozous, Portable Apaches #4, 1990
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
PAST
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