NATIVE ART PRESS
ARTNEWS | DECEMBER 18 2024
Year In Review: 2024 Saw a New Level of Interest in Indigenous Art—the Market Response Has Been More Complicated
By Karen K. Ho
In January, several industry insiders predicted there would be more attention paid this year to Indigenous and Native art. That month, Phillips was gearing up to hold “New Terrains,” its first selling exhibition of contemporary Indigenous and Native art at its New York headquarters. Quickly, it became apparent that the predictions made around the time of the Phillips show were correct. Later that month, the Venice Biennale would announce its artist list for the main exhibition, “Foreigners Everywhere,” which included numerous Indigenous artists.
Now, 2024 is nearly complete, and further proof that Indigenous art is on the rise has arrived in museums, auction houses, and galleries. Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee), the artist who represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, got representation with Hauser & Wirth. Emmi Whitehorse, a Diné painter who showed in the Biennale’s main exhibition, gained a new auction record at Phillips, where one of her paintings sold for over $177,000—nearly nine times its high estimate. A retrospective for Aboriginal painter Emily Kam Kngwarray continued to travel Australia, and even resulted in the late artist’s addition to Pace’s roster.
Emmi Whitehorse (Diné), Canyon Lake I, 2001
ARTNEWS | DECEMBER 16 2024
The Defining Art Events of 2024
Native and Indigenous art continued to be featured in museum exhibitions and in the market, boosted by the visibility of Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw/Cherokee) representing the US at the Venice Biennale this year. Both of the Biennale’s top prizes also went to Indigenous artists, and the façade of the central exhibition hall was covered with a mural by an indigenous collective from the Brazilian Amazon.
Phillips held its first exhibition sale focused on Native and Indigenous art in January. Then, in May, the auction house set a new artist record for Kent Monkman (Cree) after his 2020 painting The Storm sold for $300,000 ($381,000 with fees).
Solo shows for Native and Indigenous artists this year included Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) and Nicholas Galanin (Tlingít/Unangax̂) at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Mary Sully (Yankton Dakota) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Melissa Cody (Navajo) at MoMA PS1. The Cincinnati Art Museum also held a large exhibition of glass works by contemporary Native American and Indigenous Pacific-Rim artists, while the Blanton Museum of Art currently has an exhibition curated by Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke).
There are already signs the momentum will continue into 2025: The Denver Art Museum announced that next year it will hold a large-scale exhibition of works by Monkman, the first museum survey for Andrea Carlson (Ojibwe), and a partial reinstallation of its collection of Indigenous art. The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art, will also open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., next October before traveling to other venues in Canada and the US.
Jeffrey Gibson at the Venice Biennale
ARTDAILY | DECEMBER 12 2024
Works by contemporary Native American artists acquired by the National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art has acquired paintings, sculptures, a video, and several photographs by contemporary Native American artists Jeffrey Gibson, Sky Hopinka, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Dakota Mace, Eric-Paul Riege, Cara Romero, Kay WalkingStick, and Will Wilson, reinforcing its ongoing commitment to acquire major works that expand perspectives of the history of art, especially in the United States. Offering a critical perspective in contemporary artistic discourse and presenting a reflection on the history of the native lands and cultures of Indigenous artists, these acquisitions complement works already in the collection by G. Peter Jemison (Seneca Nation of Indians, Heron Clan), George Morrison (Ojibwe [Grand Portage]), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes), Marie Watt (Seneca Nation of Indians), and Emmi Whitehorse (Diné), among others, and build on the dialogues forged in the exhibition The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, presented by the National Gallery from September 22, 2023, through January 15, 2024.
Jeffrey Gibson, WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, 2024
ARTNET | DECEMBER 9 2024
Which 6 Artists Dominate U.S. Museums Right Now? We Crunch the Numbers
By Ben Davis
I looked at more than 200 museums, and counted which artists were on view any time during December (that includes a show like the Baltimore Museum’s “Illustrating Agency,” which closed December 1). The resulting list includes a little more than 3,400 artist names. Of these, only about 300 appear more than once—a tiny fraction. And of these, a very few repeat multiple times, giving a sense of which voices are most resonating with curators and institutions.
Because I’m most interested in breadth of influence, I decided not to make any distinctions between bigger and smaller institutions. I rank career retrospectives and surveys highly, followed by special commissions or exhibitions that spotlight a specific body of work, biennial appearances, and then inclusions in thematic group shows.
All the most visible figures are Black and Indigenous. A rhetoric of speaking for and to historically marginalized identities surrounds a lot of the work.
Virgil Ortiz
HYPERALLERGIC | NOVEMBER 26 2024
Weaving Through the History of Diné Textiles
By Nancy Zastudil
I’m standing in a low-lit gallery, looking into a floor-to-ceiling glass case displaying three textiles: one, a horizontal field of black and white parallelograms; another, a spread of vertical brown, red, and beige zigzagging lines that form a scalloped edge on either side; the third composed of wide horizontal bands of vertical zigzags, this time black and beige, along with narrower red bands punctuated by a series of diamond shapes outlined in black. The visual vibrations and patterns feel completely of the earth and the human hand. Each of these works — one tapestry and two blankets — appears timeless, but in fact they were created in two different centuries.
The works are part of Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC). To organize the exhibition of over 30 textiles, photographs, and related items (e.g., dye samples, yarn swatches, digital media), co-curators Hadley Jensen and Rapheal Begay (Diné) collaborated with a Diné advisory committee; a similar approach was used for Grounded in Clay at the MIAC last year.
Darby Raymond-Overstreet, Woven Landscape: Monument Valley, 2023
HYPERALLERGIC | OCTOBER 23 2024
From the Ruins of the Past, Indigenous Artists Fashion New Futures
By Joelle E. Mendoza
“Maybe ‘apocalypse’ is the opportunity we are looking for, even if we don’t quite know it yet.” This message from Santa Clara Pueblo sculptor Rose B. Simpson is printed at the feet of her over-eight-foot-tall figurative sculpture “Ground (Witness)” (2016) at the Autry Museum of the American West. The artist’s evocative “maybe” can provide a generative perspective in this political moment, as many Indigenous communities continue to survive the apocalyptic reality of European settler colonialism.
Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology, in which Simpson’s towering sculpture is situated, was organized by the Autry Museum as part of the Getty Foundation’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide program and runs through June 21, 2026. With over 50 pieces on view, the show aims to challenge specific preconceived notions of what constitutes Native art through the work of contemporary Indigenous artists who explore ideas of time, technology, futurism, and science. It includes a range of tribal representation and multidisciplinary approaches that draw from ancestral knowledge and technology, interrogating how future generations might preserve and adapt traditions to carry them forward.
Wendy Red Star, Stirs Up the Dust, 2011
HYPERALLERGIC | OCTOBER 13 2024
Native Art Collection Gets a Much-Needed Rehang at Montclair Art Museum
By Greta Rainbow
A decade ago, Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon coined the term “Indigenous futurisms.” The phrase is not a call to ignore a painful past, she wrote, but rather to fold the past into the present. When this past-present meets the future, it creates “a philosophical wormhole that renders the very definitions of time and space fluid in the imagination.”
Historically, Indigenous art has been clumsily slotted into the Western canon. Museums tend to conceive of Native identity as static or even a thing of the past, relegating ephemera to the furthest, darkest corner of its permanent collections. In the long-term installation Interwoven Power: Native Knowledge / Native Art, which opened on September 14, New Jersey’s Montclair Art Museum (MAM) achieves a sorely needed curatorial feat: an institutional display of Indigenous art that courses with vitality.
OBSERVER | OCTOBER 11 2024
How Denver Art Museum Is Looping Indigenous Communities into Its Program
By Elisa Carollo
The Denver Art Museum was among the first institutions in the U.S. to collect Native American art, beginning in 1925, and has maintained a steadfast commitment to highlighting the contributions of Indigenous artists. “The impact of Indigenous people on the collection is fundamental,” Heinrich said in his speech, “It has always been essential for us to collect contemporary art by Native American people.”
This month, the museum is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its Indigenous Arts of North America collection with a complete rehanging of its Indigenous works. “As we approach the 100th anniversary of the DAM’s Indigenous Arts of North America collection, we take this moment to honor and uplift Native voices and perspectives by communicating the many contributions Indigenous artists, advisors, and scholars have made to our museum,” Dakota Hoska, associate curator of Native Arts, told Observer. “We are excited to expose our larger audiences to the beauty and innovation found in Native North American artwork throughout time.”
Kent Monkman, Compositional Study for The Sparrow, 2022
HARPER’S BAZAAR | OCTOBER 4 2024
Wendy Red Star Is Decolonizing the Art World With Humor—and Help From Her Ancestors
By Ariana Marsh
Red Star’s artmaking practice has always served as a dialogue between past and present. Best known for her photography work confronting stereotypes about Native American identity, she also works in sculpture, installation, performance, and fashion to correct harmful historical narratives and act as a cultural archivist for the Crow community. Represented by Sargent’s Daughters in New York, Red Star also recently joined Roberts Projects gallery in L.A., where she had her first solo exhibition, “Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper),” earlier this year. Now, the 2024 MacArthur Fellow is gearing up for her biggest solo show to date: an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 2026, which will focus on Plenty Coups, the last chief of the Crow to be elected by other chiefs. “I'm on this exciting adventure of research right now,” Red Star says of the project. “There’s so much to Plenty Coups’s legacy and history—we’ve found mentions of him across all the Smithsonian institutions.”
ARTNET | SEPTEMBER 23 2024
How Raven Halfmoon Channels Indigenous History and Identity Into Her Monumental Sculptures
By Katie White
Raven Halfmoon (Caddo Nation) makes monumental, totemic sculptures that speak to the living power of indigenous peoples. Halfmoon is best known for towering, glazed stoneware figures that loom at more than twice a human scale and can weigh hundreds of pounds. These figurative beings, whom Halfmoon builds from a coil method, bridge Caddo pottery traditions with ideas rooted in the artist’s feminist matrilineal ancestry along as well as a range of artistic influences including Land Art and the Moai figures on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).
Now in a new exhibition “Neesh + Soku (Moon + Sun)” at Salon 94 in New York, the artist has taken inspiration from her name —Halfmoon—to mine the binaries of light and dark, male and female, past and present, while finding meaning in the rich spaces in between. Here for the first time, the artist presents work in stone and bronze, in addition to new stoneware sculptures. In these works, twinned figures appear, hinting at the multiplicities present in each person. Her works are still monumental, and include a 9-foot bronze sculpture and a 7-foot figure made from travertine.
BOSTON.COM | SEPTEMBER 19 2024
New Dewey Square mural honors Indigenous heritage
By Nia Harmon
In partnership with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), The Greenway Conservancy will feature its first mural designed by an Indigenous artist with its 10th installation in the cycle.
Indigenous-American multidisciplinary artist Jeffrey Gibson will debut your spirit whispering in my ear on Sept. 19 with an opening celebration that includes performance, art-making, and music from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
The mural contains ten different elements that honor how Indigenous, Native, and other oppressed communities combat systemic obstacles “with faith, courage and strength,” Gibson said in a statement about the installation.
THE ART NEWSPAPER | SEPTEMBER 17 2024
Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore wins the Audain Prize, one of Canada’s top art awards
By Hadani Ditmars
The winner of the 2024 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts was announced Tuesday in Vancouver, recognising the distinguished Canadian artist Rebecca Belmore with a cash prize of C$100,000 ($73,500). A member of the Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe) based in Vancouver and Toronto, Belmore is a multidisciplinary artist recognised internationally for her performance art, photo-based work and site-specific sculptural installations.
Rooted in the political and social realities of Indigenous communities, for decades Belmore’s art has made evocative connections between bodies, land and language. In 2023 for example, she was commissioned by the Polygon Gallery, in collaboration with the Burrard Arts Foundation, to create a large-format public work in North Vancouver. The commission, Hacer Memoria (2023), presented a series of blue and orange shirts made of tarpaulin, referencing the resilience of residential school survivors and offering an opportunity for the public to acknowledge Indigenous people.
Rebecca Belmore's ishkode (fire) 2022)
ARTSY | SEPTEMBER 17 2024
Jeffrey Gibson launches public art series in New York during Climate Week
By Maxwell Rabb
Jeffrey Gibson, the artist currently representing the United States at the 60th Venice Biennale, is presenting a series of public art installations during Climate Week New York. The project, running until September 29th, aims to spark public dialogue on climate change and the intricate relationship between humans and nature through immersive art experiences.
Central to the project is Gibson’s moving image animation, The Spirits Are Laughing (2024). This 11-minute video work, featuring animated designs and evocative texts, draws on Gibson’s Choctaw and Cherokee heritage to explore Indigenous kinship and environmental consciousness. The piece was originally created for The Hudson Eye art festival in 2021 and has been adapted for large-scale projections at several New York landmarks, such as Union Square, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Columbus Circle.
Jeffrey Gibson, still images from The Spirits Are Laughing, 2024
HYPERALLERGIC | SEPTEMBER 15 2024
Rachel Martin Serves Up a Communal Meal of Art
By Lakshmi Rivera Amin
A simple change of perspective can crack open a universe of possibilities — and in Rachel Martin’s galaxy, the artwork greets you upside down.
Her body arched in a backbend, a female figure donning a Tlingít mask perches on red-nailed fingers in an extraordinary balancing act, playfully beckoning visitors into the artist’s first solo show in New York City.
True to its name, Bending the Rules gathers 15 works on paper that defy convention in more ways than one. I felt a magnetic pull toward the Queens-based Tlingít artist’s imaginative field of vision, drawing from Indigenous Northwest Coast formline practices to conjure her own artistic vocabulary. Martin grew up between California and Montana’s Fort Peck Indian Reservation and connected with Tlingít culture later in life, most recently through learning to speak the language. Here, her capacity to weave cultural traditions together and imbue them with her distinctive voice has translated into inventive drawings that center the joy of communing, confiding, and sharing meals.
Rachel Martin, Bending the Rules, 2024
THE ART NEWSPAPER | SEPTEMBER 11 2024
Wendy Red Star brings contemporary Native American art to London
By Aimee Dawson
Since early June, walking into the London gallery Gathering has meant entering a colourful, 3D panorama of mountaintops, forest glades and a winding river reminiscent of a stage set for a primary school play. But the installation is not a vacuous vision of pastoral escape; it is a new work by the Apsáalooke (Crow) artist Wendy Red Star that ruminates on the colonisation of Native American land.
Her exhibition, In the Shadow of the Paper Mountains (until 14 September), takes its name from this new sculptural work. Made of painted fibreboard, the installation “intends to capture the reductive design language of the cheap greeting card and apply it to the Montana Crow Reservation landscape”, a press statement reads. The artist has added an audio recording from the Pryor Mountains—a sacred site of Apsáalooke history and folklore—that layers birdsong atop the sounds of insects and running water. These elements combine to raise a niggling question: How much of the complex truth of this place and its culture are being flattened in these generic images?
installation view, In the Shadow of the Paper Mountains, 2024
FORBES | SEPTEMBER 9 2024
Joslyn Art Museum In Omaha Does More Than Open New Building
By Chadd Scott
The Joslyn Art Museum has done it. Completely integrating Native American art into its broader American and contemporary galleries.
Plains beadwork work side-by-side with Mary Cassatt and Childe Hassam paintings in the American gallery. Thomas Hart Benton and the Kiowa Six as neighbors. Oscar Howe (Yanktonai Dakhóta) and Grant Wood. The Omaha museum’s contemporary galleries place Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk) with Mickalene Thomas, and Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw) with Simone Leigh. A signature alcove given to Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke).
American art museums have been making progress towards mainstreaming Indigenous art into their permanent collection display areas for a handful of years now–it’s a recent development–the Joslyn goes all the way. No silos. No ghettoization. No this here, that there. One in the same. Native American art indistinguishable from American art.
ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL | AUGUST 25 2024
Can Santa Fe’s Indian Market Free Itself From the Settler Gaze?
By Sháńdíín Brown and Zach Feuer
What does it mean to be a real Indian artist who makes real Indian art? And what happens when they try to sell it?
James Luna (Payómkawichum, Ipai, and Mexican) approached the former question in his 1991 installation titled “Take a Picture with a Real Indian.” The artist invited visitors to take a picture with him or with three cut-outs of his likeness: one donning war dance regalia, another in a black t-shirt and slacks, and a third in a leather loincloth and moccasins. Settler viewers may understand only one layer of irony — the absurd idea that an “authentic” Native person exists as an artifact to be put on display. As they pat themselves on the back for being in on the joke, they replicate the same mechanism the work exposes: gawking at a Native person on display.
The latter question was on our minds over the weekend of August 17 at the Southwest Association for Indian Arts’s (SWAIA) annual Indian Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Work by Ken Williams Jr. (Arapaho/Seneca) at Shiprock Gallery
ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL | AUGUST 25 2024
Quenching a thirst: Cara Romero Gallery exhibit celebrates the art of water
By Kathaleen Roberts
When photographer Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) first opened the only female Indigenous-owned gallery in Santa Fe in 2022, she intended to show only her own work.
But the success of the gallery at 333 Montezuma Ave. inspired her to expand her single artist stable to other Native creators she admired.
The exhibition “Slow Water” features more than 20 works by Indigenous artists Leah Mata Fragua, Porfirio Gutierrez, Ian Kuali’i, Lehuauakea, Erica Lord, Diego Romero and Cara Romero. The multidisciplinary works feature handmade kapa (barkcloth), textiles, jewelry, photography, ceramics, cut paper and more. The show runs through Oct. 2.
Lehuauakea, Kūmauna, 2024
FORBES | AUGUST 22 2024
SWAIA Indian Market: A One-Of-A-Kind Artistic Destination For 102 Years
By Chadd Scott
Bigger isn't better. Older isn't better. Friendly is better, but what most distinguishes the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts Indian Market each August in Santa Fe, NM is the caliber of the art. Better makes it better.
The jewelry here makes anything found on 5th Avenue in New York look “eh.” It would be laughable to compare contemporary pottery anywhere else in the world to that seen at Market. The silverwork is otherworldly. The painting, sculpture, and photography comparable to the world’s best fairs.
What's on view and for sale at Santa Fe Indian Market is the best of the best contemporary art. Indigenous made, yes, but contemporary art writ large.
Pursuing the artist booths alongside collectors are museum curators looking to bring home treasures. Direct from the maker.
VOGUE | AUGUST 20 2024
Style Was Embedded With Culture at the 2024 Santa Fe Indian Market
By Christian Allaire
Early Saturday morning, just as the sun was rising and the 2024 Santa Fe Indian Market was kicking off in New Mexico, serious collectors were already stationed outside their favorite artists' booths in hopes of scoring a piece of their work.
Spanning two days, the annual outdoor market features hundreds of booths with the new works of more than one thousand Indigenous artisans from across North America; there's jewelry, textiles, fine art, pottery, and more. The annual event, now in its 102nd year, continues to be one of the city's most popular attractions, drawing an international crowd of serious collectors to Santa Fe (with their wallets in tow). This isn't your average market, after all: It features some of the most renowned contemporary Indigenous artists in the world, all of whom are carrying forward their cultural craftwork and traditions in new, innovative ways. By noon, many artists were completely sold out.
SANTA FE REPORTER | AUGUST 14 2024
Tony, Tony, Burning Bright
By Iris Fitzpatrick
It’s late summer in Santa Fe, and Downtown Subscription’s parking lot is jam-packed with expensive and beautiful foreign cars, opulent under an August sun whose light this morning bathes everything in a secretive pre-fall glow. I’m thinking about the way things look because I’m meeting with Tony Abeyta, whose angular landscapes are also lush; craggy hills softened by thick stripes of rain and dervishing blue-gray wind. Abeyta works in a range of media, but it’s these landscapes—rich with magpies, gods and forest fires—that launched him into art stardom.
Today, Abeyta says, he’s going for a “kinda gentrified” look with the fit: soft and spotless white tee, khaki shorts, white Adidas ankle socks and scuffed black Louis Vuitton loafers. He blushes when I tell him he’s a Santa Fe fashion icon, but he knows I mean it. Abeyta the sartorialist is one of his many moods. There’s also the son, the brother, the father, the fisherman; the flea-market-fiend and the Scorpio. Increasingly, Abeyta is known as art historian and expert appraiser, roles informed by a lifelong passion for collecting and trading beautiful things
NEW YORK TIMES | JULY 25 2024
Native Modern Art: From a Cardboard Box to the Met
By Holland Cotter
The Dakota Sioux artist who called herself Mary Sully is having an enchanting first survey at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but she came close to being swept off the stage of history. When she died in Omaha, Neb., in 1963, at age 67, her primary output of around 200 color-pencil-and-ink drawings lay hidden in a cardboard box kept by her older sister, with whom she had lived most of her adult life.
When that sister herself died a few years later, the box ended up among piles of ephemera waiting to be sorted through. Time passed. More than once the box came close to being tossed until one of Sully’s nieces, who happened to be a librarian, opened it and transferred the contents to a suitcase, which was then tucked away under a staircase.
More time passed. In 2006, the drawings resurfaced and came to the attention of Sully’s great-nephew, Philip J Deloria, who happened to be a history professor at Harvard, and who documented them in a terrific 2019 book called “Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract.” Last year the Met acquired much of the work. And now we have this rich, strange show, “Mary Sully: Native Modern.”
Mary Sully, Indian Church
HYPERALLERGIC | JULY 22 2024
Fritz Scholder’s Art of Non-Belonging
By John Yau
Being biracial in the United States means that you are the perpetual outsider. Fritz Scholder, who blasted apart the stereotypes of Native American people and life circulating in the mass media and tourist art, experienced the dilemma of non-belonging. Born in Breckenridge, Minnesota, in 1937, his ancestry was largely German, but his paternal grandmother was from the Luiseño tribe of California Mission Indians. Because of her, Scholder was an enrolled member of the federally recognized La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians.
While Scholder described himself as a “non-Indian Indian,” and vowed to never paint a Native American person, he broke that vow at different points in his career. His refusal to conform to expectations and his rejection of limiting definitions of his identity as Native American are high watermarks in postwar American painting. He both acknowledged his biracial identity and reminded us of the country’s legacy of eradicating Indigenous people and culture.
Fritz Scholder, Indian with Umbrella, 1972
HYPERALLERGIC | JULY 17 2024
Why Native Artists Are Reclaiming the Whirling Log
By Sháńdíín Brown and Zach Feuer
The Whirling Log symbol appears under different names and variations for communities across the world — manji in Buddhism, swastika in Hinduism. Specifically for the Diné or Navajo people, whose ancestral homelands are in what is now called Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico, the symbol is known by a variety of names in Diné bizaad (the Navajo language). It references the Diné Bahaneʼ or Navajo creation story and is generally understood as a harbinger of good luck, healing, and balance. But for some viewers dealing with historical trauma, it calls only one meaning to mind: Nazi propaganda.
Melissa Cody, Navajo Whirling Log, 2019
COWBOYS AND INDIANS | JULY 17 2024
Earl Biss: The Spirit Who Walks Among His People
By Chadd Scott
My favorite artist is Earl Biss. No. 2: Vincent van Gogh. When I say Earl Biss is my favorite artist, I’m not grading on a scale. I don’t mean my favorite painter or Native American artist; I mean my favorite artist.
I’ve felt a spiritual connection to Biss’ paintings, and him, from the moment I first saw his work. It’s unlike anything before or since. That first time was at The James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I remember the moment as distinctly as I recall seeing my wife for the first time.
Lisa Gerstner’s documentary Earl Biss: The Spirit Who Walks Among His People, released in late April 2023, shares Biss’ genius and spirit and Gerstner’s personal background with Biss.
Earl Biss, Riders of the Foothills With a Witching Moon
ART NEWS | JULY 12 2024
Alex Janvier, Pioneer of Contemporary Indigenous Art in Canada, Has Died at 89
By Tessa Solomon
Alex Janvier, an Alberta-based painter and pivotal champion of contemporary Indigenous art in Canada, died on July 10. He was 89. The news was confirmed by his family on July 10 in an Instagram post. A moment of silence was held in his honor at the Assembly of First Nations annual general meeting that same day.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, writing on X, said: “His art reflected so much of Canada’s history, including some of the hardest parts of our story.”
In some of Janvier’s vibrant abstractions, lush forms contract and converge, suggesting the unfathomable natural world; in others, brisk lines and fierce swaths of red indict the historical mistreatment of First Nations.
“Painting says it all for me,” Janvier said in a statement in 2012. “It is the Redman talk in color, in North America’s language. Our Creator’s voice in color.”
EUGENE WEEKLY | JUNE 27 2024
Drawing Themselves Straight: The Son of Oregon’s Late Indigenous Artist Rick Bartow Begins to Walk in his Father’s Footsteps with a Gallery Show in Newport
By Bob Keefer
One night in late 2016, Booker Bartow — best known in those days, if at all, as a skateboard videographer and hip-hop DJ performing as “Nomadic” — was skateboarding down a hill near his home in the Nye Beach neighborhood of Newport when he hit a patch of black ice.
When he came to on the cold pavement, the 30-year-old had a fractured skull, a broken clavicle, a dislocated shoulder and several smashed ribs. He was bleeding from cuts and scrapes all over his body, but especially his head. No one came to his aid. He crawled back to his house and passed out again when he got inside, bleeding all over the couch. Before losing consciousness he took a selfie and posted it on Instagram, leading his uncle, who happened to see it, to come over and take him to the hospital.
That, Bartow says, was a pivotal moment in his life, which had lately been mired in a haze of alcohol, drug use and anger over the death that year of his father, the renowned Oregon artist Rick Bartow, and the death of his mother years before.
KOREAN JOONGANG DAILY | JUNE 24 2024
America revisited: Indigenous culture showcased in first Korean exhibition
In a scene from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning film “Parasite” (2019), lead actor Song Kang-ho wears a feathered headdress as he peers out from the bushes on a lawn decorated with tipis. This scene is an accurate representation of how Koreans visualize the Indigenous peoples of North America, who are still often referred to as "Indians."
It’s not that there isn’t a Korean translation for Indigenous Americans. Instead, there have rarely been opportunities in the country to straighten out the monumental mistake that Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) made centuries ago when he called Indigenous Americans "Indians," believing that he arrived in India. The National Museum of Korea aims to address this historical inaccuracy.
For the first time ever, there is an exhibition in Korea on the cultures and histories of Indigenous Americans at the National Museum of Korea in Yongsan District, central Seoul. Under the Korean title “Stories of the People Whom We Once Called Indians,” the exhibition addresses the historical inaccuracy of the terminology most commonly used in Korea.
The exhibition was co-organized by the Denver Art Museum and displays 151 selected items from its collection.
Fritz Scholder, Indian Power, 1972
BOMB MAGAZINE | JUNE 14 2024
Jeffrey Gibson by Anthony Hudson
I first performed with Jeffrey’s work as Carla Rossi, Portland’s premier drag clown, for Like a Hammer, his exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in 2019. This was also the first time I saw work in person on museum walls by another queer Indigenous artist. As queerness and Indigeneity have gradually become recognized and supported by art institutions, Jeffrey’s work—inspired as much by pop music and club culture as by ancestral practice—has voiced a loud, earnest, and exuberant declaration of personhood through oil painting and airbrushing, sculpture, beadwork, and wearable fashion and regalia. Taking the stage in one of the international art world’s most prestigious venues, his work is a call to action, revolution, and love and celebrates a worldwide Indigenous community of living cultures and hearts.
In the weeks before Jeffrey’s Venice debut, we sat down to discuss self-determination and identity, audience and performance, acknowledging Indigenous makers, Nicole Kidman, the Biennale, and the artwork on the other side of this massive achievement.
Jeffrey Gibson, the space in which to place me, 2024
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART | JUNE 11 2024
Cannupa Hanska Luger | Uņziwoslal Wašičuta | Whitney Biennial 2024 | Artist Interview
Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota) proposes: “This installation is not inverted . . . our current world is upside down.” For the artist, upending our grounding in time and space makes way for imagined futures free of colonialism and capitalism, where broader Indigenous knowledge can thrive. The work here, Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta (a Lakota phrase meaning “the fat-taker’s world is upside down”), celebrates Native technologies by using the shape of a tipi—a word that the artist has also turned into an acronym, standing for Transportable Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure (TIPI). Luger looks at the complex structure as an example of the innovations created by his ancestors of the Northern Plains tribes. Luger’s materials, such as deadstock fabric, found objects, and clay, reflect the artist’s commitment to sustainability and reuse. The featured work, Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta (from the series Future Ancestral Technologies), 2021– is featured in the current edition of the Whitney Biennial.
ART IN AMERICA | JUNE 7 2024
Navajo Artist Melissa Cody Reclaims a Sacred Symbol That the Nazis Weaponized
By Alex Greenberger
In Melissa Cody’s 2014 weaving Good Luck, a figure known as Rainbow Man is represented as an electrical cord, his lower half culminating in a two-pronged plug. His tubular body encircles the phrase GOOD LUCK, and beneath those words, there’s a somewhat unexpected motif, formed from four right angles that meet at a central point.
Navajo viewers will understand the symbol as a whirling log, which connotes Good Luck’s titular well wishes. But to many other viewers, the symbol will likely read as a swastika. There are differences between the two symbols: a whirling log’s four angles form a square, whereas a swastika is rotated 45 degrees, creating a diamond. But those differences are subtle and easy to miss. That’s why it’s worth spending time with Cody’s whirling logs, which figure in two current New York solo shows, at MoMA PS1 and Garth Greenan Gallery.
Melissa Cody: Rainbow Road, 2023
THE TELEGRAPH | JUNE 4 2024
Native American artists edge ever closer to the million-dollar mark
By Colin Gleadell
At the major international Contemporary Art sales in New York last month, I thought I noticed a new trend. There were more Indigenous American artworks for sale than ever, and they were making record prices – a bright light in an otherwise fairly sombre marketplace.
Contemporary American Indigenous art used to be included in Native American sales along with the jewellery, blankets, totem poles and ethnographic tribal artefacts that remind us of bygone cultures. But with the call for change and diversity, the auction landscape shifted.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, I See Red: Talking to the Ancestors, 1994
BLACKBOOK | JUNE 4 2024
Cannupa Hanska Luger Honors His Indigenous Heritage with a New Public Sculpture
By Chloe Shaar
Tonight, the Public Art Fund will debut Cannupa Hanska Luger’s newest sculpture, Attrition. Made up of steel and ash black patina features, the 10-foot skeletal bison explores the relationship between animals, humans, and land in the context of Ingenious experiences within the United States. The opening reception will take place tonight, while the official viewing will be open to the public on Wednesday, which also falls on World Environment Day.
The sculpture will live on the pathway to City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan, the center of policy making within the city. The symbolism behind the sculpture confronts the past histories of the European settlers’ aggressive practices that took place in the 19th century, which inevitably led to the lack of survival within the bison population.
The artist behind the sculpture, Cannupa Hanska Luger, is a descendant of the buffalo people. Luger is an active member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. His ancestry and personal identity actively inspire the work he creates. Taking this into account while creating Attrition, the sculpture symbolizes Indigenous resilience and sovereignty.
APOLLO MAGAZINE | JUNE 3 2024
How Indigenous artists are holding their own in the art market
By Jane Morris
Does the Venice Biennale affect the art market? The consensus on this non-commercial festival, which opened last month, is usually yes. In the va-va-voom 2000s it was common to see collectors snapping up works by Venice stars as soon as they could at Art Basel (for years the Venice preview ended two days before the opening of the fair). ‘See in Venice, buy in Basel’ became an often-repeated phrase.
If the conventional wisdom holds true, this year should be a good one for Indigenous artists – those who trace their ancestries to the first inhabitants of countries such as Canada, Australia, Brazil and Norway. The winner of the Golden Lion for the best national pavilion, Archie Moore, is of Kamilaroi/Bigambul heritage. His stark, black and white installation in the Australian pavilion is a memorial to the 60,000-year history of his Aboriginal ancestors. Indigenous artists Jeffrey Gibson, Inuuteq Storch and Glicéria Tupinambá also represented the United States, Denmark and Brazil respectively.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, My Heart Belongs to Daddy, 1998
HYPERALLERGIC | MAY 30 2024
Shelley Niro on Her Life in Art
By Hyperallergic Staff
Shelley Niro (Kanien’kehaka) grew up watching her father craft faux tomahawks to sell to tourists who flocked to her birthplace, Niagara Falls. In this episode of the Hyperallergic podcast, she reflects on how witnessing him create these objects planted the seeds for her brilliant multidisciplinary art practice spanning film, sculpture, beading, and photography.
She joined us in our Brooklyn studio for an interview, where she reflected on growing up in the Six Nations of the Grand River, the Native artists she discovered on her dentist’s wall but rarely encountered in a museum before the mid-’90s, and her latest obsession with 500 million-year-old fossils.
Shelley Niro, Ancestors, 2012
HYPERALLERGIC | MAY 26 2024
Indigenous Artists Make Themselves Seen at the Thomas Cole Site
Comic by Steven Weinberg
Scott Manning Stevens, PhD Karoniaktatsie (Akwesasne Mohawk) curated the current show "Native Prospects" at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. (Up through October 27th.) He has a word for depictions of Indigenous people in paintings like this.
The show he's organized at The Thomas Cole Site aims to shift the role of Indigenous people in American art from background decoration to the creators themselves. It's a brilliantly simple idea made all the more clear when you walk into the exhibition and see sculptor Truman T. Lowe's (Ho-Chunk) own waterfall made from strips of pine that referencing the splints used in traditional Ho-chunk baskets. It hangs right next to Cole’s waterfall.
FORBES | MAY 25 2024
A Native ‘Takeover’ At Baltimore Museum of Art
By Chadd Scott
“A Native takeover.” That’s how Dare Turner (Yurok Tribe), Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum and former Baltimore Museum of Art Assistant Curator of Indigenous Art of the Americas, describes the Baltimore museum’s “Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum” initiative launched April 21, 2024.
“Preoccupied” includes nine solo and thematic exhibitions, a film series, a publication guided by Native methodologies, museum-wide education for staff related to Native American history and colonization, and a broad array of public programs through February 2025.
“It also includes audio tour stops where indigenous community members have gone into the galleries and selected any artwork they're interested in, which most of the time is not an artwork made by a Native person, and they speak about it from their perspective,” Turner told Forbes.com. “We also rewrote (wall) labels that had privileged white artists when they were depicting Native subjects. We flipped the script on that so the Native subjects were privileged.”
Julie Buffalohead, The Noble Savage, 2022
WHITEHOT MAGAZINE | MAY 21 2024
Beau Dick’s Dzunuk’wa Is Here for Your Soul
By John Drury
Here on the East Coast and in New York City, we are about as far as one gets from artist Beau Dick’s beloved home of choice, Alert Bay. He who was Walas Gwa’yam by name - the “big, great whale” - and a Hereditary Chief of his people, even now posthumously, continues to expand his philosophical reach by way inarguable artistic talent and the shared tales of his indigenous people. Beau’s warnings of the inherent and matched evils of colonialism and capitalism come to us from the woods, deep in the ancient and old-growth, wooded forests of the Pacific Northwest and are timeless, as revealed in the reflection today’s ongoing and evil land grabs and rampant greed, fueled of war and division.
Beau Dick, Wind, 2005
FINANCIAL TIMES | MAY 10 2024
Wendy Red Star: ‘Native artists are hot right now’
By Joshua Hunt
When I visited Wendy Red Star at her studio in south-east Portland, she described her work as that of a “visionary” rather than an artist. “I don’t think I’m an artist, at least not in the western sense,” she said. “I’ve never tailored my stuff to fit in the art world.”
The products of her vision were scattered all around us, illuminated by the late-morning sun: sculpture, mixed-media installations and many, many photographs of Native Americans. Some of these were archival images of long-dead ancestors that she had annotated and embellished with red pen, others surrealist self-portraits that seem to cast the artist as the star of Technicolor melodramas satirising white views of Native American life in the 19th and 20th centuries. In “Fall”, for example, from her 2006 self-portrait series Four Seasons, Red Star sits alongside an inflatable deer in front of a painted backdrop, dressed in the ornate regalia of the Crow people, a Native tribe indigenous to America’s northern plains. All around her are plastic flowers and leaves that evoke the artificiality of indigenous life as dramatised by natural history museum dioramas.
Wendy Red Star, Her Dreams Are True (Julia Bad Boy), 2021
EDGE EFFECTS | MAY 2 2024
How Indigenous Artist George Morrison Resists Ecological and Cultural Extraction
By Matt Hooley
In 1965, George Morrison started making landscapes out of driftwood. He gathered wood from Atlantic beaches near Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he rented a studio on breaks from teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design. He looked for scraps of wood grayed and weathered by the sea to the brink of abstraction, but that also bore some trace of human use or attachment. Morrison began each landscape, which he also called “wood collages” and “paintings in wood,” by fitting together a few pieces in the bottom left corner of the frame that, along the broken lines of driftwood edges, gathered out into massive sweeps and rivulets of fragments to fill frames up to fourteen feet wide and five feet tall. Setting off the top quadrant of each collage, a single, twisted but unbroken line—a horizon line—is the only gesture spared from the turbulence of fracture and motion that characterizes the landscapes.
George Morrison, Red Cube, 1983
‘It is a conversation you’re having with your loom’: Melissa Cody on her lifelong relationship with weaving
THE ART NEWSPAPER | MAY 2 2024
By Wallace Ludel
Webbed Skies at MoMA PS1 is the first major museum exhibition for Melissa Cody. Cody is a fourth-generation Navajo/Diné weaver, and much of her practice is rooted in the Germantown Revival style: a type of Navajo weaving developed when weavers began to take apart the commercially dyed blankets provided to them by the US government, repurposing the fibres to create tapestries rooted in their own traditions. This style is also indicative of Cody’s work in its harmonious blend of generational practices. While her work is no doubt an offspring of ancestral tradition, it is also a bridge towards a new generation of weavers and artists, as well as towards a large, international audience.
NEW YORK TIMES | APRIL 26 2024
Baskets Holding the Identity of an Indigenous People
By Hilarie Sheets
Long before painters such as Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth arrived in Maine to capture its spectacular natural beauty on canvas, the native Wabanaki people used materials from the landscape to weave black ash and sweet grass baskets, the oldest continuously practiced art form in the state.
“It’s said that our cultural hero, Glooskap, fired an arrow into the black ash tree and our people came dancing out — it’s tied to us,” said Jeremy Frey, a 45-year-old, seventh-generation basket maker from the Passamaquoddy tribe, one of several in the Wabanaki Confederacy.
Frey’s vibrant and innovative baskets — remarkably contemporary forms woven with ancestral knowledge — have caught the attention of the art world and put him at the forefront of a wave of interest from museums, galleries and collectors in the work of Native artists. (This month, Jeffrey Gibson is the first Indigenous artist to have a solo exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.)
Jeremy Frey, Nostalgia, 2022
THE ART NEWSPAPER | APRIL 19 2024
The legacy and mystery of the display of Native American art at the 1932 Venice Biennale
By Claire Voon
In December 1931, the Italian commissioner of the 18th Venice Biennale penned a plea to organisers of the United States pavilion, who had yet to fully deliver their vision for the impending international art exhibition. “We should like some of your very great artists like Whistler,” he wrote, “and as for the living ones we should allow a room for [Paul] Manship as Sculptor, and [Maurice Sterne], or some others, as painters.”
The following January—four months before the exhibition’s opening—a reply arrived from New York. It confirmed that the US pavilion would feature, out of four rooms, one devoted to art by Native Americans, among them the Pueblo painters Fred Kabotie and Awa Tsireh. It would include neither Whistlers, nor Homers, nor Sargents—conspicuously setting aside the era’s assumed “great artists” to shine an international spotlight on lesser-known Indigenous names.
The resulting display was historic: it marked the first time that Native American artists represented the United States at the prestigious art exhibition, a distinction that has repeated only this month, with the Chocktow Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson’s takeover of the US pavilion at the 60th edition of the Biennale (until 24 November). Yet it has largely been forgotten, according to Jessica L. Horton, a professor of modern and contemporary Native American art at the University of Delaware.
NEW YORK TIMES | APRIL 18 2024
A Millennial Weaver Carries a Centuries-Old Craft Forward
By Patricia Leigh Brown
Spiders are weavers. The Navajo artist and weaver Melissa Cody knows this palpably. As she sits cross-legged on sheepskins at her loom, on one of the wooden platforms that boost her higher as her stack of monumental tapestries grows, the sacred knowledge of Spider Woman and Spider Man, who brought the gift of looms and weaving to the Diné, or Navajo, is right there in her studio with her.
It also infuses “Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies,” the first major solo exhibition of the artist’s work, which is on view at MoMA PS1 through Sept. 9. in a co-production with the São Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil (known as MASP).
Detail of “Power Up” (2023)
At the Venice Biennale’s Contemporary Showcase, Living Artists Examine Queer and Indigenous Legacies
ARTNEWS | APRIL 17 2024
By Maximilíano Durón
As the international art world has descended on La Serenissima this week, the 2024 Venice Biennale began the first of its preview days on Tuesday morning, with visitors heading to either (or both) of its main venues: the Arsenale and the Giardini. Curated this year by Adriano Pedrosa, the closely watched artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, the exhibition, titled “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere,” focuses on Indigenous artists and artist from the Global South, highlighting the vastness of art that is out in the world today and, with the historical section, throughout the 20th century.
Emmi Whitehorse, Typography of Standing Ruins #3, 2024
ART BASEL | APRIL 15 2024
For these Native American creatives, fashion and art are inextricably linked
By Stephanie Sporn
Tradition versus innovation. Authenticity versus stereotype. Pride versus pain. To be a Native artist in today’s contemporary landscape is to constantly juggle centuries-old tensions, frequently echoed within the history of one’s chosen artistic medium. ‘The visual aesthetics of Indigenous communities are innately tied to alternative media that have often fallen into the category of “craft,”’ says John P. Lukavic, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts at the Denver Art Museum, one of the first American institutions to collect Indigenous arts.
For centuries, ‘Indigenous people have expressed many aspects of themselves through regalia, beadwork, embroidery patterns, animal skins, and feathers that also express family ties or clans, life accomplishments and spiritual beliefs,’ says Kent Monkman, a Canadian First Nations artist of Cree ancestry. The interdisciplinarian is known for his charged paintings critiquing colonization, as well as his performances as his gender-fluid alter-ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. ‘Art was not separate from other aspects of life, so creativity was and still is expressed through clothing and the creation of ceremonial and everyday objects.’
Kent Monkman, The Great Mystery, 2023
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE | APRIL 14 2024
Her large-scale photos speak thousands of words about Indigenous communities, identities
By Lisa Deaderick
Contemporary fine art photographer Cara Romero is thoughtful and deliberate in her work and particularly in her selection of photographs for her solo exhibition this month at the Museum of Photographic Arts at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park.
“The Artist Speaks: Cara Romero” is divided into three sections: Native California, Imagining Indigenous Futures, and Native Woman, and there’s a clear purpose to offer representations of her culture, history, and lived experience from her perspective as a Native American woman.
Cara Romero, 3 Sisters, 2022.
NEW YORK TIMES | APRIL 13 2024
Representing the U.S. and Critiquing It in a Psychedelic Rainbow
By Jillian Steinhauer
People in Venice might hear the jingle dress dancers before they see them. On April 18, some 26 intertribal Native American dancers and singers from Oklahoma and Colorado will make their way through the winding streets and canals of the Italian city. Wearing brightly colored shawls, beaded yokes and dresses decorated with the metal cones that give the dance its distinctive cshh cshh rattling sound, they’ll make their way to the Giardini, one of the primary sites of the Venice Biennale. There, they’ll climb atop and surround a large red sculpture composed of pedestals of different heights and perform.
The jingle dress dance, which originated with the Ojibwe people of North America in the early 20th century, typically takes place at powwows. In Venice, it will inaugurate the exhibition in the United States Pavilion on April 20. Titled “the space in which to place me,” the show is a mini-survey of the rapturous art of the queer Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson.
MVSKOKE MEDIA | APRIL 12 2024
Ofuskie projects his passion for painting and Indigenous people through acrylics
By Braden Harper
Artist George Alexander (Mvskoke) has come a long way from growing up on the Mvskoke Reservation in Mason. Alexander goes by the name Ofuskie, an homage to Okfuskee, the county he grew up in. Although Alexander has been making art his entire life, his hard work and dedication has culminated into owning his own art studio where he produces original paintings. Alexander was named as one of this year’s National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development’s 40 under 40 honorees for contributions to his community.
George Alexander, What’s That Over There?
HYPERALLERGIC | APRIL 10 2024
Rose B. Simpson’s Soaring Metal Sentinels Watch Over Madison Square Park
By Elaine Velie
Santa Clara Pueblo artist Rose B. Simpson’s first New York City solo public artwork has arrived in Manhattan. Seven 18-foot-tall figures surround a bronze female form in Seed, on view in Madison Square Park through September 22. The installation’s weathered steel sentinels are the artist’s tallest sculptures yet.
“They transform the nature of a hectic and scary city, in a sense, to a place that’s really safe,” Simpson said at the work’s unveiling today, April 10. She explained that they mimic the energy of the park, a place people go to reconnect with their humanity. “They become these protectors of what they’re looking out for, so that [the inner sculpture] can close her eyes. So she doesn’t have to be worried or on.”
ART BASEL | APRIL 9 2024
The transformative rise of Indigenous and First Nations artists
By Stephanie Bailey
At the Venice and Sydney Biennales, they highlight the importance of stories and perspectives rooted in land and sea.
The wave of Indigenous and First Nations artists exhibiting in national pavilions for the first time is undoubtedly the Venice Biennale’s most significant development in recent years. In 2019, the Isuma collective became the first Inuit artists to occupy the Canadian Pavilion, with Zacharias Kunuk’s film, One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk (2019), recounting the forced relocation of Inuit people in Canada. Then the Nordic Pavilion transformed into ‘The Sámi Pavilion’ in 2022, with artists Pauliina Feodoroff, Máret Ánne Sara, and Anders Sunna illuminating an Indigenous community stretching from Norway to Russia, as Yuki Kihara became the first Pacific, Asian, and fa’afafine artist to represent Aotearoa New Zealand.
Eric-Paul Riege and his installation at the Sydney Biennale
ART IN AMERICA | APRIL 9 2024
Kay WalkingStick’s Layered Landscapes Get Under the Genre’s Surfaces
By Alex Greenberger
A member of the Cherokee Nation who is also of European descent, WalkingStick has been exploring relationships between people and the earth for five decades. Diptychs are her signature format: often, she pairs landscapes with abstractions. Since the 1960s, her output has been marked by impressive range. During the ’70s, at the height of the feminist art movement, she painted brightly hued images of her nude form. In the decades following, she took up various triumphs of Native American culture alongside tragedies of Native history. Among her few sculptures is Tears (1990), representing a traditional Plains Indian funerary scaffold, but this version is embossed with a poem identifying the structure as a memorial to those lost, and to those never born. It’s a piece about Native grief that WalkingStick made in anticipation of the quincentennial of Columbus’s 1492 voyage.
Below, WalkingStick discusses her approach to painting—and probing— landscapes, all the while looking past the land’s surface to unearth its wounds.
Kay WalkingStick: Farewell to the Smokies (Trail of Tears), 2007.
PHILLIPS | APRIL 4 2024
Phillips’ Dropshop Announces Kent Monkman as Featured Artist for April
Phillips is pleased to announce Kent Monkman as the featured artist for the upcoming April Dropshop. Following the highly acclaimed Cree artist’s recent showcase in the PhillipsX Exhibition New Terrains: Contemporary Native American Art, Monkman will be offering six unique works from his latest series, Portraits of a Legend, along with How the West Was Won, a watercolor hand-painted etching available in a limited edition of 30. These exclusive pieces, priced at $15,000 each for the paintings and $1,500 for each etching, will be available for purchase via dropshop.phillips.com at 10am ET on 9 April. Recognized as one of the foremost Indigenous artists in North America, Monkman's oeuvre confronts themes of colonization and resilience against the backdrop of classical European and American art.
Kent Monkman, Study for The Fun Is in The Chase, 2024
ART IN AMERICA | APRIL 4 2024
Raven Chacon Summons Earthy and Ethereal Sounds from Landscapes and Guns
By Andy Battaglia
Drawing on music, video, and installations that evoke the presence of environmental sights and sounds, Raven Chacon is a composer and artist whose work focuses in part on land and its many different inhabitants. Born in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, and currently based in Upstate New York and New Mexico, Chacon (Diné) has created compositions and artworks inspired by a distinctive sense of place, however specific or impressionistic that sense may be.
He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022 and was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2023. His current exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York, touted as his first major institutional solo show, features 11 works dating back to 1999 and is accompanied by companion show sharing the same title—“A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak”—at Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum in Tromsø, Norway. (The New York exhibition is on view through April 14; the Norwegian show continues through September 1.)
Raven Chacon, American Ledger No. 1 (Army Blanket), 2020.
THE BROOKLYN RAIL | APRIL 2024
Art In Conversation: Kay WalkingStick with Patricia Marroquin Norby
Kay WalkingStick is currently enjoying a moment of tremendous recognition, with multiple solo exhibitions and international group shows on the near horizon. If her stars have aligned, it’s not because WalkingStick has done anything different. As the artist says in the interview that follows, she hasn’t changed. On the occasion of her exhibition at Hales Gallery in New York, WalkingStick met with curator Patrica Marroquin Norby to discuss her love for materials, especially paint, her admiration for the bridges of New York City, and her deep appreciation for geometry and drawing.
Kay WalkingStick, Tepee Form, 1974
FRIEZE MAGAZINE | MAR 27 2024
Roundtable: Indigenous Artists at the Venice Biennale
Dare Turner talks with Jeffrey Gibson, Archie Moore and Inuuteq Storch about working within the settler colonial framework of American, Australian and Danish pavilions.
Dare Turner: “I wanted to start by reflecting on the theme of this year’s biennial, ‘Foreigners Everywhere’. In his official statement, curator Adriano Pedrosa described the title as having ‘a dual meaning. First of all, that wherever you go and wherever you are, you will always encounter foreigners […] Secondly, that no matter where you find yourself, you are always truly, and deep down inside, a foreigner’. Is this something that resonates with you?”
Jeffrey Gibson, Archie Moore, Inuuteq Storch, Dare Turner
Jeffrey Gibson, AMERICAN HISTORY, 2015
HYPERALLERGIC | MAR 24 2024
Can We Find Our Way to Indigenous Joy?
By Brian Johnson
As part of Hyperallergic’s Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators, Brian Johnson explores the de-colonial practices of Indigenous and Native American poster designers.
In a world that is currently grappling with what it means to be racially and culturally aware without appropriating from other cultures, we are still lacking Indigenous and Native American self-representation in the sphere of design.
New Red Order, The World’s Unfair series, 2023
HYPERALLERGIC | MAR 24 2024
Rose B. Simpson’s Antidote to “Postcolonial Stress Disorder”
“I didn’t want to be an artist,” Rose B. Simpson told me over the phone from her studio at Santa Clara Pueblo, an Indigenous community just outside of Española, New Mexico. “I wanted to fly airplanes and helicopters. I only did art as a kind of default.” The artist, who works across large-scale ceramic sculpture, custom cars, fashion, and performance, as well as music, has been featured in some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions, including the Denver Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and SITE Santa Fe. She had a recent solo show at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery, and is one of several Indigenous artists exhibiting in this year’s Whitney Biennial alongside Demian DinéYazhi’, Cannupa Hanska Luger, and Kite. For an artist who was reluctant to start, Simpson’s career is on a powerful path.
By Erin Joyce
Installation view Rose B. Simpson, “Daughters: Reverence” (2024)
Rose, Rina, Roxanne And Rose B. Simpson: Four Generations Of Santa Clara Ceramics At Norton Museum Of Art
FORBES | MAR 21 2024
Rose B. Simpson was hoping for a break. A rest from her busy schedule of exhibitions, commissions, gallery shows and installations nationwide.
As one of the most in demand contemporary artists working today, Simpson says “no” more often than “yes”–her gallerists, Jessica Silverman and Jack Shainman on her behalf, anyway–but some opportunities remain too good to pass up. Like presenting her work alongside her mother’s, grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, FL on view March 23 through September 1, 2024.
By Chadd Scott
DEPAUW MAGAZINE | MAR 15 2024
Ashley Holland’s Art Bridges: Redefining American Art
Holland is a DePauw alum who majored in art history and went on to do her graduate degree in museum studies, then her PhD in Oklahoma. She described how she was unable to express her indigenous identity – from her mother’s side of the family – because she didn’t live in an environment that emphasized the significance of Native women. Only when she encountered a Cherokee artist, Kay Walkingstick, during her graduate degree program, she realized what she wanted to do: become a curator of Native art.
By Osama Mirza
HYPERALLERGIC | MAR 11 2024
A True and Exact History of Queer Indigenous Sovereignty
Spanning two volumes, both richly illustrated with Monkman’s paintings, The Memoirs is an exercise of queer Indigenous sovereignty. It neither shies away from the devastating reality of colonialism nor placates settler readers with a vision of reconciliation. Through wit, fabulation, and a clear sense of ethics, the work is anchored in ninêhiyawak (Cree peoplehood) and wâhkôhtowin (the relational bonds of kinship).
By Joseph Pierce
Arts News: Former Nerman Museum executive director Bruce Hartman co-curates important New York City exhibition of Native American art
KC STUDIO | MAR 6 2024
In January, Bruce Hartman, former executive director of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and a noted expert on Native American art, co-curated an exhibition by more than 60 contemporary Native American artists at Phillips auction house Park Avenue headquarters in New York City. Dine artist Tony Abeyta and gallerist James Trotta-Bono joined Hartman as co-curators of the selling exhibition.
“James, Tony and I drew upon many decades of seeking, studying and collecting Native American art to organize such an expansive exhibition, featuring numerous tribal affiliations, modes of expression and artistic mediums,” Hartman said.
By Libby Hanssen
BLOOMBERG | FEB 21 2024
Prices of Contemporary Indigenous American Art Have Risen More Than 1,000%
It’s a decent rule that if you have to explain someone is famous, they probably aren’t. This is usually the case in the art world, where fame is niche, subjective and often fleeting. But even in this realm, insiders were surprised when the Native American contemporary artist Jeffrey Gibson was chosen to represent the US in the 2024 Venice Biennale, an art-world Olympics where about 70 countries present exhibitions around the canal city.
By James Tarmy
Kay Walkingstick, Durand’s Homage to the Mohawks, 2021
Phillips's selling show of contemporary Indigenous art reflects surge in curatorial interest
THE ART NEWSPAPER | FEB 9 2024
“It’s extraordinary what’s happening, this tide,” says James Trotta-Bono, a California-based dealer who co-curated New Terrains. “Institutions were very aware that the American art canon was fragmented at best in terms of its narrative, and they’ve been making a very concerted effort to increase the exposure and awareness of Native American artists, both historic and contemporary.”
Trotta-Bono co-curated the exhibition with Bruce Hartman, the executive director and chief curator of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas, and Tony Abeyta, a Diné (Navajo) artist from New Mexico whose work was included in the show, along with that of his father, Narciso Abeyta. Joining the Abeytas was an increasingly in-demand lineup featuring Gibson, Quick-to-See Smith, Oscar Howe, Kent Monkman, Marie Watt and Teresa Baker.
By Carlie Porterfield
Kent Monkman, Death of Adonis, 2009
HYPERALLERGIC | JAN 28 2024
Caroline Monnet’s Indigenous Worldbuilding
By Erin Joyce
The past few years have been busy for multidisciplinary Anishinaabe, French and Canadian artist Caroline Monnet, from completing a feature film in 2021 to 11 exhibitions in 2023 — of which four were solo shows — to having her artwork featured on the cover of An Indigenous Present (2023), edited by artist Jeffrey Gibson.
Clearly, the Montreal-based artist’s multifaceted practice is sparking interest. “I see the work of artists a bit like [that of] sociologists,” Monnet shared over Zoom from her Montreal studio. “I think our responsibility and our role is to respond to the world around us and offer new avenues for conversations.”
Installation view of WORKSITE featuring works by Caroline Monnet (photo by Greg Carideo, courtesy the artist)
ART & ANTIQUES | JAN 2024
Native Perspectives
Phillips Exhibition Sale Another Sign of Rising Market Interest in Contemporary Native And Indigenous Art
ARTNEWS | JAN 10 2024
Hot off the heels of several major Indigenous art exhibitions last year and the selection of Jeffrey Gibson as the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, Phillips auction house has opened a selling exhibition of contemporary Indigenous and Native art at its New York headquarters on Park Avenue. The show, which runs through January 23, is just the latest sign that the art market has taken increasing interest in works by such artists, while also acting as a reminder of how many Native and Indigenous artists have been undervalued, marginalized, and misunderstood for decades.
“They have been making good work, showing their work, sometimes with galleries, sometimes not, but in other situations, doing their work consistently, for a long time,” Mary Sabbatino, vice-president and partner of Galerie Lelong, told ARTnews.
By Karen Ho
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, My Heart Belongs to Daddy, 1998
ART NEWS | JAN 5 2024
In New Show, Tlingít Artist Nicholas Galanin Shows What Decolonization Actually Looks Like
In Galanin’s experience, posing that envisioned future forces those who believe it impossible into quantitative conversations about why. Suddenly you’ve proven what has actually been taken or removed from those Indigenous communities, and that’s where the real conversation begins.
In the case of Indigenous objects and human remains—both of which became central to the national conversation this year, following investigations into the Smithsonian Institute, the American Museum of Natural History, and other institutions—Galanin provides maps for what has been taken in his “Architecture of Return” series, begun in 2021. Those works display architectural blueprints of the aforementioned institutions painted onto deer hides, with escape routes and the objects in question also depicted. On a nearby plinth rests Purchase (2022), a set of copper lock picks handmade and engraved by Galanin with text from provenance cards of Indigenous objects at AMNH.
By Harrison Jacobs
BARRON’S / PENTA | JAN 4 2024
Contemporary Native American Art Is Hot. Phillips Will Show Why in a Huge Exhibition.
Phillips is bringing an expansive selling exhibition of contemporary Native American art to New York beginning on Friday that will showcase a diversity of expression from more than 60 artists practicing since the middle of the 20th century.
The show of more than 120 works of painting, sculpture, photography, video, jewelry, pottery, and weaving at Phillip’s Park Avenue gallery arrives at a time when the market for art by Native Americans and Canadian First Nations people “is so fast moving,” says Bruce Hartman, a curator of the exhibition, who retired as executive director of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kan., in 2021.
By Abby Schultz
Kent Monkman, Death of Adonis, 2009
SURFACE | JAN 4 2024
Surface Approved: A Landmark Indigenous Art Exhibition Opens at Phillips
On Jan. 5, Phillips will host its first major exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art: “New Terrains” includes works from more than 50 Indigenous and First Nations artists. The show’s curation charts the influences of the modernist, post-war, and Pop movements on the evolution of Native American visual art from the late-20th to the early-21st centuries. Major contributions in the lot come from the likes of Kay Walkingstick, Dana Claxton, Oscar Howe, and Kent Monkman (work pictured). The latter’s inclusion comes on the heels of a momentous fall season in which his work was included in Art Toronto, the publication of his two-volume book The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, and a reading at the Met.
