CHRONICLING Indigenous art events of this last year has proved challenging, with an explosion of art creation, curation, publications, and discoveries. As keepers of the most extensive calendar of Native art events, FAAM has happily documented this increased appreciation for and celebration of art by Indigenous artists of the Americas. All over South and North America, Indigenous artists are sharing important artwork and messages—and finding more places and ways to do so. Tribes, schools, and artist collectives assert much-needed Indigenous self-representation by creating their own venues. Several stellar events were in the running for our Top Ten Native Art Events in 2023, but below is what stood out after an anonymous vote by our advisory council, regional representatives, contributors, editors, and other Indigenous art advocates.
Teri Greeves (Kiowa), “NDN Art,” 2008, 13° cut beads, glass beads, brain-tanned deer hide, cotton, private collection. Image courtesy of the artist and MacKenzie Art Gallery.
1. Radical Stitch
Traveling survey exhibition from the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Showcasing one of the most recognizably Indigenous art forms—beadwork—Radical Stitch curators explore the aesthetic innovations made by beadwork artists and how this art form conveys meaning. Far more than simple embellishment, beadwork creates “a place of encounter, knowledge transfer, and acts of resistance.”
Curated by Sherry Farrell Racette (Métis/Algonquin), Michelle LaVallee (Nawash Ojibway) and Cathy Mattes (Métis), the survey features work by Native American and First Nations beadwork superstars such as Catherine Blackburn (Dene), Teri Greeves (Kiowa), Jamie Okuma (Luiseno/Shoshone-Bannock/Wailaki), Marcus Amerman (Choctaw Nation), Kenneth Williams Jr. (Northern Arapaho/Seneca), and many more. The curators launched the exhibition at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, and Radical Stitch is now on tour. It can be viewed at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery in Thunder Bay, Ontario until March 3, 2024, before traveling to other locations in Canada and then landing at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in 2025.
mackenzie.art/exhibition/radical-stitch
2. Indigenous Representation on Television
Reservation Dogs, pilot, episode 1. Left to right: Lane Factor (Seminole Nation/Caddo), Paulina Alexis (Alexis Nakota), D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Oji-Cree), and Devery Jacobs (Kanien’kehá:ka Mohawk). Photo: Shane Brown (Cherokee Nation)/FX. Image courtesy of FX Networks.
TV party tonight! A major cultural shift has occurred in the United States, finally, where Indigenous people are being featured prominently on mainstream television series. The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) has been producing fantastic Indigenous Canadian programming since 1999, and now in 2023 Muscogee/Seminole producer Sterlin Harjo and Māori producer Taika Waititi’s Reservation Dogs on FX broke ground as the first TV show in which every writer, director, and series regular was Native American.
Selected as TIME Magazine’s best TV show of 2023, Reservation Dogs captivated Native and non-Native audiences alike (with plenty of Native jokes) and revealed what we at FAAM have always known – that people are hungry for Native stories. Rutherford Falls (2021–22) helped pave the way with writer Sierra Teller Ornelas (Navajo) and Native talent like Jana Schmieding (Cheyenne River Lakota), Michael Greyeyes (Muskeg Lake Cree), and others in key roles. Reservation Dogs and Rutherford Falls also made an intentional effort to feature Native-made jewelry and clothing as much as possible in the shows, giving Indigenous artists exposure to new national and international audiences.
Marvel’s Hawkeye gave television audiences a taste of the first Native American superhero this year with the appearance of Echo, played by Menominee actress Alaqua Cox, and a series by the same name will launch in 2024. Other notable Native representation in television includes the Native actors in Dark Winds, Season 2 of PBS’s Native America documentary series, and the Canadian mystery series Three Pines, which, as The New York Times says, “turns cultural appropriation on its head, reimagining a white-majority Quebec region as a vessel of Indigenous suffering and subjugation but also empowerment.”
Animated series for kids like PBS’ Molly of Denali, with a ten-year-old Alaska Native as its main character, and Spirit Rangers on Netflix, which features a trio of Native American siblings who protect a national park, are starting young audiences off on the right foot when it comes to viewing more Native storytelling as well.
Reservation Dogs | Rutherford Falls
PBS: Native America | Dark Winds | Three Pines
Preston Singletary (Tlingit), “White Raven (Dleit Yéil),” 2018, blown, sculpted, and sand-carved glass, steel stand, 18½ × 7 × 9 in. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Russell Johnson.
3. Preston Singletary: Raven and the Box of Daylight
Traveling solo exhibition from the Museum of Glass
Native glass art is a recognized movement thanks to the pioneering art by Preston Singletary (Tlingit) and his many collaborations with fellow Native artists from diverse tribes, by glass studios particularly in Washington State and New Mexico, and by the survey and catalogue, Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2020) by Letitia Chambers and Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi).
Now Preston Singletary: Raven and the Box of Daylight (2018–24) shows glass art’s ability to bring ancestral transformation stories to life in this monumental, immersive exhibition. Curated by Miranda Belarde-Lewis (Tlingit/Zuni), Raven and the Box of Daylight centers on the Tlingit story of Raven, the trickster who first brought light to people via the stars, moon, and sun.
The exhibition started at the Museum of Glass (Tacoma, WA) and has traveled to the Wichita Art Museum (Wichita, KS), Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC), Chrysler Museum of Art (Norfolk, VA), and the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (Oklahoma City, OK), where it will be on view through April 28, 2024. This immersive, multisensory experience features striking sculptures by Singletary that are paired with textile art, original music, Pacific Northwest Coastal soundscapes, and projected images.
museumofglass.org/raven-box-of-daylight
4. Native Representation in Comics and Comic-Cons
Candice Byrd (Quapaw/Osage/Cherokee Nations) and Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation) at IndigiPopX at the First Americans Museum. Photo: FAAM.
For many of us, comics provided some of our first exposures to visual narrative arts. While the Western art world deemed comics “low art,” we in the Native art world can glide right past those outdated, classist hierarchies. Indigenous artists show us how Native comic art can bring Indigenous aesthetics, stories, and values to vast, far flung audiences, including Native children.
At comic-cons (comic conventions) fans meet creators, dress up like their comic book heroes, and in general, nerd out about their favorite comic and pop culture obsessions. Native comic-cons serve the same role but also celebrate the intersection of pop culture with Indigenous identity.
There has been an explosion of Native representation in comics and events that share the Native perspective and influence on comic books and pop culture from the annual IndigiPopX expo (first launched as the Indigenous Comic Con in Albuquerque in 2016) to the Cherokee Nation’s SkasdiCon in Tahlequah, to áyA Con, Denver’s Indigenous art and comic festival hosted by the Denver Art Museum. In 2023, San Diego Comic-Con featured “Indigenous Futurisms: Transcending Past/Present/Future,” a panel with artists Jason Garcia (Santa Clara Pueblo), Ryan Singer (Navajo), and Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti), moderated by Suzanne Newman Fricke. PBS’s Native America included comic writer, artist, and musician Arigon Starr (Kickapoo/Muscogee).
Marvel Comics featured Native talent during Native American Heritage Month including Steven Paul Judd (Kiowa/Choctaw) and Bobby Wilson (Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota) who wrote stories for Ghost Rider #20 and She-Hulk #2. Artists Shaun Beyale (Navajo) and Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation) also contributed cover and interior artwork for Marvel Comics. And, as mentioned previously on our list, Marvel Studios now has a Native superhero, Echo, who is based on a character from the comics at the Choctaw Day Celebration in Durant, Oklahoma.
indigipopx.com | skasdicon.com | denverartmuseum.org/en/calendar/aya-con-2023
5. Agua Caliente Cultural Museum
New tribal museum in Palm Springs, California
Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, designed by JCJ Architecture, Palm Springs, CA. Photo: Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians (CC BY 4.0).
Self-representation is a human right that is outlined in Article 18 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Tribes understand how vital it is to tell our own stories on our own terms, and tribal museums allow communities to represent themselves on their own terms—simultaneously to their own members and the outside world. They serve as physical spaces to build relationships and understanding.
In California, the numerous and diverse Indigenous tribes are outnumbered, even by Indigenous peoples from other regions who have moved to the state. Cahuilla people were created in Southern California by the two immortal brothers Mukat and Temayawut, and today they have nine tribes. One of these is the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians of the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation, who survived colonization and genocide by the Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans, and have rebuilt their government in Palm Springs, California, and now have unveiled their new museum to tell their story of resilience and perseverance to the world.
The Agua Caliente Cultural Plaza and Museum opened on November 3, 2023 in downtown Palm Springs, California, after years of planning and construction. The new museum is adjacent to Séc-he, a mineral hot springs site that holds important historic and spiritual significance. The 48,000-square-foot space, with a gallery, classroom, ethnobotanical teaching garden, event space, and more, allows the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians to tell their own story while sharing it with the larger community. The permanent gallery alone is nearly 10,000 square feet and divided into five exhibition areas that each offer a unique piece of Agua Caliente history, from creation and migration stories to the present day.
accmuseum.org | Facebook @ACCMPS
6. Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks in Ohio and Tak’alik Ab’aj in Retalhuleu, Guatemala named UNESCO World Heritage Sites
Precontact sites protected in Ohio and Retalhuleu, Guatemala
Tak’alik Ab’aj, featuring Stela 5 which has the date 126 CE inscribed, in El Asintal, Retalhuleu Department on the southwest coast of Guatemala. Photo: Antonio Lederer Godoy (CC BY-ND 2.0).
UNESCO added two major Indigenous sites of the Americas to its World Heritage List in 2023: the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, located in Ohio in the United States, and Tak’alik Ab’aj, located on the Pacific Coast near El Asintal, Retalhuleu Department in Guatemala.
Tak’alik Ab’aj witnessed the transition from Olmec to Early Mayan culture as a vital trading city connecting the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in today’s Mexico to present-day El Salvador, and it remains important to local Indigenous populations today. Tak’alik Ab’aj was designed with cosmological principles in mind, and incredible water management systems, ceramics, and lapidary art can be found here.
The Hopewell Ceremonial site consists of eight complexes of monumental earthen enclosures and land art constructed by Hopewellian cultures between 100 BCE and 400 CE. These earthworks include Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Chillicothe, including the Mound City Group, Hopewell Mound Group, Seip Earthworks, High Bank Earthworks, and Hopeton Earthworks, as well as Ohio History Connection’s Octagon Earthworks and Great Circle Earthworks in Newark and one feature, Pond with Gate 73, at the Fort Ancient Earthworks in Oregonia, Ohio.
Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks | National Archaeological Park Tak’alik Ab’aj
Hopewell Mound Group, ca. 80 BCE–480 CE, Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, Chillicothe, Ohio. Photo: Victoria Stauffenberg, National Park Service (CC0).
Gorman Museum of Native American Art at the University of California–Davis. Pavilion designed by director Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Navajo/Seminole/Muscogee). Photo: Veronica Passalacqua.
7. Gorman Museum of Native American Art
University museum reopens with new building, new name in Davis, California
Formerly known as the Carl Nelson Gorman Museum, the Gorman Museum of Native Art reopened this September on the University of California–Davis campus in Davis, California, with a new name and new building. The new space is four times its previous size. 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the museum, one of two in the United States solely dedicated to contemporary Indigenous art.
Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Navajo/Seminole/Muscogee), museum director, artist, and professor in the department of Native American studies, said in a press release, “The renovated space was manifested and realized into reality by a dedicated community of local, intertribal artists and allies who embrace the power of Native American art as a site to continue the creative and intellectual conversations that were interrupted by tropes and bias.” Tsinhnahjinnie created a public art piece that greets visitors at the museum’s pavilion and honors the late Bertha Wright Mitchell (Patwin, 1934–2018), a basket maker and language advocate, with its design. The museum is the first in the University of California system dedicated solely to Native American art.
Eva Talooki Aliktiluk (Inuk, 1927–ca. 1994), “Woman Wearing Beaded Amautik,” 1993, stone, glass seed beads, thread, fabric, collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery. Photo: Ernest Mayer.
8. Inuit Sanaugangit: Art Across Time
Survey exhibition at Winnipeg Art Gallery–Qaumajuq
Sanaugangit translates to “art by Inuit” and the survey Inuit Sanaugangit: Art Across Time at the Winnipeg Art Gallery–Qaumajuq celebrates creative expression in the Arctic circumpolar region showcasing art pieces from 200 BCE to the present day. With nearly 400 works by artists from Siberia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, the show also includes contemporary art by 90 contemporary Inuit artists from communities across the Canadian Arctic from Nunavut, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut, and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region.
Darlene Coward Wight and Jocelyn Piirainen (Inuk) curated Inuit Sanaugangit, which is on display in Qaumajuq, the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Inuit art center. Qaumajuq opened in 2020 and currently houses more than 20,000 artworks, making it the largest public collection of Inuit art in the world. Serving as a cultural embassy from the North to southern Canada, the museum translated all the show’s labels into Inuktitut with Inuktitut syllabics.
This exhibition has been extended and will remain on view through March 17, 2024.
wag.ca/exhibitions/inuit-sanaugangit
9. Inherent Memory
Linda Aguilar (Chumash), “The Bingo One,” 2011, coiled horsehair basket, decorated with beads, shells, bingo daubers, cut-up credit and debit cards, collection of the School for Advanced Research, SAR.2011-10-1A-Q, gift of the artist. Photo: FAAM.
Group exhibition at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts
Guest curated by Melissa Melero-Moose (Northern Paiute/Modoc) of the Great Basin Native Artists (GBNA) collective in Nevada, Inherent Memory featured basketry and other art forms from contemporary Indigenous Great Basin, Plateau, and Californian artists to educate museum audiences about this often-underrepresented geographic area. GBNA formed in 2014, sparked by conversations Melero-Moose had with Ben Aleck, to build community and provide a platform for Indigenous artists of the Great Basin and surrounding regions whose work had been collectively overlooked by art historians, museums, and galleries.
Since 2014, GBNA has hosted dozens of art shows and events, but Inherent Memory marks a major milestone. This show at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe is the first GBNA exhibition outside of the Great Basin and California. While many of these 19 women and nonbinary artists have shown nationally as individuals, this is the first time they showed collectively as Great Basin and California artists in New Mexico. The show features Topaz Jones (Duck Valley Shoshone/Lummi), Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc), Leah Mata (Northern Chumash), Lillian Pitt (Warm Springs/Wasco/Yakama/), Linda Aguilar (Chumash), and many other artists—established and emerging.
iaia.edu/event/inherent-memory
10. Center for Native Futures
New art space in Chicago
Center for Native Futures, Marquette Building, view from Adams Street, Chicago. Image courtesy of the Center for Native Futures.
Opening this September, the groundbreaking Center for Native Futures is the only Indigenous artist-run nonprofit art space in Chicago. During the pandemic, Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez/Korean), Monica Rickert-Bolter (Prairie Band Potawatomi/Black), Chris Pappan (Kaw/Osage/Lakota), Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe descent), Patrick Del Percio, and River Kerstetter (Oneida Nation) dreamed this space into being. Chicago has long been home to a large urban Native community, especially from the relocation era. The need for a Native arts space led by Native artists has been all too clear.
The collective’s booth at the 2022 EXPO Chicago proved to be an instant hit, resonating with art audiences hungry for Indigenous perspectives, and this success fueled their quest for a brick-and-mortar space in which they curate exhibitions, host talks and workshops, and provide a sustained, multifaceted source for Indigenous art. Funded with seed money from the Terra Foundation with gallery space provided by the MacArthur Foundation, the beautiful and welcoming center promotes Native visual and performing arts, supports living artists, and encourages Indigenous Futurisms.
As the Center for Native Futures looks forward to the years ahead, the future looks Indigenous!
Annual Top Ten Native Art Events
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