Up until recently, you could count on one hand the number of Native American artists valued by the contemporary art world. One of them, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, 83, has called it “the buckskin ceiling”—a rather vivid term for the institutional barriers or systemic racism preventing Native artists from landing regular exhibitions in mainstream art galleries and museums.
That much is finally changing. Thanks to work by artists and activists like Quick-to-See Smith, as well as the larger cultural reckoning that put the “I” in BIPOC, that buckskin ceiling has some serious cracks in it, with animal hides actually making an appearance in big galleries and museums. Also showing up: techno-themed Navajo weavings, abstract paintings inspired by Lakota quillwork, and more, as several artists are bringing ancestral techniques and materials into a contemporary art context, often overturning stereotypes about Native cultures in the process.
“It’s exciting to see how many Indigenous voices are being amplified in this moment, even if it only scratches the surface,” says Marie Watt, 55, an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation of Indians who lives in Portland, Oregon, and shows with galleries there, in New York, and in San Francisco. In effect, these artists are bridging at least two worlds: their ancestral communities and the rather nomadic—some would say rootless—contemporary art set, which typically hews to a white, male, Eurocentric colonizer’s version of history, with minimal knowledge of Indigenous cultures. One telling example: When gallerist Jessica Silverman took a group of figurative sculptures by Rose B. Simpson from the Santa Clara Pueblo to Art Basel in 2021, some viewers assumed at first sight the work was African.
“It’s wild how much isn’t known or understood,” says the Sičáŋğu Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk, 46, calling it “one of the biggest issues in navigating the contemporary art world as a Native person.” When the curators and other gatekeepers “don’t have a mental library that allows them to see and unpack and uncode things in your work, there can be a real communication breakdown,” she adds.
This knowledge vacuum puts a lot of pressure on Native artists to serve as educators or interpreters for non-Native audiences. While some embrace the role, going up against centuries of disinformation or outright cultural erasure is not easy. “It can be exhausting to show up and carry these conversations continually,” says Nicholas Galanin, 43, an artist of Tlingit and Unangax̂ heritage. But that also gives some of his work its urgency. “The artwork can carry these dialogues too, and break through to people without lecturing them, by sharing ideas, stories, dreams.”
Or, as White Hawk puts it, “beauty is medicinal.” An enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, White Hawk makes exquisitely detailed abstract paintings that combine the meditative appeal of, say, Agnes Martin with a textured sense of Indigenous history. “I am intentionally making beautiful things as a gift for the audience,” says the Minneapolis-based artist, who just signed on with the gallery Various Small Fires, which is showing her work alongside that of weaver extraordinaire Diedrick Brackens at Frieze Los Angeles in February. “But it’s also my hope that my work offers a moment of reciprocity that encourages people to stay longer and think more deeply.”
White Hawk made her most ambitious artwork to date for the Whitney Biennial last year: a 14-foot-long painting consisting of more than half a million glass beads that took her and a team of 18 nearly a year to create. Her visuals nod both to 20th-century Color Field paintings by the likes of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman and to Native examples of abstraction that predate those painters by centuries and, in some cases, inspired them. “Our abstract painting was happening here with earth pigments on hides well before stretched canvases showed up,” she says. She is especially interested in Lakota quillwork, a form of adornment that typically involves softening and stitching porcupine quills onto fabric or other surfaces in a way that prefigured beading.
In graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, White Hawk used actual quills in her paintings, but the process is extremely time-intensive. These days she is more likely to honor Lakota quillwork through her use of paint or glass beads, especially cylindrical “bugle” beads. She also makes video- and photo-based installations that emphasize Native women’s individuality and skewer stereotypes. “I am not a conservationist or preservationist, but an artist participating in an artistic lineage upheld for generations,” she says. “I get to jump in at this time and play.”
