The Newfound Fervor for Indigenous Art Masks Thorny Questions

“Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always” refuses easy coherence. A survey of more than 100 works of contemporary Native American art by 97 artists from 56 Indigenous nations, the exhibition at the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers confronts viewers with a bold statement of heterogeneity. There is pottery, photography, film, and beadwork—jewelry, stone, steel, silver, and paint. Works range in scale and sensibility, from monumental portraits to abstract sculpture, yielding productive frictions and forming solidarities across artists and Indigenous cultures.

“Indigenous Identities” is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s final curatorial project; the groundbreaking artist, activist, and curator died only a few days before its opening this past February. The product of over a decade of correspondence between Smith and Zimmerli director Maura Reilly, “Indigenous Identities” continues Smith’s legacy of curatorial activism. The artist first developed the idea for what she considered a Whitney Biennial for Indigenous artists in the mid-1980s, a showcase that might highlight not only art world “stars,” to use her term, but rather the breadth of contemporary Indigenous artistic production—she advocated for recurring exhibitions ever after. The Zimmerli took up her mantel, insisting all aspects of the exhibition be Indigenous-led, from the curatorial team to the catalog design to the wall labels, which were written by the artists themselves. “We have to create our own space, bring our history forward, and communicate,” Neal Ambrose-Smith, Jaune’s son, an artist included in the show, said at the opening.

This final project unpacks the complexity of identity as a unifying concept for Indigenous contemporary artists. It’s a timely query: 2024 was a landmark year in the mainstream recognition of Native art. Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw, Cherokee descent) represented the United States at a Venice Biennale whose pavilions highlighted contributions of Indigenous artists from across the globe, and the market for Indigenous art is booming.

Yet the newfound fervor for collecting so-called “Indigenous art” has masked a somewhat thornier question: namely, how—or to what degree—does the term “Indigenous” reflect the artists it purports to represent? Currently, there are 574 federally recognized Indigenous nations within the borders of the United States alone, each with their own distinct histories, politics, and visual traditions. That already large figure does not account for state-recognized Indigenous nations and others currently seeking recognition. When is “Indigenous” a reflection of solidarity across nations, and when does it flatten historical and political distinctions?

The exhibition opens with two photographs—one by Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂) and another by Zoë Urness (Tlingit)—that together hint at differing interpretations of the show’s titular term. Galanin’s photograph documents his monumental sculpture Never Forget (2021), which spelled out indian land in the desert outside Palm Springs. It resembled and responded to the Hollywood sign, erected in 1923 to promote the white-only residential community Hollywoodland. Urness turns to a different desert: that of the Navajo reservation. She photographed a group of Diné women and girls she met online in front of Tsé Bitʼaʼí (Shiprock), in New Mexico, inviting them to dress in regalia for a group portrait of laughter and conversation. Two photographs by two Tlingit artists, each taking a different approach to the exhibition’s theme: Galanin explores a pan-Indigenous identity, opting, as Isabella Robbins (Diné) has written, for “Indian Land” rather than “Cahuilla,” the people upon whose land the work appears. Urness, by contrast, centers specific people: Indigenous identity is, the photo suggests, a group of Navajo women enjoying everyday life in their home.

This contrast recalls long-standing debates over terms like “Indigenous,” with productive frictions explored throughout. Each of the exhibition’s four thematic sections—“Political,” “Tribal,” “Social,” and “Land”—tests the concept along a different axis. The first, “Political,” explores pan-Indigenous identity as a product of resistance to settler-colonial oppression. Gerald Clarke Jr.’s (Cahuilla) 2019 print of the word “native,” branded into paper alongside a silhouette of the United States, converses with Demian DinéYazhi’’s (Diné) 2020 letterpress appropriation of the star-spangled banner stating every american flag is a warning sign. Referencing political activism through printmaking, the works illustrate how a concept of Indigeneity was created through shared histories of survivance and activism.

The “Tribal” section focuses on how artists construct identity by connecting to ancestral stories and artistic practices. A 2014 beaded bandolier bag by Joe Baker (Delaware Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma) is one example of the contemporary revitalization of customary techniques: Studying the images and beadwork practices of historical Lenape (Delaware) bandolier bags in museum collections, Baker creates contemporary works inspired by his ancestors’. Beside it, Bryson Goodrunner Meyers’s (Chippewa, Cree, Sicangu, Oglala, Hunkpapa, Dakota) Bandolier Bag of 1916 (2022) adapts the florals used across Plains nations into a mixed-media work, illustrating the movement and exchange of motifs across Indigenous cultures. These and other functional works—including a 2007 trinket box by Jackie Larson Bread (Amskapi Pikuni) and a 2023 necklace of stone fingers by Carly Feddersen (Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and mixed European heritage)—attest to the fallacy of any neat separation between “art” and “material culture” within many tribal nations.

The “Social” section highlights how artists metabolize their lived experience. Several works center around the idea of the superhero: from Cara Romero’s (Chemehuevi) Wonder-Woman-inspired portrait Arla Lucia (2019) to Star WallowingBull’s (Ojibwe/Arapaho) colored-pencil drawing of an Arapaho superhero soaring through a frame of ancestral designs. A tiny acrylic painting of a burrito vendor by Ryan Singer (Diné) might be considered a superhero of sorts, as might George Longfish’s (Seneca, Tuscarora) 1985 painting Long Fish flying over a technicolor stream.

In the show’s final section, abstraction emerges as a formal strategy spanning time and place to address kinship relations between Indigenous peoples and land. Two works in particular, by father and son Dan and Michael Namingha (both Hopi/Tewa), trace a progression from a vibrant painterly depiction of a reservation sunset to a more kaleidoscopic, geometric manipulation of territory. Along with works like Athena LaTocha’s (Hunkpapa Lakota, Ojibway) 2018–19 Murderers Creek, these works suggest that representing land is much more than depicting perspectival space. How to depict people’s invisible relationships with land becomes a formal challenge.

Many artists in the exhibition, as John Hitchcock (Comanche, Kiowa, and Northern European) remarked at the opening, are linked through lines of mentorship, artist residencies, and collaborative studios; Smith was intentional about placing internationally acclaimed artists in dialogue with lesser-known practitioners in hopes of raising the recognition of Indigenous artists overall. “It’s like the pebble in the stream,” she said in 2021. “The ripples go out and out.” Smith spent 50 years building networks and relationships across Indigenous artists. Now that some of these artists have at last received recognition, what stands out most in “Indigenous Identities” are the connections that emerge between individuals. Identity, the show suggests, is not reducible to an individualistic pursuit, but inheres in conversations, collaborations, and intergenerational knowledge transfers. “After I’m gone, I can see that all the young people are going to be doing these incredible things,” Smith once remarked. As she passes the torch to a new generation of Indigenous artists and curators, these “incredible things” will owe thanks to the groundwork Smith herself established.