Featuring Sarah Sense's Brooklyn Alligator, 2024
This exhibition highlights contemporary Native design, craftwork, and art that employ the formal and aesthetic elements of abstraction as meaningful motifs and coded tools of Indigenous expression to communicate tribal cultures and histories, ancestral knowledge, and the lived experiences of the artists and their communities. On view in the exhibition are two- and three-dimensional works by some of the most exciting Native American artists working today, including Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa, b. 1985), Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc, b.1980), Kiana Bell (Seminole, b. 1998), Elisa Harkins (Cherokee/Muscogee [Creek], b. 1978) , Erica Lord (Iñupiaq/Athabascan, b. 1978), Sarah Sense (Chitimacha/Choctaw, b. 1980), Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos, b. 1976), Marie Watt (Seneca/German-Scot, b. 1967), and Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota, b. 1976). Explored in a variety of media, including basket weaving, beadwork, collage, clay, textiles, photography, metalwork, and printmaking rooted in ancestral technologies, their work shares similar stylistic and social concerns, such as vibrant color, hard-edged geometries, curvilinear patterns, and bold mark-making, all infused with personal stories and those of their kin.
Major lenders to the exhibition include the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum on the Big Cypress Reservation, the Gochman Family Collection, and the Rubell Museum. This exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalog with curatorial and scholarly texts. Funding is generously provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art.
