Ancestral Edge explores craft, cultural, spiritual and ceremonial traditions through media including basket weaving, collage, clay, textiles, photography, metalwork and printmaking.
The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art has announced an upcoming exhibit focusing on the work of nine Native American female artists.
Ancestral Edge: Abstraction and Symbolism in the Works of Nine Native American Women Artists opens Sept. 13, 2025, and will be on view through April 12, 2026. It’s curated by Ola Wlusek, the Ringling’s curator of modern and contemporary Art.
The exhibition brings together works by nine contemporary Native American artists making significant contributions to the field of abstraction, including Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa), Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc), Kiana Bell (Seminole), Elisa Harkins (Cherokee/Muscogee [Creek]), Erica Lord (Iñupiaq/Athabascan), Sarah Sense (Chitimacha/Choctaw), Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos), Marie Watt (Seneca/German-Scot) and Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota).
The exhibit comes on the heels of The Ringling’s 2023 exhibition of Native American art, Reclaiming Home, the first Ringling show ever to focus on the subject. That exhibit featured 12 artists, mostly from Florida’s Seminole and Miccosukee tribes, but also creators whose ancestors were forced to leave the state, ending up in Oklahoma or elsewhere out west.
Ancestral Edge explores craft, cultural, spiritual and ceremonial traditions through a variety of media, including basket weaving, collage, clay, textiles, photography, metalwork and printmaking. As with Reclaiming Home, Ancestral Edge includes pieces lent to The Ringling by the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum on the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation. Work is also on loan from the Gochman Family Collection in New York and the Rubell Museum, which has locations in Miami and Washington, D.C.
The exhibition also highlights recent acquisitions to The Ringling’s collection by Dyani White Hawk, whose work combines influences from European and American abstraction with abstract Lakota art forms to challenge the hierarchy of art history. The Ringling recently acquired two of White Hawk’s screen-printed pieces: They Gifted (Day) (2024) and They Gifted (Night) (2024). Both include motifs associated with Lakota beadwork and quillwork.
“Native American art and craft traditions have long engaged with abstraction as a meaningful, complex visual language, woven into ancestral knowledge, ceremonial practice, and material culture,” says Wlusek. “Ancestral Edge celebrates the richness of Indigenous artistic traditions and reaffirms the central role that contemporary Native American art plays in shaping a more expansive, inclusive understanding of abstraction today.
“For these artists, abstraction is not merely an aesthetic strategy,” she continues. “It is a long-standing practice to convey cultural, spiritual, and ceremonial meaning that predates modern art movements.”
