In shows coinciding with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, artists including Jeremy Dennis, Shelley Niro, and Sarah Sense chart Native history and futurity.
To commemorate Indigenous Peoples’ Day here in New York, we have highlighted seven ongoing exhibitions of Native art and history in Manhattan, the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, and the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook. Across solo and group presentations, the featured artists, who represent a diverse tapestry of Indigenous populations across Turtle Island, embody survivance by tracing and rejecting narratives of dispossession and irrelevance, upending and satirizing stereotypes, preserving and reinventing traditional art forms, and bringing underrepresented histories out from the margins.
Some of these sites are closed in observance of the occasion, and some of you have not been afforded the three-day weekend commanding this period of reflection, so rest assured that the following programs will be available from the last week of October through next spring.
Sarah Sense: Land, Line, Blood, Memory
Bruce Silverstein Gallery, 529 West 20th Street (4th Floor), Chelsea, Manhattan
Through Nov. 21
Chitimacha/Choctaw artist Sarah Sense’s latest series frames traditional rivercane basket weaving as a restorative practice, one that reconnects her with her ancestry and cultural traditions while creating a tangible heirloom for future generations. Sense weaves photographs taken at national parks and other significant landscapes printed on rice and bamboo paper together with colonial documents pertaining to Native land dispossession — such as maps and treaties — to create multi-dimensional compositions that reunite historic Indigenous art and stewardship practices with the environments integral to their formations. Sense deliberately undercuts colonial authority by manipulating these settler-driven documents.
