Individuals typically relegate Nativeness to November, Native American Heritage Month, however from September by way of December, we have a good time prefer it’s the excessive holidays. In early October, I visited the long-awaited present “An Indigenous Current,” co-organized by Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter at ICA Boston. The present options the work of 15 summary Native artists—none from Massachusetts tribes, and there was a sequence of stay performances throughout opening weekend that animated the galleries with sound, motion and ritual presence. Its title, borrowed from Gibson’s 2023 guide, references Indigenous reward economies and the persistent gaps in Native artwork assets he skilled throughout his training.
This present elevates abstraction not solely as a mode however as a mode of expertise for Native folks dwelling intermundane lives—between Native America and the USA. Some count on a panegyric from a Lakota/Dakota author participating with Indigenous curation, however I can’t ignore the absence of a Wampanoag, Nipmuc or Massachusett artist on this up to date vanguard—a regular for recognition extending past hole Western land acknowledgments. The guide clarifies abstraction as lived expertise whereas revealing a structural hole: Massachusetts tribal artists working in conventional mediums like wampum not often enter up to date artwork networks centered on abstraction and innovation. Launching as a substitute from AbEx artists Mary Sully and George Morrison, Gibson’s introduction questions the segregated place of Native up to date artists and underscores humor because the challenge’s most electrifying throughline.
Cara Romero creates campy pictures, James Luna molds sculptural lampoons and Wendy Pink Star arranges sarcastic tableaus. Gibson’s curation untangles these artists from “advantageous artwork” rhetoric by bringing collectively numerous Native tradition bearers—visible artists, poets, historians—who share area inside Indigenous contexts however are not often united in Western establishments. He juxtaposes Jamie Okuma’s cradleboard beside Philip J. Deloria’s essay, Layli Lengthy Soldier’s poem subsequent to Marie Watt’s tin-jingle embellished blanket, peeling again Western superimpositions to disclose a pure cohesion that transcends web page and gallery. The exhibition interprets this strategy throughout 9 rooms, with every of the fifteen artists represented a number of instances—an expansive format demonstrating the breadth of up to date Native abstraction. Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s work occupied two rooms, although the reasoning behind the position was unclear, making it really feel each distinguished and enigmatic. In different areas, the present’s group extra clearly locations artists in dialog with each other, engaged on shared themes and mediums, who couldn’t meet in life because of generational and sometimes structural divides.
The 2023 publication date could clarify the absence of native artists. The hole additionally highlights the overrepresentation of Southwestern and Plains aesthetics in up to date Native artwork pedagogy on the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and in non-Native college artwork departments. Wampanoag artist Elizabeth James Perry—an NEA grant recipient whose wampum work honors historic traditions—exemplifies the catch-22 dealing with Northeastern Native artists: too conventional for up to date artwork establishments looking for innovation, but neglected when curators do embrace craft traditions, defaulting as a substitute to Southwest and Plains aesthetics centered round IAIA networks. Perry occupies a liminal area, legible neither as “up to date” sufficient nor inside the geographic or institutional orbit that Gibson’s curation privileges. Regardless of the disciplinary schism, the present succeeds in broadly reflecting Native aesthetics with plain visible and conceptual splendor. Sonya Kelliher-Combs’ Salmon Curl (2023) emulates sanguine salmon flesh with acrylic polymer and reindeer hair, satisfyingly reminding one of many violent fantastic thing about life’s cycles throughout species. Mary Sully’s Met present of lately unearthed coloured pencil, graphite and watercolor on paper portraits of white celebrities—Admiral Byrd, Bob Ripley, Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart—quietly lampoon the very tradition that excluded her, reimagining fame by way of a Dakota aesthetic lens. George Longfish deploys related wit in work like Take Two Aspirins and Name Me within the Morning, You Are on Goal (1984), the place medical dismissiveness and violence collide in sardonic titles. Sully’s panache and posthumous present created demand from the exhibition’s artists to be hung subsequent to her works, from Kelliher-Combs to Teresa Baker, in accordance with Erika Umali, their collections curator. Gibson relied on Porter’s sturdy publishing background to manifest the guide and publish it earlier than the present, affecting the exhibition’s equally nontraditional strategy; as a substitute of defining strictly by theme, materials or signifiers, they create cogency with a mélange of humor, sound, supplies and the land. “These are usually not storytelling work, these are abstractions, however they do inform a narrative in a means, and so they inform an emotive story,” stated Kay WalkingStick, a Citizen Band Potawatomi/Cherokee painter whose work seems within the exhibition. “While you transfer previous them, you’re inspired to have a look at them and stand again and transfer.”
Teasing the present’s major theme, Man-made Land (2025), commissioned from Caroline Monnet, is put in diagonally in ICA’s slanted lobby wall as a singular, although ancillary, exhibition, depicting summary botanical blooms rendered with hundreds of rectangular and stylized items of black, clear and silver Tyvek, plastic and foil, evoking flowers on the harbor’s edge that carry out land restore and set up Indigenous demesne—land claimed and held in our personal proper, not granted by colonial powers. In entrance of Monnet’s work, a record-breaking (actually) Indigenous efficiency was produced by Porter and museum employees, scraping at a operating turntable with speaker-tethered sound rods, adopted by a brassy symphony efficiency carried out with ceremonial gravitas that jolted power into exhibition galleries already buzzing by 11 a.m.
Put in between two galleries within the ICA’s Poss Household Mediatheque, Hassanamisco Nipmuc photographer Scott Robust Hawk Foster’s “Right here We Keep” gathers portraits, quotes and audio recordings from Indigenous folks dwelling in Better Boston. Offered in partnership with the North American Indian Middle of Boston (NAICOB), the present—and sturdy lineup of performances all through the exhibition’s run—may soothe institutional anxieties about reciprocity and different cultural protocols. It gestures towards Gibson’s acknowledged funding in relational ethics with area people, however Foster’s portraits—faces of all ages illuminated towards a discipline of black—one other antinomy comes into view: how abstraction can each shield and erase Native our bodies.
Whereas the No Dakota Entry Pipeline battle positioned Native our bodies in imperialism’s means—forcing a reckoning for settlers and the world about delusions of historic distance from colonialism—abstraction presents an sudden consequence: obscuring Native our bodies from view on this land. Audie Murray’s video efficiency Bear Smudge (2022) is an exception. We see Murray, a Métis artist, setting down ceremonial paraphernalia—a blanket, a jar of bear grease—in a verdant discipline. She performs historic traditions within the current, including definition to the present’s multifaceted title by way of the mediated gaze of a digicam. After a number of minutes of preparation, she stops to shortly apply a thick layer of bear grease to the digicam lens, creating a visible barrier to guard, not erase. From that time on, the ritual continues offscreen; we hear however can’t see.
Murray recollects Betonie from Silko’s Ceremony—the mixed-blood healer who controversially tailored custom with trendy objects, embodying its obligatory evolution. Inside this lineage, her bear-greased lens belongs to a broader feminist follow of controlling the gaze, the place artists like Lorna Simpson flip figures away and Nicole Miller silences interview topics beneath instrumental sound. Murray’s refusal is gentler, tactile: she doesn’t deny entry a lot as consecrate the boundaries of it. The work’s readability—visibly Métis, performing recognizable ceremony—makes its second of disappearance much more highly effective.
Sound reappears elsewhere within the present, most notably in Raven Chacon’s Managed Burn (2025), a low, percussive set up that hums like a distant engine. The place Murray’s sound gestures towards continuity and safety, Chacon’s features as warning—a sonic fence line that marks what can’t be entered. Each artists, in several registers, confront the boundaries of visibility and entry, asking what stays when the physique is withheld from view.
That query reverberates by way of the work of multidisciplinary artist Kimowan Metchewais, who made abstraction his major mode of survival. Working largely in solitude in North Carolina, removed from main artwork facilities that not often welcome Native artists, Metchewais skilled the isolation that outlined a era of Native abstractionists. He died younger after years of insufficient healthcare regardless of federal belief obligations, his life and work marked by the identical structural neglect that formed so many Native artists’ trajectories. Even when working contemporaneously with white modernists, Native artists have been routinely excluded from museum networks and residencies, prevented from assembly, collaborating or growing group by way of institutional help. Modernism’s vaunted “universalism” was thus sustained by way of Indigenous exclusion.
Metchewais’ Chief’s Blanket (2002) evokes the enduring Navajo chief’s blanket sample and the relational tales embedded in its type and that means. Created with picture paper, ink, pigment, watercolor and pencil—supplies grounding the work within the current—it fuses panorama pictures with the blanket’s horizontal stripes, rendered right here in ruddy hues like dried blood. The result’s a darkish but resilient meditation on Indigenous historical past, the place bloodshed marks each panorama and the home intimacy of material. Jaune Fast-to-See Smith’s Ronan Gown #1 and #2 (1977) prolong this thread, using canvas as a wealthy stand-in for the animal hides used to assemble Plains tipis. Collectively, Metchewais and Fast-to-See Smith evoke house, security and storytelling—shot by way of the reminiscence of violence—abstracting Native supplies and motifs simply sufficient to register as up to date artwork.
Different artists strategy ontological themes with much less materials and conceptual rigor. Teresa Baker’s Throw It to the Ocean (2025), a piece evoking
Humor permeates all through, from caption to composition in Anna Tsouhlarakis’s IF SHE WAS AT THE PARTY, SHE WOULD HAVE DUMPED MORE THAN TEA (2025), a vacant white particle-board ship prow lined with discovered objects and animal supplies. Each its supplies and white coating sign the unsustainability and whitewashing of U.S. life and historical past. The place weapons, cannons and sailors would stand within the ship prow, Tsouhlarakis wryly locations a litany of objects that calls for to be listed in full: IKEA furnishings remnants, aspen, birch, maple, ice choose pole, oars, boat fenders, metallic, leather-based, synthetic sinew, tobacco lids, press-on nails, steer horns, synthetic elk tooth, horsehair, basketball rim, paint, adhesives, plaster, mattress body, plastic, elk conceal, screws, nails, helmet face guard, buffalo nickels and located guide objects. The disembodied ice choose and birch and maple poles are notably efficient in pointing to the makeshift, theatrical settler strategy to colonization, on land they coerced Native folks (e.g., pre-pubescent Mataoka and Sacagawea) to assist them colonize. Tsouhlarakis additionally satirizes “worth” within the West—animal pelts are traded for tea, cash for land, bushes for flimsy compressed wooden that, put collectively, turns into artwork: what has worth, what’s sacred? The gesture towards animal fur evokes the Indigenous adage “use each a part of the buffalo”—a knowledge nonetheless misplaced on Individuals.
The Navajo and Muscogee Creek artist additionally grounds the work in Boston lore, making it singularly topical. In 2025, referencing the 1773 Boston Tea Get together—a revolt towards tea tariffs—she phases an intervention on American ennui, difficult settler complacency in imperialism. The place Murray protects the sacred by way of ceremony, Tsouhlarakis lets all of it hang around.
“An Indigenous Current” affords a present, unsurprising for its namesake: disquietude for settlers, delight and laughter for Native attendees opening weekend. The exhibition, galvanized by #NoDAPL’s contribution to institutional consideration towards Native artists, delivers one thing past representationalism—evolving towards resistance and circumnavigation of the colonial gaze. Whereas some works succeed greater than others in translating abstraction’s energy, Murray and Tsouhlarakis, although not native, floor the present in Boston, compensating for the absence of Massachusetts peoples. Different works—from Dakota Mace’s silver chemigrams to Kay Walkingstick’s gestural abstractions—ship not solely an providing however temporality, not solely the present second however embodiment, not solely lived expertise however sovereign show. Gibson and Porter enlist Indigenous ideas—reciprocity and reward economies—and in return, viewers snort, and settlers study.
“An Indigenous Current” is at ICA Boston by way of March 8, 2026. From there, the exhibition will transfer to the Frist Artwork Museum in Nashville (June 26 by way of September 27, 2026) and the Frye Artwork Museum in Seattle (November 7, 2026, by way of February 14, 2027).
Extra exhibition critiques
