WASHINGTON, DC.- The National Gallery of Art has acquired paintings, sculptures, a video, and several photographs by contemporary Native American artists Jeffrey Gibson, Sky Hopinka, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Dakota Mace, Eric-Paul Riege, Cara Romero, Kay WalkingStick, and Will Wilson, reinforcing its ongoing commitment to acquire major works that expand perspectives of the history of art, especially in the United States. Offering a critical perspective in contemporary artistic discourse and presenting a reflection on the history of the native lands and cultures of Indigenous artists, these acquisitions complement works already in the collection by G. Peter Jemison (Seneca Nation of Indians, Heron Clan), George Morrison (Ojibwe [Grand Portage]), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes), Marie Watt (Seneca Nation of Indians), and Emmi Whitehorse (Diné), among others, and build on the dialogues forged in the exhibition The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, presented by the National Gallery from September 22, 2023, through January 15, 2024.
“Representing artists across generations who work in a variety of media and express distinct perspectives and individual and regional identities, these works advance the National Gallery’s vision to be of the nation and for all the people. They illuminate the symbiotic relationship between Native American culture and the natural environment, reflecting the shared reverence and stewardship for the land. We are grateful to be entrusted with their care, and for the opportunity to share these remarkable works with our audiences,” said Molly Donovan, curator of contemporary art and acting head of the department of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery.
Works by Dakota Mace, Sky Hopinka, and Kay WalkingStick will be featured in exhibitions in 2026.
Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee Nation, b. 1972)
Jeffrey Gibson’s interdisciplinary practice is characterized by a bold use of color, pattern, and text that combines American, Indigenous, and LGBTQ2S+ histories with references to popular subcultures, literature, and global aesthetic and artistic traditions.
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT (2024) was featured in the rotunda of the United States Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, a central feature of Gibson’s highly acclaimed exhibition the space in which to place me (2024). Part of Gibson’s compelling series of punching bag sculptures, it speaks to the complexity of identity construction through action, Indigenous knowledge, and belief systems. Gibson embellished this punching bag with beadwork, fringe, and text from the Declaration of Independence. The colors of the red, yellow, white, and black fringe not only refer to the Native American medicine wheel but are also associated with the American Indian Movement, an Indigenous advocacy group founded in 1968. This dynamic object evokes Native dance ceremonies by requiring viewers to walk around it to read the beaded text.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, b. 1984)
A photographer, filmmaker, and poet, Sky Hopinka’s multimedia practice uses moving images, sound, written text, and photography to communicate the range and complexity of Indigenous perspectives.
A reflection on ancestors and descendants, Hopinka’s video Kicking the Clouds (2022) examines his family’s history within the context of the loss and revival of Native languages and cultural traditions. A 50-year-old audio recording of Hopinka’s grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother, his great-grandmother, inspired the storyline. In the video viewers hear excerpts from the recording along with Hopinka and his mother talking about the different generations of women in their family. These discussions, along with music and other sound effects, play over edited clips of landscapes and family events made in their chosen home of Whatcom County, Washington.
The National Gallery also acquired six photographs by Hopkina. Four photographs from 2022 depict bucolic landscapes made at the settlement sites and burial grounds of Dickson Mounds and Cahokia Mounds in Illinois. Inscribed with excerpts from Hopinka’s poem “Believe You Me,” the series is a powerful reflection not only on the history of these lands that are preserved as onsite archaeological museums but also on the obligation of American institutions to return ancestral remains to their respective Indigenous communities. Two additional photographs from 2020, from the artist’s earlier series Breathings, feature a mix of thoughts, memories, and poems—the artist’s “breaths”— inscribed around the borders of these pictures of everyday life.
Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota, b. 1979)
Cannupa Hanska Luger’s installations, videos, and sculptures convey contemporary Native American stories that incorporate actions ranging from the personal to the political, as well as those involving greater communities.
Comprised of mirror shields and an accompanying video, Mirror Shield Project (2016) documents how, through a collective consciousness, a single action can amplify and reproduce efforts to protect natural resources. Mirror Shield Project was conceived to support the Water Protectors who were protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) that threatened ancestral lands, burial sites, and the water source of the Standing Rock Reservation. How to Build Mirror Shields for Water Protectors, an instructional video made by the artist and released online, invited people to create and transport mirror shields to the Oceti Sakowin camp near Standing Rock, South Dakota. There, more than a thousand shields were made available to the Water Protectors for their peaceful protest against the DAPL and police. Luger also collaborated with Rory Erler Wakemup, an Indigenous artist and close friend, on Water Serpent Action (2016). At this site-specific performance hundreds of Water Protectors, singing an honor song, walked the Oceti Sakowin camp holding the reflective shields above their heads. This created a moving river or serpent-like formation that Wakemup recorded overhead with a drone.
Dakota Mace (Diné, b. 1991)
An interdisciplinary artist who explores the sacred connections of her people to their homeland and their history, Dakota Mace incorporates Diné weaving and beadwork into her photographs. Her deliberate choice of materials centers the deep significance of place and memory for her people.
Two photographs from her series Dahodiyinii (Sacred Places) foreground the stories of her family. Helen Nez–Diné Elder (2021) pairs a close-up view of the elder’s hands with a cyanotype of native plants that still grow despite the toxic effects of uranium mining on the lands of the Navajo Nation. In Joe Mace–Diné Elder (2021), Mace recalls her grandfather by pairing a picture of a spoon, the sole remnant from his childhood home, with his only photograph of himself as a young man. He stands in front of Fort Wingate, the boarding school in New Mexico he was made to attend. The fort was also the starting point for the Long Walk, the forced removal of the Diné from their homelands in 1864.
The National Gallery also acquired Na’neel’Zhíín (Dark-Colored Barrier) (2023), from her Distorted Landscapes series, which features sites sacred to the Diné people and calls attention to the sites’ hidden narratives. In this work, she altered a photograph of the site of a school in the northeastern part of the Navajo Nation and adhered diamond-shaped beadwork, symbols of Dinétah (the Diné homeland), across its surface.
Eric-Paul Riege (Diné, b. 1994)
Exploring histories, economies, and cultures of the marketplace, Eric-Paul Riege’s practice in creating soft-sculpture and durational performance embodies his lived experience through ancestral traditions in weaving and adornment, especially those passed down from his maternal family.
His sculptural pair of medallion-topped “earrings,” Hólǫ́’s Rattles, the Yáhzí 1z [1-2] + [jaatłoh4Ye’iitsoh] (2023), reflect the Diné philosophy of hózhó, a worldview that encompasses beauty, balance, and goodness in all things physical and spiritual. The nearly achromatic tonal range (black, brown, and beige) honors birth, life, and survival as well as approximates human skin tones and the wool of churro sheep, a sacred animal whose population was decimated in the 19th and 20th centuries. These sculptures were created from the remnants and off-cuts of previously activated and adorned soft-sculptures. Riege performed with parts of this sculpture in his singlechannel video of a weaving dance (2023) and Hólǫ́-it xistz at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami in 2022. He was featured in a solo performance, Weaving Dance (2023), that took place at the National Gallery on September 24, 2023.
Cara Romero (Chemehuevi, b. 1977)
Cara Romero’s theatrical photographs challenge preconceived notions of Native Americans by telling new stories about Indigenous experiences from the perspective of a Native American woman.
In two works, Romero presents a layered critique of mainstream popular culture’s depiction of Indigenous identity and cultures in popular television programs and films from the 1950s to the 1990s. The surreal, sepia-toned dreamscape TV Indians (2017, printed 2023) features friends and family dressed in Pueblo clothing and posed among television sets, whose screens show iconic scenes with Native American characters (from the Lone Ranger to Smoke Signals). Referencing the “damsel in distress” character of the silent movie era, Life in the West (2022) explores the impacts of westward expansion and the Transcontinental Railroad on Indigenous people.
Oil & Gold (2021) and her earlier work Oil Boom (2015, printed 2023) foreground Indigenous peoples’ responses to the exploitation of land they once stewarded. In Oil Boom, a central male figure (artist Cannupa Hanska Luger posed for Romero) appears as if submerged in oil, sinking beneath the bleak landscape of pumpjacks. In Oil & Gold, Naomi White Horse and Crickett Tiger, representing the Central Coast people of California, are posed in front of a Los Angeles refinery. One woman’s hands have been dipped in gold, while the other, in oil. In this work, Romero calls attention to the treaties that California failed to ratify with the Native tribes whose land was rich in natural resources.
Sisterhood is Sacred (2018, printed 2023) portrays six women from different Pueblo communities who actively participated in the creation of this photograph.
Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, b. 1935)
One of the most celebrated Native American artists of the past half-century, Kay WalkingStick draws on formal modernist painterly traditions as well as her own Native American experience to create works that connect the immediacy of both the natural and the spiritual worlds.
Aiming to join elements from two worlds, whether her Indigenous and Anglo ancestries or her connection to environmental realms, WalkingStick began to experiment with joining two square panel paintings in 1984. North Rim Temple (2023), the first oil painting of the Grand Canyon in the National Gallery’s collection, exemplifies her depictions of the untamed North American landscape and its specific cultural significance in Native American culture. The left panel shows the rising buttes and spires of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, while on the right side flat-topped mesas, all formed between five and seven million years ago, are depicted. WalkingStick overlayed a traditional Native American design based on a pattern drawn from a design from a basket made by the Moapa Band of Paiute Indians, one of the nearly dozen Native tribes who call the Grand Canyon their home.
Will Wilson (Diné, b. 1969)
Will Wilson’s photographs focus on Native American identities and the interrelationship of environment, pollution, and health on Indigenous lands.
Two works from Wilson’s series Connecting the Dots feature abandoned uranium mines (AUMs) on Indigenous lands in the West. Now closed, the mines were used to extract uranium for nuclear bombs. Disposal sites attempt to contain the tailings from these mines, but contaminated building materials pollute the air and nearby bodies of water. Wilson recalls playing as a child on the sites of AUMs and witnessing the devastating health effects caused by exposure to the radioactive materials. Using a camera mounted on a drone, his aerial views of these sites reveal the scale of these mining operations, often close to where people live, to call attention to their devastation and toxic effects. Church Rock Mill Spill Remediation Ponds AUM, Coyote Canyon, Navajo Nation, 35.64810921016795 N. / - 108.50126295589726 W (2019) shows the site of the largest release of radioactivity in US history. In 1979 a dam at the Church Rock Mill collapsed, flooding the Puerco River with wastewater. This resulted in polluted aquifers and water sources downstream that destroyed a vital source of water. In Shiprock Disposal Site, Shiprock, Navajo Nation, 36.769690596277414 N / -108.68547605691704 W (2020), the pentagonal uranium disposal cell encapsulating radioactive materials—an area of approximately 77 acres—dominates the landscape. Visible through the streaming light in the far distance is Monument Valley.
AIR: 2 (2004) is from Wilson’s ongoing series Auto Immune Response, or AIR, which he began in 2004. Images in the series explore the numerous autoimmune diseases that disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples around the world. Wilson photographs himself as a wanderer through the landscape of the Navajo Nation—located in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah—assessing and rebuilding the environment from the remnants of the past. Anticipating an unknown future that merges ancestral knowledge with technical advances, Wilson appears three times in AIR: 2, looking over a massive canyon to emphasize the postapocalyptic condition of the landscape.
