In Jeffrey Gibson’s “An Indigenous Present,” Native Art Beyond Representationalism
People often relegate Nativeness to November, Native American Heritage Month, but from September through December, we celebrate like it’s the high holidays. In early October, I visited the long-awaited show “An Indigenous Present,” co-organized by Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter at ICA Boston. The show features the work of 15 abstract Native artists—none from Massachusetts tribes, and there was a series of live performances during opening weekend that animated the galleries with sound, movement and ritual presence. Its title, borrowed from Gibson’s 2023 book, references Indigenous gift economies and the persistent gaps in Native art resources he experienced during his education.
This show elevates abstraction not only as a style but as a mode of experience for Native people living intermundane lives—between Native America and the United States. Some expect a panegyric from a Lakota/Dakota writer engaging with Indigenous curation, but I can’t ignore the absence of a Wampanoag, Nipmuc or Massachusett artist in this contemporary vanguard—a standard for recognition extending beyond hollow Western land acknowledgments. The book clarifies abstraction as lived experience while revealing a structural gap: Massachusetts tribal artists working in traditional mediums like wampum rarely enter contemporary art networks centered on abstraction and innovation. Launching instead from AbEx artists Mary Sully and George Morrison, Gibson’s introduction questions the segregated position of Native contemporary artists and underscores humor as the project’s most electrifying throughline.
Cara Romero creates campy photography, James Luna molds sculptural lampoons and Wendy Red Star arranges sarcastic tableaus. Gibson’s curation untangles these artists from “fine art” rhetoric by bringing together diverse Native culture bearers—visual artists, poets, historians—who share space within Indigenous contexts but are rarely united in Western institutions. He juxtaposes Jamie Okuma’s cradleboard beside Philip J. Deloria’s essay, Layli Long Soldier’s poem next to Marie Watt’s tin-jingle embellished blanket, peeling back Western superimpositions to reveal a natural cohesion that transcends page and gallery. The exhibition translates this approach across nine rooms, with each of the fifteen artists represented multiple times—an expansive format demonstrating the breadth of contemporary Native abstraction. Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s work occupied two rooms, though the reasoning behind the placement was unclear, making it feel both prominent and enigmatic. In other areas, the show’s organization more clearly places artists in conversation with one another, working on shared themes and mediums, who could not meet in life due to generational and often structural divides.
The 2023 publication date may explain the absence of local artists. The gap also highlights the overrepresentation of Southwestern and Plains aesthetics in contemporary Native art pedagogy at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and in non-Native university art departments. Wampanoag artist Elizabeth James Perry—an NEA grant recipient whose wampum work honors historical traditions—exemplifies the catch-22 facing Northeastern Native artists: too traditional for contemporary art institutions seeking innovation, yet overlooked when curators do embrace craft traditions, defaulting instead to Southwest and Plains aesthetics centered around IAIA networks. Perry occupies a liminal space, legible neither as “contemporary” enough nor within the geographic or institutional orbit that Gibson’s curation privileges. Despite the disciplinary schism, the show succeeds in broadly reflecting Native aesthetics with undeniable visual and conceptual splendor. Sonya Kelliher-Combs’ Salmon Curl (2023) emulates sanguine salmon flesh with acrylic polymer and reindeer hair, satisfyingly reminding one of the violent beauty of life’s cycles across species. Mary Sully’s Met show of recently unearthed colored pencil, graphite and watercolor on paper portraits of white celebrities—Admiral Byrd, Bob Ripley, Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart—quietly lampoon the very culture that excluded her, reimagining fame through a Dakota aesthetic lens. George Longfish deploys similar wit in paintings like Take Two Aspirins and Call Me in the Morning, You Are on Target (1984), where medical dismissiveness and violence collide in sardonic titles. Sully’s panache and posthumous show created demand from the exhibition’s artists to be hung next to her works, from Kelliher-Combs to Teresa Baker, according to Erika Umali, their collections curator. Gibson relied on Porter’s robust publishing background to manifest the book and publish it before the show, affecting the exhibition’s equally nontraditional approach; instead of defining strictly by theme, material or signifiers, they create cogency with a mélange of humor, sound, materials and the land. “These are not storytelling paintings, these are abstractions, but they do tell a story in a way, and they tell an emotive story,” said Kay WalkingStick, a Citizen Band Potawatomi/Cherokee painter whose work appears in the exhibition. “When you move past them, you are encouraged to look at them and stand back and move.”
Teasing the show’s primary theme, Man-made Land (2025), commissioned from Caroline Monnet, is installed diagonally in ICA’s slanted foyer wall as a unique, though ancillary, exhibition, depicting abstract botanical blooms rendered with thousands of oblong and stylized pieces of black, clear and silver Tyvek, plastic and foil, evoking flowers on the harbor’s edge that perform land repair and establish Indigenous demesne—land claimed and held in our own right, not granted by colonial powers. In front of Monnet’s work, a record-breaking (literally) Indigenous performance was produced by Porter and museum staff, scraping at a running turntable with speaker-tethered sound rods, followed by a brassy symphony performance conducted with ceremonial gravitas that jolted energy into exhibition galleries already buzzing by 11 a.m.
Installed between two galleries in the ICA’s Poss Family Mediatheque, Hassanamisco Nipmuc photographer Scott Strong Hawk Foster’s “Here We Stay” gathers portraits, quotes and audio recordings from Indigenous people living in Greater Boston. Presented in partnership with the North American Indian Center of Boston (NAICOB), the show—and robust lineup of performances throughout the exhibition’s run—might soothe institutional anxieties about reciprocity and other cultural protocols. It gestures toward Gibson’s stated investment in relational ethics with local community, but looking at Foster’s portraits—faces of all ages illuminated against a field of black—another antinomy comes into view: how abstraction can both protect and erase Native bodies.
While the No Dakota Access Pipeline struggle placed Native bodies in imperialism’s way—forcing a reckoning for settlers and the world about delusions of historical distance from colonialism—abstraction presents an unexpected consequence: obscuring Native bodies from view on this land. Audie Murray’s video performance 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 field. She performs historical traditions in the present, adding definition to the show’s multifaceted title through the mediated gaze of a camera. After several minutes of preparation, she stops to quickly apply a thick layer of bear grease to the camera lens, creating a visual barrier to protect, not erase. From that point on, the ritual continues offscreen; we hear but cannot see.
Murray recalls Betonie from Silko’s Ceremony—the mixed-blood healer who controversially adapted tradition with modern objects, embodying its necessary evolution. Within this lineage, her bear-greased lens belongs to a broader feminist practice of controlling the gaze, where artists like Lorna Simpson turn figures away and Nicole Miller silences interview subjects beneath instrumental sound. Murray’s refusal is gentler, tactile: she doesn’t deny access so much as consecrate the limits of it. The work’s clarity—visibly Métis, performing recognizable ceremony—makes its moment of disappearance even more powerful.
Sound reappears elsewhere in the show, most notably in Raven Chacon’s Controlled Burn (2025), a low, percussive installation that hums like a distant engine. Where Murray’s sound gestures toward continuity and protection, Chacon’s functions as warning—a sonic fence line that marks what cannot be entered. Both artists, in different registers, confront the limits of visibility and access, asking what remains when the body is withheld from view.
That question reverberates through the work of multidisciplinary artist Kimowan Metchewais, who made abstraction his primary mode of survival. Working largely in solitude in North Carolina, far from major art centers that rarely welcome Native artists, Metchewais experienced the isolation that defined a generation of Native abstractionists. He died young after years of inadequate healthcare despite federal trust obligations, his life and work marked by the same structural neglect that shaped so many Native artists’ trajectories. Even when working contemporaneously with white modernists, Native artists were routinely excluded from museum networks and residencies, prevented from meeting, collaborating or developing community through institutional support. Modernism’s vaunted “universalism” was thus sustained through Indigenous exclusion.
Metchewais’ Chief’s Blanket (2002) evokes the iconic Navajo chief’s blanket pattern and the relational stories embedded in its form and meaning. Created with photo paper, ink, pigment, watercolor and pencil—materials grounding the work in the present—it fuses landscape photography with the blanket’s horizontal stripes, rendered here in ruddy hues like dried blood. The result is a dark yet resilient meditation on Indigenous history, where bloodshed marks both landscape and the domestic intimacy of cloth. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Ronan Robe #1 and #2 (1977) extend this thread, employing canvas as a rich stand-in for the animal hides used to construct Plains tipis. Together, Metchewais and Quick-to-See Smith evoke home, safety and storytelling—shot through the memory of violence—abstracting Native materials and motifs just enough to register as contemporary art.
Other artists approach ontological themes with less material and conceptual rigor. Teresa Baker’s Throw It to the Ocean (2025), a work evoking
Humor permeates throughout, 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 found objects and animal materials. Both its materials and white coating signal the unsustainability and whitewashing of U.S. life and history. Where guns, cannons and sailors would stand in the ship prow, Tsouhlarakis wryly places a litany of objects that demands to be listed in full: IKEA furniture remnants, aspen, birch, maple, ice pick pole, oars, boat fenders, metal, leather, artificial sinew, tobacco lids, press-on nails, steer horns, artificial elk teeth, horsehair, basketball rim, paint, adhesives, plaster, bed frame, plastic, elk hide, screws, nails, helmet face guard, buffalo nickels and found book objects. The disembodied ice pick and birch and maple poles are particularly effective in pointing to the makeshift, theatrical settler approach to colonization, on land they coerced Native people (e.g., pre-pubescent Mataoka and Sacagawea) to help them colonize. Tsouhlarakis also satirizes “value” in the West—animal pelts are traded for tea, coins for land, trees for flimsy compressed wood that, put together, becomes art: what has value, what is sacred? The gesture toward animal fur evokes the Indigenous adage “use every part of the buffalo”—a wisdom still lost on Americans.
The Navajo and Muscogee Creek artist also grounds the work in Boston lore, making it singularly topical. In 2025, referencing the 1773 Boston Tea Party—a revolt against tea tariffs—she stages an intervention on American ennui, challenging settler complacency in imperialism. Where Murray protects the sacred through ceremony, Tsouhlarakis lets it all hang out.
“An Indigenous Present” offers a gift, unsurprising for its namesake: disquietude for settlers, delight and laughter for Native attendees opening weekend. The exhibition, galvanized by #NoDAPL’s contribution to institutional attention toward Native artists, delivers something beyond representationalism—evolving toward resistance and circumnavigation of the colonial gaze. While some works succeed more than others in translating abstraction’s power, Murray and Tsouhlarakis, though not local, ground the show in Boston, compensating for the absence of Massachusetts peoples. Other works—from Dakota Mace’s silver chemigrams to Kay Walkingstick’s gestural abstractions—deliver not only an offering but temporality, not only the current moment but embodiment, not only lived experience but sovereign display. Gibson and Porter enlist Indigenous principles—reciprocity and gift economies—and in return, viewers laugh, and settlers learn.
“An Indigenous Present” is at ICA Boston through March 8, 2026. From there, the exhibition will move to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville (June 26 through September 27, 2026) and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle (November 7, 2026, through February 14, 2027).
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