Indigenous Art History Has Been Waiting for You to Catch Up

NEW BRUNSWICK, New Jersey — “It’s a good day to be Indigenous,” Thomas Builds-the-Fire declares in the 1998 Native comedy, Smoke Signals — a fitting prelude to the staggering monument to Native resilience that is Indigenous Identities at the Zimmerli Art Museum, the late Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s final curatorial salvo. Rooted in a circular worldview in which humanity is inseparable from nature — in stark contrast to the linear, extractive logic of American colonialism — the exhibition is the most extensive display of Native American art to date, numbering 100 works by 97 artists. I was struck in particular by the haloed elk in Norman Akers’s “Drowning Elk” (2020), which drifts in a lake of crushed plastic bottles — a quiet martyr. I felt that I found a spectral stand-in for Quick-to-See Smith, the show’s late curator, who walked on just days before the opening. An artist and environmental activist, Smith’s passing feels like a final warning: a departure from a world too broken to be saved. 

But if the show carries an elegiac weight, it also thrums with life. In Jeffrey Gibson’s (Choctaw, Cherokee) “SHE NEVER DANCES ALONE” (2021), a woman’s photographed visage is embellished with a potent rainbow collage: Triangular vertical stripes are abstracted mountains, connecting Earth to the spiritual realm, while a bright palette and the eponymous phrase convey adornment and matriarchal collectivity. A war shirt stitched from landscape stills fuses bygone battles with the bucolic in Bently Spang’s (Tsitsistas/Suhtai) “War Shirt #3 – The Great Divide” (2006). Yet Quick-to-See Smith resists nostalgia, assembling a vast arsenal of contemporary artists to confront colonial archives. Spang does so deftly, transposing a dusky wooded landscape image onto the plastic silhouette of a Plains Native war shirt, merging garment and terrain — both historically sites of struggle internally, between tribes, and externally with White settlers — into a synthetic, hyperreal tableau. Marie Watt’s (Seneca) “Skywalker/Skyscraper Twins” (2020) nods to the Seneca ironworkers who built New York’s skyline — an icon of American power — in light of the country’s ongoing marginalization of Native people. Steel I-beams pierce stacks of ceremonial Indian blankets, evoking a brutal irony: The material that built those symbols of American dominance violently impale a material that it once biologically weaponized against Tribes. Through this jarring juxtaposition, Watt exposes the cruel paradox of Indigenous labor helping erect the infrastructure of a nation that sought their erasure. 

RYAN! Fedderson’s (Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation) chilling “Bison Stack Crane” (2018) extends Watt’s critique of New York’s industrial appetite for Indigenous erasure. A metal crane drops a bison skull onto a heap of thousand-dollar bills, invoking the systematic campaign to starve Plains nations into submission. The slaughter’s industrial afterlife was equally insidious: Bones too large to transport were piled into macabre monuments, as seen in an infamous 1893 photograph of Michigan Carbon Works, while smaller ones were shipped by train, ground into carbon black, and used to whiten sugar at Brooklyn’s Domino factory and strengthen the steel in cranes like the one Fedderson depicts. Her sculpture transforms the bones of a genocide into the raw material of capitalism itself — a stark meditation on the infrastructure of violence.

Spirituality is also woven into the show, yet the artists wrestle with the challenge of moving beyond its often clichéd presence in Indigenous art – sometimes succeeding, other times falling into predictable or disjointed expressions. Terran Last Gun’s (Blackfeet) “Nearing the Sky Beings Lodge” (2021) situates a purple sun within teal and ochre galaxies atop Tribal rolls — a Native American tracking system that continues to dictate identity and federal recognition today. His work synthetically pairs a familiar visual motif in contemporary Native art with celestial forms, gesturing toward an interconnectedness that transcends human, spatial, and spiritual boundaries. Tony Abeyta’s (Diné) “Dispersion” (2018) offers a more subdued approach in its cubist portrait composed of totemic and bird-like elements, its earth-toned acrylics layered against a micaceous clay backdrop. Yet its muted palette and stylized construction evoke a detached, almost inert spirituality, undercutting its own allusions to movement and transformation. 

Other works interweave Indigenous motifs to contest archival erasure. Sarah Sense’s (Chitimacha and Choctaw) “Dickens” (2022) weaves archival photographs into a sepia-and-taupe tapestry, its pixelated lattice dulling both the visual impact and the potential dynamism of its medium. The phrase “The New World” emerges faintly from the composition, its faded presence mirroring the erasures embedded in colonial narratives. Wendy Red Star’s (Crow) “Dust” (2020) foregrounds a repititive black-and-white photographed triumvirate against a green, ecru, and white star quilt enrobed in connect-the-dot constellations marked on all sides by the word “dust.” This produces a striking contrast within the composition and in comparison to other metaphysical works, from Jason Clark’s (Non-enrolled Algonquin, Creek) polemic creation scene-like painting “Winona and the Big Oil Windigo” (2014) to Marwin Begaye’s (Diné) depiction of a spectral vulture, “Columbia River Custodian” (2018), which mirror mass produced Native art like posters with glowing wolves, eagles, and buffalos superimposed over sunsets and cosmic backdrops. Red Star instead layers historical and contemporary narratives, evoking a visual parallel to the Three Kings and the Star of Bethlehem from the Bible. She employs repetitive attire and sheriff’s badges, blending Crow and cosmic imagery into a philippic against authority that reflects the compounded impact of colonization and religious imposition. 

Jocular works appear throughout the show, leveraging levity to diffuse the contradictions of contemporary Native life. In Julie Buffalohead’s (Ponca) “The Great Divide” (2008) the iconographic painting depicts a short-haired 1950s-era woman in a ruby dress bent over a white picket fence offering sugar cookies to a supine dog; a rabbit, otter, and weasel standing on hind legs; and a crane posed next to a tipi. I am reminded of children’s storybooks and the Arcadian ideals of American suburbia. Raven Half Moon’s (Caddo) approximately seven-by-three feet (two-by-one meters) “E-a’-ti-ti”(2021) is not a hat on a hat, but a head on a head — a bipartite stoneware sculpture that invokes Mount Rushmore. The mirrored Native faces at its base, topped with 18th-century white-wigged and bespectacled faces sinking into each other and diagonally bifurcated by a wash of white and red paint, however, disrupt the monumental allusion. Instead, the claymation-like work reminds us of feminist Cherrie Moraga’s This Bridge Called My Back (1981) (or in this case, head), which critiques the building of United States power upon the bodies of Indigenous people.

For centuries, American institutions have flattened Native existence into a relic of the past, a historical footnote to be studied rather than a living, evolving force. Yet, as Indigenous Identities makes clear, the so-called “past” is still unfolding. Native artists have always operated outside the Western art world’s linear timeline — moving in circles, spirals, and returns — holding history as not something left behind but something to actively engage. In this sense, the exhibition doesn’t just correct the art world’s omissions; it dismantles the entire premise of progress as defined by colonial modernity. What emerges instead is an art history that refuses erasure, one that has always been here, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always continues at the Zimmerli Art Museum (71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey) through December 21. The exhibition was curated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.