Welcome to Session Nine

Indigeous artists have a different (they suggest "healthier") way of being in the world. Meet eleven artists and view their work reflecting how they see the world.

"Seeing with an Indigenous eye means considering the present in terms of its extended past and future. What seems simple on the surface is often shaped and transformed by oral traditions that bear witness to an interconnected and animate landscape. Humanity and nature—always in dialogue—share knowledge, intelligence, and volition to shape our world and inform our actions. Indigenous customs are dynamic and innovative. These artists are flexible in their choices and uses of tools and in the new ways they blend historical practices and diverse materials into their work. Even those artists who attend most overtly to timeless oral histories, stories, and traditions offer works that are shaped by contemporary life. Speaking with Light, Denver Art Museum.

In this session you will find eleven Indigenous artists using  different art forms in expressing how they see their way in being in the world.

• On Romanticism, an essay by Paul Chatt Smith, author and Associate Curator at the National Museum of the American Indian from Everything You Know about Indians is Wrong, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

• Meaning of Life, an essay by Paul Chatt Smith, author and Associate Curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, from Everything You Know about Indians is Wrong, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

• (optional  Speaking with Light - Historic Interstices of Indigenous Visualities and the Uprooting of Settler Terrains 

Scroll down for an overview of  the work of these artists. How would you describe their work? 

Mercedes Dorame, Nest of Apparitions—Mopii’ar Kiiy Akaawkoc, from the series Earth the Same as Heaven—‘Ooxor ‘Eyaa Tokuupar, 2013,  Inkjet print (Collection of Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, P2022.3. © Mercees Dorame 2022)

"Upon close looking, what appears to be a bit of yarn caught in a bramble is actually a meticulous construction by Mercedes Dorame. This humble nest is a portal to the artist’s memories and her deep relationship to the Malibou property on which, until  recently, her maternal grandparents lived. Constructing and photographing the nest created a story that will stay with her long after others take over the place. It also acknowledges her Tongva Nation’s longstanding residency in the basin of what today is called Los Angeles."  (Amon Carter Museum of American Art)

"Meryl McMaster (b.1988) is one of the most intriguing and accomplished artists working in Canada. In Bring me to this Place, she created a self-image that evokes what she calls “the contradictions and conflicts in [her]dual heritage.” Of nêhiyaw (Plains Cree), British, and Dutch ancestry, she was born and raised in Ottawa and continues to be based in the city. Her work is “predominantly photography based, incorporating the production of props, sculptural garments and performance forming a synergy that transports the viewer out of the ordinary,” and she is known for exploring the self  “in relation to land, lineage, history, culture and the more than-human world.” (Ottawa Art and Artists, An Illustrated History, by Jim Burant)

Sarah Sense, Bayous Meander, Trees Remember, Water Heals, Roots Meander, Inkjet prints, bamboo and rice paper, wax, and tape, 2022. Collection of Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, © Sarah Sense

"The outer panels of this work interweave photos of culture and natural place, invoking the invader’s mindset that has overrun but not fully taken over the landscape. Choctaw and Chitimacha weaving patterns make clear the resilience and continuity of those cultures. The middle panels, using maps and the words and drawings of ethnographer Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, suggest the overwhelming of Chitimacha life by settler colonialism. The loosening of the pattern, however, suggests a resolution found in the fluidity of water, tree branches, and roots." Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

See other work below by Sarah Sense 

"Bruce Silverstein Gallery will present the first New York gallery exhibition for Native artist, curator, writer, and activist, Sarah Sense, September 22 through November 5, 2022. Power Lines features two-dimensional photo-weavings and three-dimensional photo-baskets. Sense employs traditional weaving techniques from her Chitimacha and Choctaw family for this exhibition, combining photography and craft rich with historical significance and personal meaning."

"The visually layered imagery is both created and appropriated, incorporating subjects and themes that Sarah Sense has explored over her career, including her two personas, ‘the Cowgirl and the Indian Princess,’ landscape photography, representations of American historical figures relevant to Native histories, stereotypical depictions of Natives in Hollywood, and maps from world-renowned archives."  

"Power Lines shares a multi-faceted story; it is one of historical marginalization including the destruction and loss of land through colonization and the disappearance of culture and traditions through force However, it is also an uplifting testament to Native resistance and resilience, celebrating Chitimacha and Choctaw weaving and furthering Sense’s connection to her family and Native heritage." 

For more background information: Sarah Sense, "Power Lines" at Bruce Silverstein Gallery, NYC by Chadd Scott, Sept. 19, 2022.

Dylan McLaughlin, Lines, 2022, Inkjet print with audio. Collection of Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, © Dylan McLaughlin

"Vibrations and sounds, collectively called vibroacoustics, play significant roles in multispecies communication, including among bees, birds, and tree rooting systems. Power-line infrastructure creates an imposed, endlessly audible set of frequencies around 60hz throughout multispecies habitats. This is a landscape of dissonance." Dylan McLaughlin

Dylan McLaughlin, The People Who Invent the Tools to Invent the Dismantling of a World in Harmony, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.

Jolene Rickard, Sky Woman Looks Back II, Inkjet print, transparency, and red whip vine (dogbane) 1997/2022. Collection of the artist. © Jolene Rickard. Photography by Paul Leicht, courtesy Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

 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.

 Indigneous Art History Has Been Waiting for You to Catch Up. The late Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s final curatorial salvo—the largest show of Native American art to date—carries an elegiac weight, but also thrums with life. By Petala Ironcloud, Hyperallergic, April 8, 2025.

Image by Jeffrey Gibson, I WANNA STAY HERE WITH YOU FOREVER, 2019, repurposed punching bag, repurposed wool army blanket, glass beads, metal studs, tin jingles, artificial sinew, nylon fringe, and steel, Dallas Museum of Art, TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art Fund, 2019.87. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California. ©️ Jeffrey Gibson

Other Work by Rose B. Simpson 

"Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) presents one new and two existing sculptural works from her Carry series. Each Carry piece, composed of a large copper bucket and ladle adorned with glass beads, bears extravagantly long fringe whose draping emulates arboreal root structures. Alongside the artist’s works, White Hawk selected historic Lakota belongings from the BMA’s collection. Through these works, White Hawk insists upon an interdependence between art and function—and by extension art and life—effectively calling into question art history’s tendency to devalue craft. These works operate as physical metaphors for the carrying of history, cosmology, generational teaching, and deep thought." Preoccupied Indigenizing the Museum, Baltimore Art Museum, 2023.

"Collectively, the four prints create a suite titled Takes Care of Them. White Hawk explains: “Inspired by Plains style women’s dentalium dresses, the set speaks to the ways in which Native women collectivel care for our communities. Through acts of creation, nurturing, leadership, love, and protection carried out in infinite forms, our grandmothers, aunties, sisters, cousins, nieces, and friends collectively care for our communities. As a suite, these works speak to the importance of kinship roles and tribal structures that emphasize the necessity of extended family, tribal and communal ties as meaningful and significant relationships necessary for the rearing of healthy and happy ndividuals and communities

The idea for this suite of four dresses came from the practice of requesting four veterans to stand in each cardinal direction for protection when particular ceremonies are taking place. My mother is a veteran. In thinking through the ways the women in our lives stand guard, protect, and nurture our well being, the idea for this set of four was born. Each print is individually named with a quality that embodies the ways they care for us all. Yet, this list of qualities couldgo on and on and each person carries multiple roles. This list is simply a starting point, an acknowledgement and gesture of gratitude for the many women in my life that have helped Create, Nurture, Protect, and Lead in ways that have taught me what it means to be a good relative." Takes Care of Them Suite, Dec. 6, 2019