One thing Georgia O’Keeffe fans enjoy about her work are the beautiful New Mexico landscapes – wide open vistas, close-ups of eroding cliffs, colorful and moody skies, all devoid of people. Looking out from her big picture window in her studio at Abiquiu, she sometimes said she felt the landscape was “hers.” But Tewa artist Jason Garcia (Okuu Pín) has long wondered – didn’t she forget something? Did she forget that her neighbors – Indigenous people from the half-dozen Tewa pueblos – still live there and have lived there from time immemorial?
Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum invited Garcia to co-curate an exhibition to answer that question.
2025 Welcome to Tewa Country by Jason Garcia/Okuu Pín (Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo) made with traditional ceramic techniques and natural paint – a comment on deep ancestral roots with Northern New Mexico land – not a 20th century “discovery” by a New York painter. Courtesy: the artist.
The result is a loving, provocative, look at the land, legacy, and people in one of the largest special exhibitions ever mounted by the GOK Museum – Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country, on view through November 1, 2026.
2025 Tewa Country map showing the four sacred mountains, modern pueblos, and ancestral pueblos; created by the exhibition collaborators and museum graphic designer Kristian Breeze.
Take a look through some of the beautiful, throught-provoking, and spiritual work in our Flickr album.
Here’s a map to Tewa Country, home to just one group of Pueblo people who share the Tewa language, culture, and spiritual practices and symbols. Note that one of the four sacred Tewa mountains (indicating north, south, east, and west geographic markers for Tewa communities) is the single peak that Georgia painted over and over. She and others called it Cerro Pedernal; Tewa people call the sacred mountain Tsi’ Pin.
Stepping inside the expansive show, visitors are surrounded by spectacular O’Keeffe paintings, punctuated by contemporary works by twelve artists from six Tewa pueblos whose ancestors inhabited the Four Corners for millennia and migrated centuries ago toward the Rio Grande to build communities near Abiquiu, the historic village that Georgia called home.
Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1962-1963 painting Above the Clouds I surrounded by stone, ceramic, and earth pigment works by contemporary Tewa artists – Arlo Nahaminga (Ohkay Owingeh, Hopi), Eliza Naranjo Morse (Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo), Marita Swazo Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo), and Martha Romero (Nambé Pueblo).
The bright space is filled with landscapes, contemporary installations, and sculptures – most utilizing clay from the very earth that both Georgia and contemporary artists trod and respected.
The museum inviteed the Tewa artists to look through Georgia’s collections and tour her Abiquiu home, and left them to create works for the show. Santa Clara’s John Garcia Sr. honors Georgia’s love of the land and sky. Randolph Silva read in Georgia’s letters her love of attending dances at the nearby pueblos, and it made him think about his own family’s travels across the Southwest performing dances at tourist locations. He discovered tourist postcards featuring his own family and decided to paint huge “postcard” paintings of dances that Georgia might have seen in the 1930s.
2025 mixed-media on board Nana’eaa Dance in Abiquiu Plaza by Randolph Silva (Kha’p’o Owingeh / Santa Clara Pueblo) – one of a postcard-style series of six Tewa Pueblo dances that O’Keeffe would have witnessed in the 1930. Courtesy: the artist.
Two 2025 acrylic paintings by John Garcia Sr. (Kha’p’o Owingeh / Santa Clara Pueblo): One Last Door and The Sentinels Have Always Been Watching, referencing the deity Morning Star, Tsi Pin (Pedernal), and other mountains. Courtesy: the artist.
After touring Georgia’s home, Tesuque’s Marita Swazo Hinds took a more personal approach, creating pieces that wonder about Georgia’s contemplative daily routines and creative processes.
2025 ceramic installation Did Georgia Pray? by Marita Swazo Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo), reflecting on the extent Georgia honored the land in her creative process as Puebloans do; pot shards, red clay pot with cornmeal, broken pieces, and Ghost Ranch rocks and earth. Courtesy: the artist.Georgia O’Keeffe’s white porcelain Urbino Teapot with 2025 Let’s Have Tea, Tea Time with Georgia by Marita Swazo Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo) – a tea set made of hand-gathered clay, and teas that the artist imagines Georgia would enjoy. Courtesy: the artist.
Several Tewa pueblos are on the Parajito Plateau, where the US government appropriated land in the 20th century to build top-secret nuclear warheads in the Manhattan Project. Michael Nahaminga’s powerful work and several others reference the threats that began when Georgia lived there in the 1940s and the legacy of environmental contamination that persists today.
2025 Disaster #8 by Michael Namingha (Ohkay Owingeh, Hopi) – an image of a pyrocumulus cloud that results from an intense fire, volcanic eruption, or nuclear explosion; silkscreened and enamel on canvas using the high-alarm color from the Air Quality Index. Courtesy: the artist.
Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1945 oil painting Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow – a replacement of her favorite blue sky with a sky color associated with the Trinity Site nuclear test. Courtesy: private collection.
Meet the artists and hear them talk about their participation in this remarkable collaboration with the GOK Museum:
Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1940 oil painting Untitled (Red and Yellow Cliffs).
It’s 1680 and the Revolt has begun. Heavily armored Spanish forces guide their horses and armored attack dogs through a maze of Southwestern mesas in driving rain and a blinding storm to thwart the unexpected uprising of the Pueblo nations. The leader of the Revolt, Po’pay invokes the spirits and calls up his warriors and archers to meet the challenge of the assault. In the epic, 9-minute video installation Blindfall, there’s another twist – Pueblo warriors and starship pilots from the 2180 future use their superpowers to ensure a win.
The exiting epic is part of the exhibition Continuum: Blindfall, First Strike on the second floor of Vladem Contemporary in Santa Fe through October 18, 2026. See the highlights in our Flickr album
The Revolt is planned: Blindfall installation features 2024 glazed raku sculpture Sika, Than (Sun) by Virgil Ortiz with cinematic depiction of 1680 Revolt leader Po’pay. Courtesy: the artist.
Acclaimed ceramic artist Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo), who has developed this time-travel Pueblo superhero history/sci-fi adventure over the last twenty years, partnered with artist Eric F. Garcia to bring the Spanish story to life and provide visitors with a glimpse into the deep histories and belief systems of the clashing cultures.
The three-part exhibition space initially feels like a contemplation of traditional and contemporary ceramic artistry, but unfolds. Through the doors, it’s a fast-paced, other worldly presentation on the process of creating 19 tribes of superheroes (representing the 19 current Pueblos of New Mexico) and surrounding sculptures. Turn the corner, and you experience a no-holds-barred immersion into an action-packed past/future futuristic cinema experience.
Ortiz calls this exhibition a “three-dimensional storyboard” for the full-length epic he plans to make. The first section begins with a small case with traditional and contemporary Cochiti pottery. Ortiz showcases the ancient practices that he’s mastered in his contemporary work – and believes will be continued by future generations of Cochiti artists.
Mother and son Cochiti Pueblo ceramic legacy: 1985 owl figure by Serafina Ortiz and 2026 Blind Strike by Virgil Ortiz; both created in Cochiti red clay with black wild spinach plant paint. Courtesy: the artist.
Two enormous ceramic raku-fired heads dominate the main hall of the gallery. Both depict warriors from the future – Po’pay, the brave leader of the Revolt, and the leader of his female archer corps, Tahu the Blind Archer (“you are not blind if you can see through your fear”). Ortiz created these at the Cuernavaca studio of Juan de Dios Sánchez – an experience with a large-scale ceramic master that Ortiz says felt “like working with Prince and Madonna.”
Pueblo leader: 2026 glazed raku ceramic scultpure Po’pay 2180: Leader of the Pueblo Revolt by Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo). Courtesy: the artist.
Pueblo warrior: 2025 glazed raku scultpure Storm Sentinel: Tahu, Leader of the Blind Archers by Virgil Ortiz – the leader of a female warrior corps guided by instinct to move through the chaos of the strike. Courtesy: the artist.
These are flanked by his work with Garcia and his other ceramics collaborator, Tommy Lomeli. Garcia contributes two busts of the controversial La Malinche, the Indigenous Nahua woman who translated at Cortez’s side as he negotiated with neighboring city-states to vanquish Montezuma in 1520 and bore him a son. There’s no better symbol of New World cultural collision and legacy.
Eric F. Garcia’s 2026 Doña – a portrait of La Malinche, who symbolizes shifting identity, language, and empire. Courtesy: the artist.
Eric F. Garcia’s 2026 Shadow Guide – a portrait of La Malinche, the Nahua woman who served as intermediary for Cortez in his 1520 conquest. Courtesy: the artist.
Lomeli’s collaboration bedazzles Virgil’s ceramic busts of his twin aeronaut pilots with gorgeous layers of automotive paint, giving the 2180 characters some low-rider flash.
2180 pilots: Sculpture collaboration by Virgil Ortiz and Tommy Lomeli: 2026 Dya, Aeronaut and Muus, Aeronaut – twin pilots of the Survorship Armada, who steer the fleet through the deluge surrounding the Revolt, saving people, culture, and language and taking it into the future. Courtesy: the artists.
The second exhibition space features mannequins of the warriors themselves, bedecked in custom fabric, leather, and fierce masks and headgear. Several are superhero Recon Watchmen from 2180, who are seen in the back video advancing through the forbidding Bisti Badlands, preparing for an attack on the unsuspecting Spaniards. There are also video clips of the artists at work creating clay, costumes, and large-scale sculpture, interspersed with stylish clips showing his transformation of friends into superheroes.
Protectors from 2180: Ortiz’s 2026 The Last Sovereigns video and time-traveling Recon Watchman wearing fashion as armor –Talon and Matriarch Mitz with a ceramic Cochiti mask. Courtesy: the artist.
The third dark gallery is where fury is unleashed on a wrap-around screen. At the sides, ominous black profiles of Po’pay and his Spanish opponent loom. Garcia contributes large stand-alone sculptures of a charging Spanish conquistador and his vicious war dogs. Ortiz counters with a Recon Watchman and a gentle Sika Cochiti creature, who protects children but turns deadly when unleashed in battle.
The clash begins: ceramic protector sculptures by Virgil Ortiz – 2024 Sika, Than (Sun) and 2023 Kuu’ame (South) Recon Watchman –in front of Blindfall action sequence featuring charging Spanish dogs of war. Courtesy: the artist.
Blindfall, First Strike is an unforgettable experience – an assault of images, past and future, colliding, changing, morphing into unknown beings, worlds, and forces – a message about the blind whirlwind of war and strength required to ensure that culture will endure.
Listen in as Ortiz explains his process, Cochiti tradition, and collaboration with his community of multicultural artists:
And thanks to Ortiz, Garcia, their team for the reminder of the legacies and promise that guides them going forward.
Legacy: 2026 mixed-media collaboration by Eric F. Garcia and Virgil Ortiz – Castilian Christ signifying colonial devotion and dominance, and Po’pay, Face Off showing Puebloan defiant resolution. Courtesy: the artists.
Gazing into her canvases, you enter vast space. Is it the sky? Are you looking through a lagoon? Into the deep recesses of the universe? You’re surrounded by ethereal, tranquil work by an artist who spent her life observing the natural world, creating abstractions causing you to pause and contemplate. The masterful work in Emmi Whitehorse: Intimate Landscapes is on view at Santa Fe’s Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian through October 4, 2026.
This retrospective was mounted in two parts this year so that some of her recent large-scale canvases could have room to breathe in the hogan-inspired main gallery of the Wheelwright.
Whitehorse’s 2007 Fragment oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.
Part 1 of the exhibition was subtitled Light and Space; Part 2 Line and Form. Works in both installations have hovering biomorphic shapes against a subtle ground that seems to undulate. Take a look in our Flickr album to see the gorgeous, atmospheric works from both installations of Emmi’s show.
Whitehorse’s 2019 Kelp Moss oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.
Entering the Wheelwright, the introductory gallery features some of Emmi’s earliest work – a set of abstractions inspired by symbols of Diné culture and the color-field movement. From the start of her art training, Emmi was attracted to abstraction. Her delicate, mixed-media layers and light touches are a prequel of her mature style.
The artist’s beginnings: Three of Whitehorse’s 1980 works from her Kin Náh Zin series – collages with dyed rice paper, chalk, conte, and pencil on paper; inspired by memories of Ancestral Pueblo sites.
Nearby, a glass-topped case shows ephemera from Emmi’s earliest showings at the Wheelwright – a featured member of the Grey Canyon Artists, a ground-breaking collective initiated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith; a set of portfolio slides from the archives; an early typewritten artist’s statement; and photos taken at the opening of her celebrated 1991 solo show exhibition.
1991 photo of Emmi Whitehorse with her grandmother and mother at the opening of her ten-year solo show at the Wheelwright.
The retrospective includes some of the impressive works from this period, on loan from private collections – hand-applied chalk and pastel on paper mounted on canvas. Right from the start, Emmi identified her ethereal abstractions as landscapes – inspired by her days as a young girl tending to her grandmother’s sheep amidst the endless vistas of the Navajo Nation, looking at horizons, skies, and the small details of the natural world at her feet. She imagined details of landscapes beyond the horizon, and held on to those images in her memory.
Whitehorse’s 1983 Landscape – East #255 oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.
Early on, she sometimes incorporated symbols and slightly recognizable images into her work – such as domestic items (like her grandmother’s comb) or mysterious symbolic figures – but over the years, these types of definable shapes gave way to less recognizable abstract elements and shapes from her memory.
Whitehorse’s 1991 Untitled #883, with an abstracted depiction of her grandmother’s comb; oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.
Symbolic landscape: Whitehorse’s 1999 Untitled #902, oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.
The main gallery is populated by works of hazy, floating images created on paper with chalk, soft conte crayon, and pencil.
Whitehorse’s 2014 Charting a Walk-About oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.
Emmi works on these images flat on a table (not an easel), so she can walk around and apply delicate layers by hand from all sides. When the work is complete, she mounts the paper on canvas – a structural support that makes for sturdier display, transport, and installation.
Whitehorse’s 1997 Witch Seed I, #1147 oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.
The visual experience at each canvas truly feels like standing in nature, slowly observing surrounding details. Sometimes it feels as if you’re looking at the smallest details of pods and nature; sometimes it feels like you’re peering into a microscope to see the organisims populating a pond or a deep lake or ocean. Take a close-up view:
Whitehorse’s 2002 Undercurrent, #1315 oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: the artist; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.
Video of details in Whitehorse’s 2002 Undercurrent, #1315
Her most recent works are confident and very large-scale, allowing you to get lost in the mystical expanse as you move across the work. It’s a lesson learned from the mid-century masters of American color-field painting but channeled through the mind of a quiet artist who has spent time really looking and feeling the world around her.
How does she do it? She treats the act of creation as a slow process, working on multiple pieces at a time. Large expanses populated with tiny details and memories.
Detail of Whitehorse’s 1996 Tó (Water), #1109 oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.
Detail of Whitehorse’s 2019 Kelp Moss oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.
Enjoy this visit with Emmi talking about the land and family that formed her, her life path, and how she creates in her beautiful studio. Kudos to Diné filmmaker Kelso Meyer for such an insightful portrait:
To celebrate over six decades of the revolutionary educational institution, museum of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) decided to showcase the breadth and scope its spectacular contemporary jewelry collection made by students, faculty, and artists-in-residence. The Stories We Carry shows that wearable art can convey ancient tales, speak truth to power, and incorporate surprising materials in the hands of forward-thinking innovators.
The exhibition – which has occupied the upper floor of Santa Fe’s IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts for a four-year run – is on view through September 28, 2026.
Dramatic 1980 fringed, beaded gauntlet cuffs on buckskin by Marcus Amerman (Choctaw); featuring spirals of energy that emanates from the artist’s hands.
Take a walk through the exhibition in our Flickr album, and see what we’re talking about right here in closeups of the displays on the IAIA site.
The diverse range of jewelry created over the years at IAIA might surprise anyone with a stereotypical view of “Native jewelry,” but it’s exactly this mastery of ideas and materials that keeps visitors coming back for a closer look and to admire new favorites from the over 100 pieces on display.
1974 silver, jet, ivory necklace by unknown artist in IAIA Honors Collection.
1995 bracelet by Robert Gresse, Jr. (Crow); made with silver, turquoise, lapis, coral, sugilite, and buffalo horn.
The first gallery is a clean, white space that presents the full range of techniquqes, processes, and types of wearable art. It’s no surprise that the curator has chosen to present the innovative, masterful belt by Denise Wallce to kick off the show. Denise has crafted ten distinctive silver/gold inlaid figures who are each gathering materials and making traditional art of the Pacific Northwest. Take a close-up look at the miniature craft makers going about their work.
Detail of 1992 silver Craftsperson’s Belt by Denise Wallace (Chugach Aleut), featuring figures making traditional crafts; figures inlaid with semiprecious stones and gold, interspersed with incised fossilized ivory.
Over a dozen cases are filled with spectacular works that emphasize the material process that decades of IAIA students, faculty, and museum donors have contributed to the broader collection – necklaces, cuffs, belts, bolos, and pins made through inlay, casting, enamel, beadwork, and other studio techniques.
Traditional handmade bead technique with modern sensibility: 2001 white melon shell necklace by Juan Cate (Kewa-Santo Domingo Pueblo)
Leather with cast silver: 2001 Inuit Mask Bowguard by Mark Holiday (Diné), 1969 bowguard by Ramos Pacheco (Kewa-Santo Domingo Pueblo) from the IAIA Honors Collection, and 1981 Gato Bow Guard by Mark Swazo Hinds (Pueblo of Tesuque).
Some of the remarkable pieces collected by IAIA from the early years of the its Honors program are unfortunately marked “unknown artist.” But it’s still exciting to see early student pieces by artists like Estelle Loretto or Marcus Amerman who are considered leaders in contemporary Southwest art. (Click here to see our coverage of Marcus’s 1995 retrospective at the Wheelwright.)
1974 silver enameled pin by Gilbert Kellywood (Ohkay Owingeh) from the IAIA Honors Collection.
1962-1983 nickel silver and Carico turquoise bracelet by unknown Hopi artist the IAIA Honors Collection.
The second gallery begins with a large photo of the “room where it happens” – the IAIA jewelry studio. Back in the early Sixties, IAIA’s jewelry studio was begun by legendrary Charles Loloma (Hopi), who merged modernist aesthetics with traditional jewelry practice and encouraged his students to follow their own aesthetic paths. The innovation hasn’t stopped.
2022 photo of IAIA jewelry studio and student work stations by Sallie Wesaw-Sloan (Eastern Shoshone)
The gallery is filled wth workd by IAIA graduates, visiting artists, and faculty – a mind-bending experience that sets traditional, futuristic, technological, and controversial work side by side. Jewelry and wearable art that holds both a shining vision of the future and reflects upon dark corners of Indigenous history. It’s all quite a tribute to the creativity campus that IAIA was at its inception and continues to be.
Two pieces of silver, coral, turquoise, and ironweed jewelry by 1962-1965 IAIA faculty member Charles Loloma (Hopi) – a 1973 pendant and a 1963-1965 hair comb.
2017 Decimation by Decimal by IAIA 2019 artist in residence Jodi Webster (Ho Chunk/Prairie Band Potawatami; necklace made with beaver pelt, sterling silver, bone beads, glass beads (with faux blood), and sinew – all precious materials not normally associated with jewelry.
The last gallery features a mix of storytelling – everything from metalwork on a Mohawk hard hat telling a story of East Coast construction-trade prowess to pow-pow princess crowns to politics and a barely-there magical quartz amulet by Pacific Northwest artist Isaac Tait (Nisga’a). Contemporary achievement, 20th century culture, and ancient myths are all put to work in the IAIA jewelry studio.
1999 Indian Police Headdress by Richard Glazer Danay (Mohawk) – an aluminum construction worker’s hard hat with silver from buffalo nickel coins with attached BIA police badge, created in tribute to the legendary Mohawk skywalkers who specialize in Manhattan skyscraper construction.
The exhibition represents over 100 years of Indigenous jewelry in all its forms from IAIA’s permanet collection. Take a walk through the exhibition with guest-curator Brian Fleetwood (Mvskoke), who explains his inspiration behind his selections and explains how wearable art has told stories from ancient times:
See all eight of IAIA’s short videos about these artists and this fascinating tribute to creativity and culture here, including the backstory on the crowns.
Mark of Native Indigenous royalty: 1978 silver, turquoise, and beaded Miss IAIA Pow-Pow Princess crown by Lutz Whitebird (Southern Cheyenne)
For years, the Nevada Museum of Art has been collecting photographs by artists whose work puts the environment, our culture’s addiction to nuclear and fossil fuel, construction booms, and degradation of desert landscapes front and center. Altered Lands and the Anthropocene, on view in Reno through September 20, is a beautiful installation across the second floor that causes visitors to stop, look, and contemplate what it took to record such tour de force images.
Sensual, cocoon-like participatory space at the core of Ernesto Neto’s 2019 Children of the Earth – filled with futons, pots, crytals, instruments, and spice smells Courtesy: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.
The masterful photo exhibition is next door to a solo installation that serves as a great respite – the immersive, colorful, magical playground-style environment Ernesto Neto: Children of the Earth, also on view through September 20. More about this in a moment.
The first section of the photography galleries features traditional documentay photography about legacies of industrial-scale extraction of oil, gas, uranium, and minerals across the West – Edward Weston’s image of big equipment at work toward the end of the Great Depression, Robert Adam’s aerial view of the legacy of Colorado mining, and Zig Jackson’s headdress-adorned Native American perched at the edge of the largest mine on earth in Utah.
Toshio Shibata’s 1997 silver gelatin print Coolidge Dam, San Carlos, AZ – a controversial project built as part of the San Carlos Indian Irrigation Project on tribal burial grounds.
2004 (printed 2020) archival inkjet print by Zig Jackson (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara) Indian Man at Kennecott Copper Mines, Toole, Utah – a man in a war bonnet sits at the edge of the largest human excavation on earth.
These share the space with evidence of long-lasting consequences of uranium mining by Patrick Nagatani and a startling document of America’s disposal culture from Edward Burtynski. Each image is crammed with feeling that the ominous impacts will be around for a long time – moving calls to action.
In pursuit of nuclear fuel: Patrick Nagatani’s 1990 chromogenic print ’Bida Hi’/Opposite Views: Northeast-Navajo Tract Homes and Uranium Tailings, Southwest-Shiprock, New Mexico – from his Nuclear Enchatment series highlighting the community contaminated from the 1950s uranium mill at Shiprock.
Impact of relying upon fossil fuel: Edward Burtynski’s 1999 chromogenic color print Oxford Tire Pile #9a and #9b, Westley, California, USA – a documentation of a massive industrial hazard, which later caught fire and contaminated nearby communities and water resources.
To mix it up, the curators have thrown in a touch of the surreal – an arresting image by Cara Romero collaged into the oil-field landscape near where she grew up, and Meg Webster’s sculpture from living Earth. Beautiful and inviting art from across the room, but more thought-provoking as you draw near.
2015 archival inkjet print Oil Boom by Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) from her “Water Memories” series – with collaborator artist-activist Canupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota) floating in brown liquid below an oil pump.
Meg Webster’s 1986/2005 peat moss, earth, and plastic installation Moss Bed, Queen – evoking relaxation in nature with materials collected nearby from the forest; on walls, work by Martine Gutierrez and Lee Friedlander. Courtesy: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Nevada Museum of Art.
Some of the largest works also require visitors to take them in from a distance – such as Rohini Devashar’s gorgeous, huge printed silk.
Visitors contemplate Rohini Devashar’s 2023 Latent Field (Field One) – colliding molecules and celestial bodies printed on silk. Courtesy: the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.
But in most cases in this section, you have to get close to the fine print to truly understand what you’re seeing. Most appear abstract. An epic seemingly all-black work by David Maisel is actually a collage of aerial views of the bombing runs in the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The evocative, overlapping images in a gelatin silver print by Laura Bon, Tristan Duke, and Richard Nielsen was done inside a container-shipping-sized camera obscura at the tragic environmental site of Owens Lake. The huge one-of-a-kind photo was actually developed in the sad lakewater.
2013 gelatin silver print Bubblers, Owens Dry Lakebed (Lakebed Developed) – project by the Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio created by Laura Bon, Tristan Duke, and Richard Nielsen. Created on light-sensitive paper via camera obscura inside a shipping-container studio, developed in the lakebed.
A similarly epic achievement is displayed in the gallery devoted to documenting the aftermath of the Marshall Islands nuclear detonation experiment following World War II – Meghann Riepenhoff’s cyanotype tryptich made right there on a contaminated beach using plants that (like the people) are still in recovery.
Marshall Islands project: Meghann Riepenhoff’s 2023 Untitled (Adaptive Radiation: Radioactive Palm Triptych – a cyanotype made from laying native medicinal plants found across pre-treated paper; washed in the waters of Bikini Atoll, the site of extensive nuclear tests in the 1950s. Courtesy: the artist and Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC
The images are stunning but the content is disturbing (and meant to be), so visitors are actually eager to enter Ernesto Neto’s nearby recuperation chamber. Adults and children can find respite, surrounded by natural dyed fabrics (you can even put on matching play-jackets!) that provide a mysterious, happy entry to a magical world.
Surround yourself with cushions, create healing sounds with a Tibetan singing bowl, lay down, smell the fragarent spices, look at playful Amazon-inspired hanging jungle things, think about the future, and be happy to be among the Children of the Earth.
Exploring the sensual, cocoon-like participatory space at the core of Ernesto Neto’s 2019 Children of the Earth – filled with futons, pots, crytals, instruments, and spice smells Courtesy: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NYC
Thanks to the Nevada Museum of Art for providing an amazing, unforgettable experience!
Filling the entire museum, the exhibition uses painting, sculptures, and performance sculptures to chronicle how radical performances by Native Americans shifted conversations, illuminated forgotten populations and treaties, asked difficult questions, and thoroughly influenced the trajectory of the contemporary Native American art movement.
2019 lightbox portrait Headdress – Jeneen by Dana Claxton (Lakota); the sitter bedecked in beads and embroidered gifts. Courtesy: the artist and Forge Project Collection.
Take a walk through the show (and a few performances) in our Flickr album.
In the entry, a provocative neon sign by Demian DinéYazhi (Diné) beckons, but visitors are immediately pulled into the large space surrounded by a graphic history of the historic Alcatraz occupation (1969-1971, one-of-a-kind mask wall pieces by Lloyd Kiva New (leader of brand-new The Institute of American Indian Arts 1967-1978), IAIA’s 1969 manifesto on Indian Theater, and a 1972 video of a NYC production by the Native American Theater Ensemble (running on an ancient Sony Trinitron). It’s all surrounded by a wall textile designed by Linda Lomahaftawa (Hopi/Choctaw) when she was an IAIA student in the Sixties. A provocative sculpture by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (Métis) adds the contemporary drama.
Exhibition entry: 2021 mixed media Counterblaste by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (Métis); tobacco-stuffed pantyhose rabbit-human figure; surrounded by 1969 Alcatraz occuption documentation and paintings by Lloyd Kiva New. Courtesy: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art; Art Bridges.
This sets the stage for curator Candace Hopkins’ thesis – in the 1960s, Native American performance went hand-in-hand with greater activism, self-determination by tribes, and contemporary art in all its forms. Listen to her explain:
Two performance spaces lie just beyond this gallery. First Nicholas Galanin’s gallery where his performance The White Carver happens weekly (surrounded by photos of previous performances since it was first staged in 2012). The White Carver tackles the subject of appropriation and Native cultural misunderstanding head on.
Behind the velvet rope: set for 2012-ongoing White Carver performance by Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax) in which a Caucasian woodcarver replicates an object made by a Galinin – a commentary about appropriation and commercialization of Indigenous culture by non-Native communities. Courtesy: Gochman Family Collection.
Next, you enter a room hung with giant earring sculptures from Eric-Paul Riege (Diné), who activated them in a ritualistic performance at SITE in August. Riege’s installation allows everyone a simultaneous experience of the contemporary and cultural deep time. Kite’s floor installation, right nearby, does this, too. (Check out our previous post about Kite’s innovative IAIA show here.)
Museum goers watch Eric-Paul Riege (Diné) interact with his mixed-fiber scultptures 2020-2022 jaatloh4Ye’iitsoh (“earrings for the big god”) (August 15, 2026); oversized jewelry suggesting knowledge by listening, harmony of natural fibers, and totems of memory. Courtesy: Forge Project Collection, traditional lands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck; Art Bridges.
Two-dimensional art on display also evokes a mix of ancient and “now.” Action painting mixed with cultural symbols. Bugle beads or painted blankets echoing color-field painting.
2014 acrylic and graphite Crow Dance by Rick Bartow (Wiyot). Courtesy: Denver Art Museum.
2022 acrylic and glass bugle bead Wopila/Lineage II by Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota) – a reference to the long tradition of Lakota abstraction. Courtesy: Gochman Family Collection.
Mash-ups of pop culture, cartoony cheesecake, ancient craft, culture, and social commentary – all the work on display incorporate aspects of performance.
1990 sculpture War Dance Technology by performance artist James Luna (Payomkowicham, Ipai, and Mexican). Courtesy: Gochman Family Collection.
2014-2022 graphite and colored pencil drawing Killer Smile by Rachel Martin (Tlingit/Tsaagweidei, Killer Whale Clan of the Yellow Cedar House Eagle Moiety). Courtesy: the artist.
The back gallery takes us back into time to consider the irony of early ethnomusic recording in the Pacific Northwest during a period when potlatches were banned and ceremonies forbidden. The exhibition has a beautiful installation of Native American LPs from the 1960s and 1970s beneath a stunning installation by Sonny Asu of copper recordings that cannot be played.
1960s-1970s LP recordings of Native American tribal songs by Indian Records; at rear, 2012 copper record installation “Ellipsis” by Sonny Asu (Ligwilda’xw Kwakwaka’wakw from the Wei Wai Kum Nation) – 138 records not intended for play. Courtesy: Forge Project Collection, traditional lands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck.
1991 High Performance art magazine cover featuring James Luna during his AA Meeting/Art History performance.
In every room, videos display performances on stages (Jeffrey Gibson or Spiderwoman Theater) or in nature (asinnajaq (Inuk). One room is devoted to a set, props, and documentation of work by the influential performance artist James Luna, whose art did not shy away from the ever-present issue of alcoholism in Native communities.
The exhibition also includes an immersive, highly theatrical, multi-gallery installation by the New Red Order. Here’s the manifesto by NRO’s Adam and Zach Kahalil (Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians) and Jackson Polys (Tlingit).
2023 performance documentation video of Don’t Make Me Over by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw and Cherokee) featuring performer Ariel Twist (Nehiyaw). Courtesy: the artist.
NRO uses satiric videos, props, murals, documents and timelines, merchandise, and graffiti style to illuminate collisions of history, pop culture, and consciousness surrounding urban Native communities today – a totally head-spinning (and brain-spinning) experience.
Video of the 2020-ongoing Progenerator installation by the New Red Order, a mixed-media installation by artists Adam and Zach Kahalil (Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians) and Jackson Polys (Tlingit) that probes societal stereotypes alongside non-Natives’ fascination with Native culture. Courtesy: the artists.
And thanks to the recreation by Erica Lord, SITE Santa Fe visitors were able to experience Artifact Revisited. Erica recreated an acclaimed 1987 performance by James Luna – a still Native body on display within a museum, encased in glass. In Erica’s recreation, her “cabinet” was surrounded by museum signage purporting to explain “Indians” and provide context for the “exhibit.” In the age of NAGPRA, the experience was unforgettable. Watch the performance heare, and listen to Erica explains how she came to perform this historic piece and how it felt.
For more background on the connections between Native American theater, politics, and art, here’s a link to the recently published book about this never-before-told story.
The quiet adobe museum entrance displaying a retro WWII-era poster prepares no one for the ultra-modern abstraction extravaganza inside the Harwood.
Pursuit of Happiness: GI Bill in Taos, on view through May 31, 2026, shows and explains how an influx of rule-breaking painters from both coasts returned from the War, enrolled in contemporary art classes, and created the mid-century phenomenon that art historians classify as Taos Modern. Take a virtual visit in our Flickr album.
Harwood Museum of Art entrance in Taos
The exhibition tells the story of young people who first applied their talents to defend America in Europe, the Pacific, and the home front, and then chose to channel their energies and experiences through color and paint on large canvases to give life to postwar Abstract Expressionism, big-field flat color painting, and innovative materials.
The exhibition captures both the energy and optimism of the moment and shines a light on the mentors, teachers, and educational institutions that gave these vets a platform to experiment as social realism’s dominance in the art scene was giving way to new expressions – inner spiritualism, bold strokes, and white canvases with wide open spaces.
South Pacific Army airman Wolcott Ely’s undated oil From the Seas that are South – trained in Paris and was a private student of Andrew Dasburg in New Mexico. Courtesy: Taos Municipal Schools Historical Art Collection.
Mid-century modern dominates the exhibition, but there are a few references to artists’ wartime experiences – dramatic ink drawings from Oli Shivonen’s European war journals and Janet Lippencott’s expressive canvas that puts the viewer amid the carnage in London from one of Germany’s final bombing raids – something she experienced as a WAC serving on Eisenhower’s staff.
Janet Lippencott’s 1940s painting Raid – reflecting her experience as a WAC in London during one of Germany’s final 1944 bombing raids; in 1949, she used the GI Bill to study at the Bisttram School of Fine Art.
An award-winning 1942 poster by Taos Pueblo artist, cartoonist, and Army veteran Eve Mirabal, who studied at the Taos Valley Art School. Courtesy: private collection.
The exhibition frames the work by highlighting the seasonal and year-round schools that welcomed students under the GI Bill of 1944, which provided WWII vets with benefits for education, mortages, and employment. A remarkably high percentage of veterans took advantage of this transformative legislation that built America’s middle class. To learn more, download the gallery guide here.
Gestural abstraction by a former student of the UNM Taos Field School on the GI Bill – Malcolm Brown’s 1960 oil painting Olaf’s Dream.
The earliest modern art program in Taos was the University of New Mexico Summer Field School, which began in 1929. Students worked and slept on the grounds of today’s Harwood itself. By the time that GI Bill students attended, property owner and philanthropist Elizabeth Lucy Harwood gifted her former residence – now the Harwood Museum – to UNM. The exhibition showcases work by former UNM summer students R.C. Ellis and Malcolm Brown.
Although she wasn’t on the GI Bill, the Harwood has an entire room full of the UNM program’s most acclaimed attendee, Ms. Agnes Martin, who shared studio space alongside returning war vets in 1947.
Transcendentalist artist Emil Bisttram also accepted GI Bill students into his seasonal fine arts program, which emphasized the principles of Kandinsky and European spiritual abstractionists. Although Taos was his home, Bisttram offered summer and winter fine arts sessions were in Los Angeles and Phoenix, where he taught. Janet Lippincott, who became a lifelong Taos resident, and Cliff Harmon, who also trained with Albers at Black Mountain College, are featured.
Founder of Bisttram School of Fine Art –transcendentalist Emil Bisttram’s 1954 geometric abstraction Out of Space.
Work by a former student of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College and the Bisttram School of Fine Art on the GI Bill – Navy sonarman Cliff Harmon’s 1951 oil painting, Construction.
The cross-pollination of styles, personalities, spiritual influences, and teaching philosophies in Taos was intense and rewarding in those post-war years. Two upstart abstractionists – Bea Mandelman and Louis Ribak – arrived and began the Taos Valley Art School in 1947, which welcomed 20 students per semester.
A significant number of works are by Leger-trained Mandelman and social-realist-turned abstractionist Ribak, and their former GI Bill students – Louis Catusco, Ted Egri, Leo Garel, Herman Rednick, and Eve Mirabal (the Taos Pueblo artist credited as the first female Native cartoonist in America).
Co-founder of the Taos Valley Art School – Beatrice Mandelman’s 1950 Mouintain (formally Dark Cloud)Co-founder of the Taos Valley Art School – Louis Ribak’s 1950 abstract Movement No. 2.
Clyfford Still-trained painters also made their way to Taos from the California School of Fine Arts, the legendary modern-art training ground in San Francisco. The Harwood’s all-white back gallery features spectacular works by Clay Spohn, Lawrence Calcagno, and Ed Corbett. When the pay was too low at CSFA, even Richard Diebenkorn enrolled in UNM to use his more generous GI Bill benefits.
Edward Corbett’s 1951 chalk on paper Number 9 – former student at California School of Fine Arts who moved to Taos. Courtesy: Tia Collection.
Former teacher and student at California School of Fine Arts who moved to University of New Mexico – Richard Diebenkorn’s 1951 untitled abstraction inspired by New Mexico’s Southwestern landscape.
The back corner features work by two former Black Mountain College. Several are by Oli Shivonen, who served in the corps of artists and sound engineers in the “Ghost Army” that created battlefield deceptions to deceive Axis troops. Note the flat shapes and bold colors, reminiscent of another Ghost Army vet, Ellsworth Kelly.
A small multiple by John Chamberlain also stands here – a tribute to the inspiration that Chamberlain drew from the new methods, material, and iridescent magic reflected in work by another SoCal-to-Taos transplant, Larry Bell.
Former Black Mountain College student on the GI Bill who moved to Taos – Oli Shivonen’s 1965 color abstraction Column Three.
John Chamberlain’s 1971 El Molé based on crumpled paper bags – one of a cast poly resin edition by Gemini G.E.L.; coated with silicon oxide. Courtesy: private collection
For more stories, background, and innovations by GI Bill beneficiaries across the US art world, listen to this lecture by the curator of this amazing show, MaLin Wilson-Powell:
And in a living tribute to all of the Taos veterans, the Harwood created a community space for temporary exhibition of photos, memories, and tributes right inside this remarkable exhibition that honors the men and women of art and service.
Photos and other items donated by the community for the Harwood’s veteran memorabilia space.
When New York Historical invited Kay WalkingStick to view its Hudson River School collection, she stood in awe of the evocative landscapes by Bierstadt, Durand, Kensett, and Cole – shimmering brooks, majestic mountains, and romantic skies. Their mastery of paint invites you to get lost in the inviting beauty. But Kay noticed that native people – who had inhabited these settings for millennia – were almost always missing. The supposed “wilderness” was likely still someone’s home.
Kay and the team at New York Historial correct this omission in the gorgeous, thought-provoking exhibition Kay WalkingStick/Hudson River School, now on view at the Heard Museum in Phoenix through May 25, 2026 – one of three stops for its US tour. (The exhibition debuted at NYH in New York in 2023.)
Louisa Davis Minot’s 1818 painting Niagara Falls with tiny Indigenous figures – a rare landscape by a female landscape painter in early America. Courtesy: New York Historical
The exhibit juxtaposes early 19th century Hudson River School landscapes with a retrospective of Kay’s own landscapes – large paintings of swirling ocean currents, dramatic Western mountains, and East Coast rivers with bands of Indigenous geometric patterns stenciled across them. It’s a signal that we are all still living on Indian land.
Take a look at our favorite works in our Flickr album.
Kay WalkingStick’s 2020 two-panel landscape New Hampshire Coast – overlaid with a stenciled Native American band. Courtesy: the artist and Hales New York and London.
By hanging 19th-century landscapes side-by-side with Kay’s paintings, the curators suggest we contemplate different questions: Did the popularity of the Hudson River School’s view of “unhabited wilderness” contribute to Americans’ drive West? Does anyone remember that the East Coast was also Native land? Does anyone realize that Native Amerians still live there?
Asher Durand’s 1837-1878 painting View of the Ausable River – a view of supposed wilderness that was home to the Haudenosaunee. Courtesy: private collector and New Britain Museum of American Art.
Bierstadt’s sketches of actual Shoshone tribal members is one of the few examples to depict specific Native Americans. And at the time, critics and buyers objected to his insertion of native people into his large-scale romantic landscapes.
Albert Bierstadt’s 1859 sketch Four Portraits of North American Indians, drawn during the Lander Expedition to record people he believed would soon vanish. Courtesy: New York Historical
The anchor painting of the exhibit is her epic Niagara, showing us the view from the Canadian side of the Falls. As she viewed the Niagara paintings in the NYS collection, WalkingStick wondered if she was up to the challenge of painting the Niagara falls herself. But when she saw a dramatic 1818 painting of Niagara by a relatively unknown female painter, Louisa Davis Minot, she decided to go for it! And what a triumph!
Kay WalkingStick’s 2022 two-panel Niagara with a Haudenosaunee pattern stenciled across remind viewers of its original inhabitants – the first painting by a Native American acquired by NYH. Courtesy: New York Historical
To drive home the connection between these landscapes with the original native inhabitants, WalkingStick looks for geometric patterns associated with specific groups of people. For Niagara, she used a Haudenosaunee pattern from a ceramic piece by David Smith, which is on view nearby in the gallery, along with patterned baskets from her own collection.
Steve Smith’s wheelthrown 1973-1974 jar, incised with a Haudenosaunee pattern that Walkingstick stenciled across Niagara. Courtesy: National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian.
1960s Cherokee woven basket. Courtesy: Kay WalkingStick and Hales New York and London.
For her paintings of the Wampanoag Coast, she used a patterned band associated with the Pequot/Narraganset tribes who originally inhabited Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
Kay WalkingStick’s 2018 two-panel oil painting Wampanoag Coast, Variation II – a view of the New England coast overlaid with a Pequot/Narraganset patterned band. Courtesy: private collection
Listen to Kay talk about her painting and see images of its original installation at New York Historical:
Other highlights of the exhibition are WalkingStick’s Our Land works, each emblazoned with a design from a Plains Indian woman’s parfleche bag – creations that WalkingStick contends are the first geometric abstract paintings done in America.
Kay WalkingStick’s 2007 two-canvas painting Our Land featuring a Parfleche design and a view of the Bitterroot Mountains, original land of the Nez Perce. Courtesy: private collection
For a more in-depth discussion between Kay and the exhibition curator, Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, about Kay’s approach to painting and the beauty she admires in Hudson River School paintings, click here.
Kay WalkingStick/Hudson River School will be on display at the Allentown Art Museum June 20-October 11, 2026 and at the James Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida November 7, 2026 – March 21, 2027.
Who better to ask us to pay attention to environmental impacts than people whose ancestors have been stewards of the land for millennia? Earth, air, fire, and water is the thematic structure for this beautiful, throught-provoking contemporary art show Essential Elements: Art, Environment, and Indigenous Futures, on view at Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture through May 31, 2026.
The curators have selected 31 artists from 18 tribal communities across the United States to draw our attention to how tribal communities and the rest of us can listen to the Earth and imagine positive outcomes in the future.
The Earth on edge: 2020 fired clay Unstable World by Roxanne Swentzell (Santa Clara Pueblo). Courtesy: private collector.
Some jewelry, paintings, drawings, pots, and installations draw attention to traditional symbols of the Earth’s health (traditional symbols, wildlife living in a healthy environment), but many include pointed references to recent wildfires and other devastating alterations affecting tribal agriculture and people’s health.
2025 pen-and-ink drawing Biohazard Beauty II by Rowan Harrison (Diné/Isleta Pueblo). Courtesy: the artist.
Take a look at some of our favorite work in our Flickr album.
The Earth section begins with Roxanne Swentzell’s large ceramic sculpture Unstable World, which sets the tone for the rest of the show – Native art that calls attention to our current environmental balancing act. Nearby, several Diné artists ring the alarm bell about the insidious damage being done to Navajo Nation and nearby pueblos – and their own families – from the long legacy of open-pit uranium mining and contamination from nuclear testing.
Rowan Harrison’s intricate drawings are made to raise awarness of intergenerational health challenges and to honor and support to cancer victims. The curators have given lots of space to Diné artist Shayla Blatchford’s photo-interview Anti-Uranium Mapping Project, including a sobering map of the nearly 500 abandoned uranium mines scattered across her homeland. Biologist-artist-public health advocate Mallery Quetawki (Zuni Pueblo), creates abstracted works. Only when you get close do you see the shapes are radiation symbols of uranium contamination working its way into DNA strands.
2019 We Will Continue to Fight by biologist-artist Mallery Quetawki (Zuni Pueblo), raising awareness of how radiation contamination on native land damages people’s DNA. Courtesy: the artist, University of New Mexico Community Environmental Health Program
Beautiful, intricately woven baskets are displayed nearby. As you admire the creations of Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy), a 2025 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship “genius” grant, it’s unsettling to learn that Jeremy and other Eastern art virtuosos are concerned that their baskets could be the last. Black ash and other natural materials are disappearing from their homelands at an alarming rate due to the triumph of invasive plant species.
Closeup of 2010 Lidded Basket with Porcupine Design by Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy) woven from black ash, sweetgrass, and porcupine quills; 2010 SWIA Market award winner. Courtesy: private collection.
2015 Ash Basket by Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy) woven from black ash, which is important to the tribe’s creation story, but highly endangered. Courtesy: private loan.
Other jewelry and ceramics artists incorporate images of animals, insects, and other indicators of what the world looks like when clean water and healthy air abound – dragonflies, tadpoles and frogs, and Avanyu, the all-important Puebloan water spirit. Multimedia artist Cannupa Hanska Luger is seen (via video) in a ritual performance “from the future” to ensure people’s continual gratitude for food, shelter, and tools.
Art featuring creatures of healthy air: 2001 Dragonfly Tall Lidded Jar by Autumn Borts (Santa Clara Pueblo), 2005 Dragonfly Bracelet by Ramon Dalangyawma (Hopi), and 2006 Dragonfly Vase by Dolly Naranjo Neikrug (Santa Clara Pueblo).
Keystone water species: 1958 ceramic Tadpole Figurines by Lucy Lewis (Acoma Pueblo); clay, crushed potshard temper, slip, and carbon paint.
Considering the string of recent devastating wildfires that have plagued New Mexico in recent years, the artwork in the exhibition representing the element of fire is truly resonant. Kevin Naranjo made a tiny ceramic jar into which he carved his recollection of the wildly destructive 2011 Las Conchas Fire. Michael Namingha’s spectacular digital image is not just a pretty view of the sky. It’s the image of a cloud that only appears above an extremely intense heat source – exactly what he photographed during the 2022 Hermit’s Peak Fire or that New Mexicans witnessed in the Trinity blast.
2024 silkscreen Disaster 2 by Michael Namingha (Tewa-Hopi) – a pyrocumulus cloud emerging from the Hermit’s Peak Fire, the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history. Courtesy: the artist, Niman Fine Art.
2011 Las Conchas Fire by Kevin Naranjo (Santa Clara Pueblo) – a carved (sgraffito) ceramic depcting trees, land, and fire that burned 150,000 acres of Santa Clara’s land on the Pajarito Plateau, including ancestral sites; the Avanyu water spirit hovers above.
Overhead, as you enter or leave this thought-provoking experience, you see paper poppies – the first flowers that bloom after a fire. Artist Leah Mata Fragua (Northern Chumash) is going a step further with her art after this exhibition ends. She’ll take her paper blossoms back home and burn them in a ritual that recycles her beautiful art back into the Earth.
2025 dyed handmade paper installation The Sun is on the Ground by Leah Mata Fragua (Northern Chumash), suggesting the wild poppies that bloom right after a wild fire. Installation intended to be recycled with fire at the exhibition’s conclusion. Courtesy: the artist
Any visitor to Chaco Canyon National Historial Park (850-1250 CE) makes the journey to appreciate innovative masonry of the Great Houses, the precision of the ancient road system, and the astronomically aligned walls, windows, and kivas. But how do contemporary Pueblo architects incorporate these traditional beliefs in their 21st century projects?
A fascinating, in-depth exhibition, Restorying our Heartplaces: Contemporary Pueblo Architecture– on view at Albuquerque’s Indian Pueblo Cultural Center through December 7, 2025 – explores how modern Indigenous architects incorporate traditional world views into their work.
2023 photo Kivas at Pueblo Bonito,Chaco Canyon by curator Ted Jojola (Islela Pueblo) showing advanced masonry and architectural concepts.
For example, just look at the design of the National Museum of the American Indian’s Resource Center – an organic design, aligned to the four cardinal directions, with extensive use of cedar wood.
1999 plans for the National Museum of the American Indian Resource Center. Courtesy: Ted Jojola (Isleta Pueblo)
Views of the 1999 National Museum of the American Indian Cultural Resource Center in Suitland, Maryland. Courtesy: Lynn Paxson.
This exhibition coincides with the 50th anniversary of the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act – legislation that shifted Native American policy in the United States from assimilation to self-determination. Tribes were now able to initiate and run justice, government, health and education departments of their own – a change that triggered a construction boom for new schools and administrative buildings.
The show opens as an immersive experience in a large, circular gallery that introduces the core belief system and origin story of the Ancient Puebloans. Across a large screen in a vivid animation, the Pueblo people emerge into this world from a previous world. You watch them migrating outward in a spiral – symbols that are reflected across the art, murals, and photographs on the surrounding walls.
Mural by Dominic Aquero (Cochiti) with symbols of Pueblo creation; T-door represents the spiritual passage between two worlds (sky and Earth)
This experience sets the stage for the rest of the exhibition by showing how the stonework and beliefs reflected by the architecture of Ancient Puebloan centers points the way forward for Pueblo architects today.
2022 print by Gerald Dawavandewa (Hopi Cherokee) with T-shaped door for passage between worlds (sky and Earth]
The exhibition describes Ancient Puebloan architectural innovations – passive solar heating, precise window alignment, and masonry approaches. How did the Ancients achieve such precision in their dramatic Chaco and Mesa Verde buildings?
The curators present engineering and survey tools from archaeological excavations and modern survey backpacks side by side – plumb bobs, levels, and measuring devices.
Ancient stone and ceramic plumb bobs (from California and from Hewitt excavation at Rito de los Frijoles, Bandelier). Courtesy: Museum of Indian Arts & Culture/Lab of Anthropology.
Modern survey tools: level, tape measure, compass, brass plumb bob, wood, and string. Courtesy: curator Ted Jojola (Isleta Pueblo)
They also add comparisons of selenite used as window panels in Old Acoma’s Sky City (among the longest-inhabited communities in the US) and the contemporary architectural approach to windows in the recently built Acoma museum – a thoughtful reflection of the past
The exhibition directly addresses past HUD housing approaches on tribal lands – pushing suburban-style low-income housing, which moved families away from the traditional Pueblo plaza (the HeartPlace) and provided pitched-roof designs that blunted community cultural practices that utilized traditional Pueblo flat-roof construction.
The curators remind us of the continual upkeep required by adobe construction – a repeated communal task typically undertaken by a community’s women that happened on a regular, cyclical basis. It’s also a reminder that Pueblo communities view buildings as living presences that evolve – not just concrete objects exist in a “finished” state.
Views of the 2000 campus for the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Courtesy: Paul Fragua (Jemez Pueblo)
Views of 2004 building designed by Janet Carpio (Laguna/Isleta Pueblos) for Pueblo of Isleta’s Headstart/Child Care Center.
Wall panels, blueprint books, and architectural models are used to demonstrate the contemporary innovations of Pueblo architects – the Resource Center of the National Museum of the American Indian (1999), the campus of the Institute of Amercian Indian Arts in Santa Fe (2000), and the Headstart Child Care Center for Isleta Pueblo (2004). Both incorporate design elements echoing the spiral migration path, alignment to the cardinal directions, and colors and elements of the Earth.
A huge multimedia interactive theater punctuates the walk-through – an immersive visit to Acoma’s new Cultural Center and Haa’ku Museum with tribal members and designers explaining the architectural details and how the buildings reflect the landscape and traditional belief systems.
Immersive interactive experience of Acoma’s new Cultural Center and Haa’ku Museum. Courtesy: Anna Seed Productions, Electric Playouse, and UNM ASPIRE.
The exhibition features the work of the Indiginous Design and Planning Institute (iD+Pi) at UNM and presents dramatic architectural models of the past, present, and future of the community of Nambe Pueblo.
Look through the exhibition in our Flickr album here – a future-forward look at the continuing progression of innovative architectural designs and the next generation of designers and architects respecting and integrating the Pueblo world view with buildings considered to be living, breathing HeartPlaces for the community.
2023 photo by curatorTed Jojola (Islela Pueblo) North Window View from Desert View Watchtower, Grand Canyon showing the T-shaped doorway symbolizing passage between worlds
As the curators made clear in their opening-day remarks, a similarly extensive exhibition could explore architectural innovation and spiritualism across Navajo Nation. Let’s hope that happens!
