Regalia Meets Riot Gear: Native Artists Turn Protest into High Art
#nativeamericanheritagemonth
Contemporary Native painting and sculpture emerge from lineages that are both continuous with, and radically disruptive of, twentieth-century American modernism. Rather than standing outside the canon, artists such as Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), and Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee) extend and critique the languages of abstraction, Pop, and conceptualism while insisting on Indigenous land relations, sovereignty, and survivance as the ground of their work. Exhibitions and studies of the last two decades, from Bill Anthes’s Native Moderns to recent projects like The Land Carries Our Ancestors and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map, have made it clear that Native artists did not arrive late to modernism; they helped shape it and are now central to global contemporary art.
The lineages of contemporary Native painting and sculpture can be traced through several overlapping arcs. Early twentieth-century painters associated with institutions like the Santa Fe Indian School and Bacone College forged “flatstyle” vocabularies that balanced ceremonial specificity with graphic abstraction, while sculptors such as Allan Houser (Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache) translated traditional forms into streamlined modernist volumes. Mid-century figures like George Morrison (Grand Portage Band of Chippewa) and Houser are now widely recognized as Native modernists who engaged Abstract Expressionism, color-field painting, and postwar sculpture on equal footing with their non-Native peers. Anthes’s Native Moderns and the National Museum of the American Indian’s Essays on Native Modernism both argue that their work cannot be reduced to ethnographic illustration, but operates instead within a self-conscious discourse about land, nation, and abstraction. Parallel developments in the Dakotas, Oklahoma, and the Southwest, exemplified by Oscar Howe’s fractured, kinetic Dakota dancers and Fritz Scholder’s Indian/Not Indian series, further destabilized expectations about what “Indian art” should look like, forcing museums and markets to confront Native artists as modernists rather than tradition-bearers alone.
This history sets the stage for contemporary practices that both inherit and critique modernism. Recent curatorial projects such as Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, and The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans explicitly frame contemporary Native work within a long continuum of experimentation rather than a belated turn to the contemporary. In that continuum, WalkingStick, Smith, and Gibson occupy a crucial position; each draws on earlier Native modernisms, but pushes painting and sculpture into multisensory fields saturated with text, found objects, performance, and institutional critique. Their work demonstrates that Indigenous modernism is not a discrete episode but an ongoing, relational practice that reorients how modern and contemporary art histories are written.
Indigenous abstraction is a key site where these lineages crystallize and shift. The “Indian Space” painters of the 1940s and 1950s, non-Native New York artists such as Peter Busa and Steve Wheeler, who openly adapted Indigenous North American motifs, exemplify a modernist fascination with Native design that often stopped short of acknowledging Native intellectual sovereignty. Anthes and other scholars have shown how Indian Space artists drew heavily on Northwest Coast and Plains visual systems to generate all-over compositions and interlocking forms; yet the source communities were rarely credited as co-authors of modernism. In contrast, Native modernists such as Morrison and Howe treated abstraction as a means of articulating specific Indigenous experiences of place and history. Morrison’s horizon-dominated canvases, for example, fuse Lake Superior shorelines with the gestural energy of Abstract Expressionism, while Howe’s prismatic figures rework Dakota quillwork and ledger drawing structures into quasi-cubist arrangements.
WalkingStick, Smith, and Gibson extend this re-Indigenization of abstraction into the twenty-first century. WalkingStick’s diptychs and horizon paintings formalize the split between Western pictorial conventions and Indigenous land-as-relation, while retaining a modernist pleasure in the flat surface and the grid. Smith’s cartographic and flag-based paintings deploy fields of color, repeated marks, and overlaid text that echo Abstract Expressionism and Pop, yet their compositional logics derive from Indigenous mapping practices and storywork. Gibson’s beaded punching bags and text-saturated wall works retool hard-edge patterning and Op art geometries through Choctaw and Cherokee beadwork, powwow regalia, and queer club aesthetics. Smarthistory’s discussion of Gibson’s I’m Not Perfect underscores how the work’s dazzling chevron patterns and circular motifs refuse to separate “decorative” Indigenous design from high-modernist abstraction; they are the same visual language read through different histories.
Land, memory, and the split horizon are particularly central to Kay WalkingStick’s landscapes. The retrospective Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist and Kate Morris’s Shifting Grounds both emphasize how WalkingStick’s recurrent horizontal division, the band of land under a vast sky, becomes a formal device for thinking about contested territories and layered sovereignties. Works such as Havasu Revisited and New Mexico Desert pair lush, illusionistic renderings of cliffs and mesas with adjacent panels of thickly worked abstraction, incised with patterns referring to Indigenous textiles and pottery. The horizon line in these works is not merely a natural feature; it is also a border, a scar, and an index of the long history of land cessions and dispossession. Jessica Horton has argued that WalkingStick’s sculptural copper panel Where Are the Generations (1991), with its stamped hoofprints crossing a gleaming metal field, materializes the violent erasures of Indigenous presence during the American Indian Movement era while insisting on the continued movement of people, animals, and ancestors across the land.
WalkingStick’s handling of paint intensifies this temporal layering. In New Mexico Desert, thin glazes allow underpainting to flicker through, suggesting the palimpsest of geological time beneath the contemporary moment, while the adjacent abstract panel uses wax-infused paint scraped back to reveal earlier chromatic decisions, like memories surfacing through sediment. In later works reproduced in The Land Carries Our Ancestors, WalkingStick often overlays silhouetted treelines or geometric patterns atop photographic or painted vistas, collapsing the distinction between surface ornament and “background” landscape. The repeated horizon is thus less a line of separation than a hinge where multiple times and ways of seeing touch, echoing long-standing Indigenous understandings of land as a sentient, storied presence rather than inert scenery.
WalkingStick’s diptychs make this epistemological split explicit. From the 1980s onward, she frequently paired a representational landscape with a nonrepresentational panel that draws on motif systems from Haudenosaunee, Northwest Coast, and other Indigenous visual traditions, as well as modernist abstraction. She has described these works as embodying “two ways of seeing”; one aligned with Euro-American landscape painting, the other with Native cosmologies that emphasize relationality and reciprocity. In a work such as Wallowa Lake: Memory, the painted lake and mountains occupy one panel, rendered in cool, atmospheric tones, while the adjacent panel offers a compressed field of earthy reds and ochres, inscribed with arcs and cross-hatched bands that suggest both basketry patterns and pathways. The painted land is not simply an object of contemplation; it is kin, bearing the traces of displacement (the Nez Perce removal from the Wallowa Valley) and ongoing care.
This relational understanding of land challenges the subject–object model that undergirds much Western landscape painting. As Morris notes, WalkingStick’s splitting and doubling of the picture plane invites viewers to hold at once the aesthetic pleasures of color and texture and the ethical demands of history and responsibility. The diptychs enact a visual form of what many Indigenous thinkers describe as “two-eyed seeing”; the capacity to view the world simultaneously through Indigenous and settler frames without collapsing one into the other. In the context of contemporary environmental crises, WalkingStick’s insistence that land is relation rather than resource aligns her work with broader Indigenous critiques of extractivism and with movements to recognize Indigenous land rights and land-back claims, as foregrounded in exhibitions like The Land Carries Our Ancestors.
If WalkingStick’s split horizon reorients the viewer’s relationship to land, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s maps and flags rewire how nation itself is pictured. From the late 1980s onward, Smith produced a series of map paintings that overlay the outline of the United States with place-names of Indigenous nations, price tags, newsprint, and cartoon fragments. In works discussed in the Whitney’s Memory Map catalogue and in Smarthistory’s essay on State Names, Smith fills the familiar continental outline not with state borders but with tribal names (Crow, Salish, Navajo, Lenape) making visible the palimpsest of Native sovereignties that underlie the settler map. As she remarked in a 2024 interview, maps “represent our stolen country,” and her task is to “subvert” those maps and their stories.
Works such as Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People) (1992), I See Red: Target (1992), and Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World with Ensembles Contributed by the U.S. Government (1991) mobilize the U.S. flag, commercial logos, and children’s toys to indict the entanglement of nationalism, capitalism, and colonial violence. In Trade, a collage-like painting of a canoe and a schematic map is crowned by a row of cheap “Indian” souvenirs and sports memorabilia, inviting non-Native viewers to consider what they are willing to trade for stolen land, and whether the “gifts” offered in return (trinkets, stereotypes, empty treaties) can ever be adequate. In I See Red: Target, Smith overlays a target logo on the outline of the U.S., surrounded by headlines about Native land struggles; the concentric rings of the corporate logo become a bull’s-eye on Native bodies and territories. Through these works, maps and flags cease to be neutral backdrops and become contested signs, rewritten to foreground Indigenous place-making and survivance.
Collage, assemblage, and appropriation are central to how Smith and her peers reclaim modernism and Pop. Memory Map and other critical studies have highlighted the ways in which Smith’s multi-layered surfaces, saturated with clippings, fruit labels, cartoons, and hand-drawn glyphs, echo the Neo-Dada and Pop strategies of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns while pulling those strategies back into the orbit of Indigenous history. A Vogue obituary notes that Smith juxtaposed “old photographs and 1930s fruit labels” with contemporary newspaper articles, creating a historical continuity between past and present forms of extraction and exploitation. In this sense, appropriation cuts both ways: where early modernists appropriated Indigenous forms without accountability, Smith appropriates the visual detritus of American consumer culture in order to expose its colonial underpinnings.
Gibson’s practice takes up this logic of appropriation and turns it toward queer Indigenous futurity. The catalogue Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer describes how Gibson began covering mass-produced Everlast punching bags with glass beads, tin cones, jingles, and hand-stitched fabrics, transforming icons of masculine aggression into shimmering, queer regalia. These works, including I’m Not Perfect (2014), draw equally on powwow dance regalia, clubwear, and the high-modernist grid. Smarthistory emphasizes that the beaded surface of I’m Not Perfect is at once decorative and deeply political, bringing Indigenous and queer craft traditions into contact with a form associated with boxing; a sport in which bodies of color are both celebrated and brutalized. In both Smith’s paintings and Gibson’s sculptural assemblages, collage and appropriation become tools for re-inhabiting and unsettling the visual languages of modernism and Pop from within.
Text, slogans, and protest function as extensions of this collage logic, turning painting and sculpture into platforms for visual activism. Smith’s works frequently incorporate handwritten phrases, printed headlines, and stenciled words that operate as sharp, sometimes sardonic commentary: “No Olympics in Indian Country,” “Who’s in charge of the land?” or simply “I See Red,” a phrase that connotes anger, blood, and the color used to code Native identity. In her essay Land/landbase/landscape in The Land Carries Our Ancestors, Smith explicitly links her use of text to Indigenous storytelling and to the need to name environmental destruction and treaty violations in plain language. The words in her paintings are not captions added after the fact; they are integral visual elements that punctuate fields of color and direct the viewer’s attention to sites of harm and resistance.
Gibson’s work likewise depends on text as a carrier of protest and desire. The Broad’s exhibition description of Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me emphasizes how he juxtaposes “foundational legal documents,” “quotes from civil rights activists,” and “pop song lyrics,” weaving together American, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ histories. In the Venice Pavilion installation and related works, phrases such as WE WANT TO BE FREE, IF NOT NOW THEN WHEN, and WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT appear on monumental paintings, banners, and sculptural forms, reframing the rhetoric of U.S. democracy through Indigenous and queer demands for accountability. By embedding text in brightly patterned, sensorially overwhelming environments, Gibson resists the didacticism of much protest art; instead, he invites viewers into an affective space where language, color, and pattern operate together as a kind of embodied chant or song.
Pattern, regalia, and pop culture converge most spectacularly in Gibson’s beaded punching bags and textile works. Like a Hammer and Smarthistory’s essays both note that Gibson’s punching bags are adorned with glass beads, tin cones, jingles, and fringes associated with powwow and jingle dress traditions, as well as geometric designs drawn from Southeast Native ribbonwork and Plains beadwork. These objects also incorporate references to club music, fashion branding, and queer nightlife, collapsing distinctions between powwow arena, dance floor, and gallery. In I’m Not Perfect, for example, a repeated diamond motif evokes both peyote stitch beadwork and the pixelated graphics of digital culture, while the jingles attached to the surface signal a sound component that is present even when the work is silent. In large-scale text works such as Those Days Are Over (discussed in the Venice Pavilion materials), patterns and slogans are sewn into vast quilt-like banners that recall protest signs, star quilts, and pop concert backdrops all at once.
These patterned surfaces function as both armor and skin. Mary McNeil’s conversation with Gibson in Boston Art Review underscores how his use of beads and fringe positions queer and Indigenous bodies as sites of beauty and resilience rather than shame or victimhood. The punching bags, in particular, stage a confrontation between the violence of the gym or ring and the protective, celebratory qualities of regalia. By transforming a training tool into a shimmering, labor-intensive object, Gibson flips the script. The bag no longer absorbs blows; it emits a field of queer Indigenous presence that demands care and attention.
Bodies, hybridity, and queer Indigeneity run throughout Gibson’s sculptural and installation work. The Venice Pavilion exhibition the space in which to place me includes beaded busts and equestrian figures, flags, and monumental sculptures that combine references to U.S. military statuary, powwow dancers, drag performance, and queer club culture. Critics have noted that these hybrid bodies resist legibility within standard identity categories: they are both Indigenous and queer, both historical and futuristic, both vulnerable and armored. Smarthistory’s overview of Gibson’s career describes him as centering “queer and Indigenous visibility,” while McNeil’s interview traces how his experiences as a queer, urban Indigenous person inform his investment in multiplicity and refusal. The Venice texts further emphasize that the exhibition title comes from Layli Long Soldier’s poem Ȟe Sápa, which reflects on the problem of finding “a space in which to place” Indigenous identity within settler structures. Gibson’s installations answer by creating spaces where queer Indigenous bodies and desires are central rather than marginal, choreographing viewers through environments that demand new bodily comportments and relations.
Across all three artists, materials themselves speak. Canvas, copper, beadwork, rawhide, metal, and found objects are not interchangeable supports; they carry specific histories and protocols. WalkingStick’s use of wood panels and copper sheets invokes both European panel painting and Indigenous metalwork, while the incised patterns on those surfaces allude to textile and basketry traditions. Smith’s reliance on newsprint, cheap toys, and commercial packaging foregrounds the material detritus of consumer capitalism and its role in ongoing colonial extraction. Gibson’s blending of manufactured sporting goods, handmade beadwork, and industrial metals dramatizes the entanglement of Indigenous labor and global commodity circuits. Like a Hammer and The Met’s documentation of his Facade Commission, The Animal That Therefore I Am, highlight how his large-scale works activate architectural surfaces and urban space, turning museum facades into sites where Indigenous materials and messages recalibrate public encounters.
These material choices resonate with broader currents in contemporary Native art. Exhibitions such as HIDE: Skin as Material and Metaphor and The Land Carries Our Ancestors foreground how artists treat skin, hide, clay, and fiber as metaphors for cultural resilience and vulnerability. In this context, the beaded punching bag, the collaged map, and the split-panel landscape can be read as material arguments about what kinds of surfaces are allowed to carry history, law, and memory. Rather than accepting canvas as the neutral ground of “fine art,” these artists insist that canvas, rawhide, copper, and plastic all come with baggage; and that making that baggage visible is itself a decolonial act.
Museums, markets, and canon-breaking form the institutional backdrop for these practices. For much of the twentieth century, Native art was segregated in ethnographic or “Indian art” galleries, even when its makers engaged the same formal concerns as their Euro-American contemporaries. Anthes and the Essays on Native Modernism volume both document how Morrison, Houser, Howe, and others were often written out of U.S. modernist narratives, their work shown in separate venues or miscategorized as craft. Recent exhibitions have begun to redress this omission. Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, organized by Mia in 2019, placed Smith, WalkingStick, and many peers in a transhistorical dialogue with historic beadworkers, potters, and painters, challenging both gendered and racialized exclusions. The Land Carries Our Ancestors, curated by Smith for the National Gallery of Art, marked the first time in decades that the NGA devoted a major exhibition to Native art and the first time it invited an artist, rather than a non-Native curator, to organize such a show.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map at the Whitney Museum further consolidated Smith’s position as a central figure in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century American art, while Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer and Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe, both co-organized by the National Museum of the American Indian and regional museums, explicitly argued for Native artists’ importance in global modernism. The cumulative effect of these projects has been to shift market and institutional expectations. Native artists are increasingly collected and exhibited not as representatives of a cultural “area” but as key protagonists in contemporary art. This shift, however, is uneven and contested, and many artists continue to navigate expectations that their work “look Native” or address certain themes.
The canon-breaking work of WalkingStick, Smith, and Gibson is thus both aesthetic and institutional; they not only redefine painting and sculpture but also force museums, biennials, and markets to reconfigure their categories and gatekeeping practices.
Finally, the global circuits of biennials and major museums intensify both the opportunities and the stakes of visibility for Native contemporary artists. Smith participated in the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 and the Havana Biennial in 2009, signaling an early inclusion of Indigenous North American voices in global exhibitionary spaces. Gibson’s selection to represent the United States with a solo presentation at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, the first time an Indigenous artist has held the U.S. Pavilion alone, marks a further turning point. The Venice project, the space in which to place me, co-commissioned by the Portland Art Museum and SITE Santa Fe, has been widely described as a kaleidoscopic environment of murals, flags, sculptures, and video works that bring Indigenous and queer histories into one of the most visible stages of contemporary art. The exhibition’s subsequent travel to institutions like The Broad in Los Angeles extends this visibility and underscores how Native artists now move through the same transnational circuits as their non-Native contemporaries, even as they critique the colonial genealogies of those circuits.
At the same time, projects like The Land Carries Our Ancestors, which has traveled from Washington, D.C., to regional museums, and the proliferation of Indigenous-led biennials and triennials, demonstrate that global visibility need not be routed only through Euro-American capitals. These exhibitions foreground multigenerational dialogues among artists working in weaving, beadwork, performance, painting, and installation, situating WalkingStick, Smith, and Gibson within a broader constellation of Indigenous makers who are reshaping contemporary art on their own terms.
Taken together, the practices of Kay WalkingStick, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Jeffrey Gibson show that Indigenous modernism is not a mere chapter in a national story of stylistic progress but an ongoing project of rethinking what painting and sculpture can do in relation to land, nation, and embodiment. Their work emerges from lineages that include twentieth-century Native modernists, the contested appropriations of Indian Space painting, and the pedagogies of institutions like the Santa Fe Indian School and the Institute of American Indian Arts; yet it also inaugurates new configurations of abstraction, collage, and text rooted in Indigenous worldviews. By splitting the horizon, rewriting the map, and beading the punching bag, they transform some of the most familiar forms of modern and contemporary art into vehicles for Indigenous sovereignty and queer futurity. In dialogue with exhibitions, catalogues, and activist movements that seek to decolonize museums and art history, these artists reposition Native art not at the margins but at the center of contemporary discourse. The challenge now is for institutions, scholars, and publics to accept the implications of that repositioning: to recognize that the story of painting and sculpture in the Americas has always been Indigenous, and that any future art history adequate to our moment will have to begin from that fact.
References:
Anthes, Bill. Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960. Duke University Press, 2006.
Ash-Milby, Kathleen, editor. HIDE: Skin as Material and Metaphor. National Museum of the American Indian, 2009.
Ash-Milby, Kathleen, and David W. Penney, editors. Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, in association with Smithsonian Books, 2015.
Cultural Survival. The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans. Cultural Survival, 2023.
Gibson, Jeffrey. Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer. Denver Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2018.
Horton, Jessica L. Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation. Duke University Press, 2017.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map. Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023.
McNeil, Mary. It Is My Infinite Indigenous Queer Love: In Conversation with Jeffrey Gibson. Boston Art Review, no. 7, 2019.
Morris, Kate. Shifting Grounds: Landscape in Contemporary Native American Art. University of Washington Press, 2019.
National Gallery of Art. The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans. National Gallery of Art and Princeton University Press, 2023.
National Museum of the American Indian. Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe. National Museum of the American Indian and University of Oklahoma Press, 2022.
National Museum of the American Indian. Essays on Native Modernism: Complexity and Contradiction in American Indian Art. National Museum of the American Indian, 2006.
National Museum of the American Indian. Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian. Prestel and National Museum of the American Indian, 2008.
Portland Art Museum and SITE Santa Fe. Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me. U.S. Pavilion, 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2024.
Smarthistory. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, State Names. Smarthistory.
Smarthistory. Jeffrey Gibson. Smarthistory.
Smarthistory. Jeffrey Gibson, I’m Not Perfect. Smarthistory.
Steinhauer, Jillian. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Shaped by the Land. The New York Times, 2023.
The Broad. Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me. The Broad, Los Angeles, 2025.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023.
Vogue. Remembering Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a Native Artist Who Changed the Way We Saw America. Vogue, 2024.
I don't know if you have been to Albuquerque or anywhere else in New Mexico but there are several places that feature this type of artwork