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In recent years, Native American artists have gained visibility in the art world. For centuries, Native art remained confined to Indian reservations, trading posts, and markets, with no dedicated commercial galleries in urban areas with Native presence such as New York, San Francisco, Tulsa, or Phoenix. However, works by these artists are finding space in important galleries and institutions, from Miami to Venice.
On the occasion of Native American Heritage Month, a selection of works by 25 Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian artists is presented. This list, while not exhaustive, represents a broad spectrum of artistic innovation spanning generations and techniques, from traditional ceramics to contemporary Ravenstail weaving. These artists, while honoring historical techniques and cultural knowledge, question conventional ideas about fine art, highlighting the vitality of Indigenous artists’ contributions to contemporary art and the need to ensure their voices and visions are central to artistic discourse.
Sydney Akagi (born 1989), Tlingit weaver, uses traditional Ravenstail and Chilkat techniques and materials to create masks, robes, and cloaks. Born in Southeast Alaska and a member of the Tlingit and Haida Indian tribes of Alaska, she made her first tapestry in 2018, learning from her mentor, Lily Hope. Chilkat formline patterns in fabrics such as Ceremonial Woven Tunic, Ravenstail and Chilkatwhich Akagi created for the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, historically declared secular and social status within the tribe; for Akagi, they often commemorate events in her life.
Bernice Akamine (1949–2024), born in Honolulu, was a Native Hawaiian sculptor, installation artist, and creator whose compositions in paper, glass, and metal critique the ongoing American colonial impact on Hawaii. Akamine earned an MFA in glass and sculpture from the University of Hawaii in 1999. She is known for her installation of 87 sculptures at the 2019 Hawaii Biennial, Kalo, honoring Hui Aloha ‘Āina, an organization supporting Hawaiian sovereignty. Equally political, his work Papahanaumokua (2018) is a series of glass-tipped bullet casings filled with ‘alaea, Hawaiian earth pigments that referenced the 2018 missile warning received (but not taken entirely seriously) by locals aware of the number of military sites on the main island. One of her last works before her passing in 2024, Kapa Moe: Hae Hawaiʻi (2021), is a kapa bark quilt protesting the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.
Melissa Cody (born 1983) is a fourth-generation Navajo weaver whose brightly colored works link weaving to video games, both of which require singular concentration and offer an escape from the monotony of childhood on the reservation: the X and Y axes of her grid patterns resemble games like Mario Kart and Pac-Man. Cody also adopts the visual elements of glitches that recur in older electronic games, explaining: “Glitches and the separation of time and space happen; I like being able to make them intentional.” His whimsical style can be traced back to the matrilineal guild of weavers who fostered and apprenticed Cody in his youth, even as his work offers ever-new definitions of the form.
Jeremy Dennis (born 1990) is a Shinnecock photographer living on his reservation in Long Island, New York, known for enacting revenge fantasies in his images. In his photo series “Nothing Happened Here” (2016-2017), Dennis portrays modern white Americans shot with one or more arrows, evoking the paradox of settler violence and nonviolent ideologies: Whether the violence is direct or indirect, settler existence on Native land is a perpetual confrontation and derailment of Native sovereignty. In his four-minute film Hearthless: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Destitute) (2015), inspired by Homer’s Iliad, Dennis draws parallels between the “otherness” of the protagonist of the Greek epic and that of the native peoples. The short, a collage of clips from films such as Dances with Wolves and The Ice-Eyed Texan, reflects on the contrast between the lived experience of Native and non-Native people in the United States, while endowing the films’ stereotypical characters with a new complexity.
Demian DinéYazhi′ (born 1983) is a non-binary trans artist of the Zuni Clan Water’s Edge and Bitter Water clans within the Navajo Nation. Her work has exposed extractive and performance investments in Indigenous artists, and, in a recent BOFFO residency on Fire Island, she examined settler colonialism through a queer lens. The project culminated in a spoken-word shoreline performance and two banners, one that read “Stolen + colonized / sacred + ancestral / UNKECHAUG EARTH” and the other “all we know is that our ancestors were as wild as comets and cosmic wind.” Their prose also appeared in “Encoded,” a virtual reality exhibit in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum, superimposed on a landscape painting, flashing between “we demand resources beyond accolades” and “we desire survival beyond declarations.”
Tyler Eash (b. 1988), a multidisciplinary Maidu and two-spirit artist, works primarily in performance, painting, and sculpture to elevate postcolonial expressions of queerness, class, and nativity. His work employs historical and new materials and often focuses on the body. Produced by Eash’s alter-ego, Loreum, and reminiscent of ecofeminist works of the 1970s, Angel/Kákkini #4 (2022) is both landscape and ethnography: a triptych painted on cowhide that comments on the artist’s Californian hometown. The purple, pink, white and black upper section evokes both the night sky and the Californian hills; the central wings, rendered in black, tan, and white, represent the darkness of Marysville’s poverty and drug problems; and the base evokes the state fires of recent years. Parabole II is a satellite dish reworked from plaster resin, car paint, and abalone shell, known as “grandmother’s shell” among West Coast tribes.
In 2024, Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972) became the first Native American to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. He is a self-declared painter whose works employ scale, color, and material to dismantle artificial divisions between native and non-native, human and animal, and celebrate the relationality between living beings. In “Power Full Because We’re Different” (2025) by Gibson, an immersive installation at MASS MoCA on view through September 7, 2026, employs fabrics embroidered with luminous ribbons, metallic-colored bobbins, and ethereal chiffon to explore the fluidity of gender roles in Native societies. In his four Metropolitan Museum facade sculptures honoring a deer, a coyote, a squirrel, and a hawk, on view through June 9, 2026, he invites viewers to understand the insights of these beings: the squirrel’s foresight, the hawk’s perspective for crucial decisions, and so on.
Lenny Harmon (1983), a Philadelphia-based Lenape multimedia artist, draws inspiration from historical traditions but is primarily self-taught. His Vision of Division (2025) combines a repeating photograph of an elderly man in powwow garb with a bifurcated strip of red paper affixed with silver discs. Lifted Journey (2025) is a non-representational landscape in shades of yellow, black, white, and red, framed in red, pink, light blue, and gold stripes that evoke a traditional blanket and embellished with a black-and-white photograph of a Native couple with their horse and hides and teepee poles. Harmon is collected by museums including the Heard Museum in Phoenix and is one of the few contemporary Lenape artists recognized today.
Sky Hopinka (born 1984) is a member of the Pachanga Band of Luiseño Indians in Southern California and the Ho-Chunk Nation. The recipient of a 2022 MacArthur Foundation grant and assistant professor at Harvard University, the artist is lauded for his work in linguistic reclamation and multimodal documentary film. His language revitalization work began in college when he took up Chinuk Wawa, a local language of the lower Columbia River basin where he grew up, ironically, to fulfill a foreign language requirement. His film Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary (2017) juxtaposes clips of Native and nature acting, graphic film stills, and audio of conversations with elders. His intention was to redesign the narrative and transmission of language from stale and moribund anthropological documents in university archives into dynamic media accessible to members of the contemporary community.
Patrick Dean Hubbell (b. 1986), a Diné artist, draws parallels between deconstructed canvases and blankets, which are ubiquitous in indigenous gift cultures. Your Perseverance Taught Us to Rise to Each New Day (2025), Hubbell’s contribution to “The Canvas Can Do Miracles,” a current exhibition at Austin Contemporary (on view through January 11, 2026), consists of draped canvases painted with luminous acrylics. In another work, Within the Darkness, the Stars in the Night Sky Came to Reclaim Their Stories and Their Songs (2023), five generic “Native-inspired” blankets hanging from a support bar are splashed with white paint. Here, Hubbell attacks cultural appropriation using heritage brands like Pendleton and Ralph Lauren while continuing his critical engagement with white ideas about Native people.
Landscape painting becomes literal in the works of Athena LaTocha (b. 1969), a Hunkpapa Lakota and Ojibwe artist living in Brooklyn. Previously a smaller-scale painter, she now creates monumental works by laying resin-coated photographic paper on the floor and then pouring and spreading puddles of ink, mounds of dirt, and other materials, allowing them to permeate the surface before scraping away the debris. Referencing the history of tribal lands, from Mexican mesas and Ozark cliffs to Louisiana wetlands, LaTocha’s compositions have recently focused on New York City. LaTocha visits construction sites and cemeteries to collect materials and dirt once in contact with the city’s original people. In this way he creates a monument to the Lenape of New York (now Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Canada).
Lehuauakea (b. 1996) is a Native Hawaiian mixed-media multidisciplinary artist whose work employs traditional materials and designs while alluding to the complexity of Indigenous mixed-gender identity. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1996 and a self-described māhūwahine, a third-gender Native Hawaiian identity, Lehuauakea developed a focus on traditional kapa bark cloth painting while attending an all-Native Hawaiian school. He honed his artistic practice at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Oregon, where he developed his signature pieces engraved with historical motifs. And Lehuauakea’s Hoʻāla Ka Lupe: To Awaken the Kite (2022) honors traditional kites, or lupes, and related mythology, while Mele o Nā Kaukani Wai (Song of a Thousand Waters) (2018) points to the need to integrate indigenous knowledge into Western climate science.
Rachel Martin (b. 1954) is a Tlingít artist and enrolled member of the Tsaagweideí, Killer Whale Clan, of the Yellow Cedar House (X̱aai Hit´) Eagle Moiety. She grew up in California and Montana and now resides in New York City. Working primarily in sculpture and drawing, Martin is an heir to the Pacific Northwest line drawing tradition, whose cosmological symbols, such as bears, fish, and frogs, she places in feminist tableaux. Bending the Rules (2024), in colored pencil on paper with a collage mask, features a bare-chested woman bent backwards. Been Ready (2023) offers the same sass, with a Tlingít mask serving as a woman’s head in profile, her cropped legs captured in mid-shot. The mask has a protruding tongue, Martin’s gesture toward the trickster figure in Tlingít mythology.
Known as the matriarch of Native American pottery, Maria Martinez (1887–1980) transformed indigenous pottery from craft to fine art through her black-on-black pottery technique. Working with her husband, Julian Martinez, and other family members from her home in San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, she achieved what few Native artists of her time could: widespread recognition in the art world. His journey began with archaeology; he studied ancient pottery fragments at a time when terracotta was being abandoned for Spanish tin and English porcelain. Martinez reinvented historical techniques, creating a distinctive style that art critics would later compare to modernist masters such as Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko. Martinez’s artistic achievements have earned her historic recognition: she met four U.S. presidents, attracted patronage from the Rockefeller family, and became perhaps the most famous Native American artist in history. Its timeless black pottery, with opaque designs painted by Julian, continues to influence contemporary ceramics and is a testament to indigenous innovation.
Cree multidisciplinary artist Kent Monkman (b. 1965) is best known for injecting his gender-fluid Cree alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, into paintings that reference the landscape styles of the Hudson River School, the photographic portraits of Edward Curtis, and the realist figuration of Eugene Delacroix. Miss Chief’s presence in monumental paintings, often suggestively dressed in dizzying heels and flowing fabrics, disrupts colonial notions of gender and disrupts narratives codified by traditional Western tableaux. Monkman’s current retrospective at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (on view until March 8, 2026) delves into the suppressed histories of the colonial origins of the United States and Canada, offering viewers a confrontation with long-obscured narratives.
Renowned fourth-generation Diné (Navajo) weaver Louise Nez (b. 1942) was born in Sand Springs, Arizona. In the 1980s, after creating hundreds of works using patterns developed in the 19th-century commercialization of Navajo rugs, he began producing woven images of life on the reservation. His best-known tapestry, Reservation Scene (1992), features brightly colored figures creating, raising, and traveling on a 19th-century wagon. Inspired by her nephew’s coloring books, Nez also included dinosaurs in fabrics such as Dinosaur Pictorial Weaving (date unknown) held by the Gochman Collection.
Self-taught beader Sandra Okuma (b. 1945) is a Luiseño and Shoshone-Bannock artist whose sumptuous beaded bags are influenced by her training as a painter and her work as a graphic designer for the music industry. Hailing from the La Jolla Indian Reservation in California, she has been a staple of the Santa Fe Indian Market since 1998. Her works, like this bag owned by the National Museum of the American Indian, boast unexpected color palettes: in this case, shades of ruby, saffron and light blue. Sandra shares a booth at the Santa Fe Indian Market with her daughter Jamie Okuma, a fashion designer; the two occasionally work together on collaborative projects. The couple’s sophisticated designs have garnered appreciation in both the art and fashion worlds.
Multimedia artist Virgil Ortiz (born 1969), from Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico, originally worked in ceramics, which he began learning from his mother at the age of six. Drawing on a historical style defined by black mineral and plant pigments and motifs drawn from landscape and cosmology, Ortiz’s interpretations are distinctly modern. Over the past two decades he has expanded into new media, from painting and glassblowing to fashion and interior design. Ortiz creates with élan, introducing genre play, science fiction and kink into his ceramic and glass vessels, busts and figures. Master and Tics (2002) is a black, white and red Cochiti clay triad of Monos figures: a two-headed horned being walking with four-legged creatures on a leash. Rise Up (2017), a black, white and red clay vessel, shows Donald Trump riding a black serpent, which traditionally represents fertility or a connection to the underworld, though in this case more likely reflects the reptile’s broader indigenous association with the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025), an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, was an innovative visual artist, curator, and activist. He worked tirelessly to break the “buckskin ceiling,” helping pave the way for a new Native avant-garde of indigenous artists. His vast oeuvre, developed over 50 years, combined incisive political humor with poeticism and spanned painting, collage, drawing, printmaking and sculpture. His works allude to the lands, cultures, and philosophies of Native peoples, asserting sovereignty in his depiction of the tribes’ past, present, and future. An exhibition he curated, “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always,” is currently on display at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Featuring more than 100 works by 97 artists, it is the largest exhibition of contemporary Native American art to date.
Diné multidisciplinary artist Eric-Paul Riege (b. 1994) honors traditional Navajo ways of making, interpreting them through craft store materials and in collaboration with family members. Riege’s work particularly salutes matriarchal weavers like her great-grandmother, who is featured in her installation, ojo|-|ólǫ́ (2025), on view through December 7 at Brown University’s Bell Gallery. The installation also includes a wall-mounted squash blossom necklace created from gray synthetic material, a suspended and empty vertical loom warp, and multiple long earrings constructed from faux fur, leather, and soft fabric. In a three-hour performance, Riege walked the length of the installation, mimicking the shuttle movements of a loom and whipping hemmed, rattle-adorned objects at the feet of a trickster-like figure.
Sara Siestreem (born 1976) is a Hanis Coos artist based in Oregon. The Pratt MFA graduate’s works include ceramics, photography, weaving, painting, and installation. Skyline (2024) is a series of traditional Hanis Coos baskets cast in clay and topped with gold, evoking the commodification of Native culture by modern interior design. Minion (2024) is composed of four black and white ceremonial ceramic caps supported by cascading scarlet beads, referencing systemic violence against indigenous women and girls. Un-ring Bells (2013) incorporates photographs and renderings of oyster shells that Siestreem found along the banks of the local Coos and Millicoma rivers long after the extinction of local tribes, the effect of white settlement, and industrial fishing. Siestreem’s work alludes to both the presence and absence of Native communities and their relationships to the land in modern American life.
Rose B. Simpson (born 1983) is a multimedia artist known for her ceramic and metal sculptures, installations, and performances. Born in 1983 in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, Simpson comes from a matriarchy of female potters. While she was accepted to Dartmouth, she chose to attend the University of New Mexico to maintain her educational ties to the land. He holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and the Institute of American Indian Arts and studied ceramics in Japan and South Korea. His work innovates at the intersection of red clay pottery and figurative sculpture, pushing the boundaries of Pueblo art. A current installation at the de Young Musuem in San Francisco consists of two classic cars customized by the artist.
Painter and sculptor Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma of Cherokee/Anglo heritage. Presented at the 2024 Venice Biennale, it is experiencing a significant moment of recognition. In her long career WalkingStick has embraced a variety of styles and formats, although her cornerstone, since she encountered the feminist and American Indian movements of the 1970s, has always been her identity as a Native American and biracial woman. He produced abstract paintings such as Archetypal Image (1975), which found commonality between the shapes of teepees and nets hanging under New York bridges; nudes influenced by Pop Art; and diptychs with symbols on one side and landscapes on the other. More recently he has made landscape paintings inscribed with indigenous motifs, suggesting that the terrain is viewed from a pre-contact point of view. As he told the New York Times in 2023, the American landscape he is painting, from the Grand Canyon to Niagara Falls, was depicted by white 19th-century artists as empty. Of course, he told the New York Times in 2023, it wasn’t empty; it was populated. . . . I think of (my paintings) as a reminder that we are all living in Indian Territory.
Contemporary multidisciplinary artist and curator Dyani White Hawk (b. 1976) is of Sicangu Lakota and white descent. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, she attended the Institute of American Indian Arts and the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was a curator at the Native-owned All My Relations gallery in Minneapolis from 2010 to 2015 before devoting herself exclusively to studio practice. White Hawk’s work applies Lakota traditions such as porcupine quill work, beadwork, and rawhide painting to critiques of a white artistic hierarchy that has historically subordinated Native art. He also makes installations, photographs and performances that promote the Lakota philosophical and moral principle mitákuye oyás’iŋ: We are all related. He brought this concept to life in early 2024 with the totemic rectangular sculpture Visiting (2024), composed of four beaded collage panels; Faced with an impossible deadline, White Hawk recruited his family and community to complete the commission, which was displayed at the 2024 Armory Show in New York City.
A Navajo painter from New Mexico, Emmi Whitehorse (born 1957) creates layered abstractions influenced by her rural upbringing. His formative years rooted his practice in a traditional ecological vision. “If you got sick and something was wrong, it meant that psychically you were losing rhythm with nature,” he explains. “So you dedicated yourself to healing by surrounding yourself with beauty and nature; this applies to my painting.” Whitehorse’s meditative landscapes employ a personal symbology of place and time, its gradual washes suggesting both serenity and constant change. In a distinctive work, Firelight II (2024), he weaves together abstract botanical shapes, dotted lines, gridded axes, and surveillance drone symbols topped with infinity signs, creating a complex cartography that maps both the physical and spiritual terrain.
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