People often relegate Nativeness to November, Native American Heritage Month, but from September through December, we celebrate like it’s the high holidays. In early October, I visited the long-awaited show “An Indigenous Present,” co-organized by Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter at ICA Boston. The show features the work of 15 abstract Native artists—none from Massachusetts tribes, and there was a series of live performances during opening weekend that animated the galleries with sound, movement and ritual presence. Its title, borrowed from Gibson’s 2023 book, references Indigenous gift economies and the persistent gaps in Native art resources he experienced during his education.

This show elevates abstraction not only as a style but as a mode of experience for Native people living intermundane lives—between Native America and the United States. Some expect a panegyric from a Lakota/Dakota writer engaging with Indigenous curation, but I can’t ignore the absence of a Wampanoag, Nipmuc or Massachusett artist in this contemporary vanguard—a standard for recognition extending beyond hollow Western land acknowledgments. The book clarifies abstraction as lived experience while revealing a structural gap: Massachusetts tribal artists working in traditional mediums like wampum rarely enter contemporary art networks centered on abstraction and innovation. Launching instead from AbEx artists Mary Sully and George Morrison, Gibson’s introduction questions the segregated position of Native contemporary artists and underscores humor as the project’s most electrifying throughline.

Cara Romero creates campy photography, James Luna molds sculptural lampoons and Wendy Red Star arranges sarcastic tableaus. Gibson’s curation untangles these artists from “fine art” rhetoric by bringing together diverse Native culture bearers—visual artists, poets, historians—who share space within Indigenous contexts but are rarely united in Western institutions. He juxtaposes Jamie Okuma’s cradleboard beside Philip J. Deloria’s essay, Layli Long Soldier’s poem next to Marie Watt’s tin-jingle embellished blanket, peeling back Western superimpositions to reveal a natural cohesion that transcends page and gallery. The exhibition translates this approach across nine rooms, with each of the fifteen artists represented multiple times—an expansive format demonstrating the breadth of contemporary Native abstraction. Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s work occupied two rooms, though the reasoning behind the placement was unclear, making it feel both prominent and enigmatic. In other areas, the show’s organization more clearly places artists in conversation with one another, working on shared themes and mediums, who could not meet in life due to generational and often structural divides.

The 2023 publication date may explain the absence of local artists. The gap also highlights the overrepresentation of Southwestern and Plains aesthetics in contemporary Native art pedagogy at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and in non-Native university art departments. Wampanoag artist Elizabeth James Perry—an NEA grant recipient whose wampum work honors historical traditions—exemplifies the catch-22 facing Northeastern Native artists: too traditional for contemporary art institutions seeking innovation, yet overlooked when curators do embrace craft traditions, defaulting instead to Southwest and Plains aesthetics centered around IAIA networks. Perry occupies a liminal space, legible neither as “contemporary” enough nor within the geographic or institutional orbit that Gibson’s curation privileges. Despite the disciplinary schism, the show succeeds in broadly reflecting Native aesthetics with undeniable visual and conceptual splendor. Sonya Kelliher-Combs’ Salmon Curl (2023) emulates sanguine salmon flesh with acrylic polymer and reindeer hair, satisfyingly reminding one of the violent beauty of life’s cycles across species. Mary Sully’s Met show of recently unearthed colored pencil, graphite and watercolor on paper portraits of white celebrities—Admiral Byrd, Bob Ripley, Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart—quietly lampoon the very culture that excluded her, reimagining fame through a Dakota aesthetic lens. George Longfish deploys similar wit in paintings like Take Two Aspirins and Call Me in the Morning, You Are on Target (1984), where medical dismissiveness and violence collide in sardonic titles. Sully’s panache and posthumous show created demand from the exhibition’s artists to be hung next to her works, from Kelliher-Combs to Teresa Baker, according to Erika Umali, their collections curator. Gibson relied on Porter’s robust publishing background to manifest the book and publish it before the show, affecting the exhibition’s equally nontraditional approach; instead of defining strictly by theme, material or signifiers, they create cogency with a mélange of humor, sound, materials and the land. “These are not storytelling paintings, these are abstractions, but they do tell a story in a way, and they tell an emotive story,” said Kay Walkingstick, a Citizen Band Potawatomi/Cherokee painter whose work appears in the exhibition. “When you move past them, you are encouraged to look at them and stand back and move.”

Teasing the show’s primary theme, Man-made Land (2025), commissioned from Caroline Monnet, is installed diagonally in ICA’s slanted foyer wall as a unique, though ancillary, exhibition, depicting abstract botanical blooms rendered with thousands of oblong and stylized pieces of black, clear and silver Tyvek, plastic and foil, evoking flowers on the harbor’s edge that perform land repair and establish Indigenous demesne—land claimed and held in our own right, not granted by colonial powers. In front of Monnet’s work, a record-breaking (literally) Indigenous performance was produced by Porter and museum staff, scraping at a running turntable with speaker-tethered sound rods, followed by a brassy symphony performance conducted with ceremonial gravitas that jolted energy into exhibition galleries already buzzing by 11 a.m.

Installed between two galleries in the ICA’s Poss Family Mediatheque, Hassanamisco Nipmuc photographer Scott Strong Hawk Foster’s “Here We Stay” gathers portraits, quotes and audio recordings from Indigenous people living in Greater Boston. Presented in partnership with the North American Indian Center of Boston (NAICOB), the show—and robust lineup of performances throughout the exhibition’s run—might soothe institutional anxieties about reciprocity and other cultural protocols. It gestures toward Gibson’s stated investment in relational ethics with local community, but looking at Foster’s portraits—faces of all ages illuminated against a field of black—another antinomy comes into view: how abstraction can both protect and erase Native bodies.

While the No Dakota Access Pipeline struggle placed Native bodies in imperialism’s way—forcing a reckoning for settlers and the world about delusions of historical distance from colonialism—abstraction presents an unexpected consequence: obscuring Native bodies from view on this land. Audie Murray’s video performance Bear Smudge (2022) is an exception. We see Murray, a Métis artist, setting down ceremonial paraphernalia—a blanket, a jar of bear grease—in a verdant field. She performs historical traditions in the present, adding definition to the show’s multifaceted title through the mediated gaze of a camera. After several minutes of preparation, she stops to quickly apply a thick layer of bear grease to the camera lens, creating a visual barrier to protect, not erase. From that point on, the ritual continues offscreen; we hear but cannot see.

Murray recalls Betonie from Silko’s Ceremony—the mixed-blood healer who controversially adapted tradition with modern objects, embodying its necessary evolution. Within this lineage, her bear-greased lens belongs to a broader feminist practice of controlling the gaze, where artists like Lorna Simpson turn figures away and Nicole Miller silences interview subjects beneath instrumental sound. Murray’s refusal is gentler, tactile: she doesn’t deny access so much as consecrate the limits of it. The work’s clarity—visibly Métis, performing recognizable ceremony—makes its moment of disappearance even more powerful.

Sound reappears elsewhere in the show, most notably in Raven Chacon’s Controlled Burn (2025), a low, percussive installation that hums like a distant engine. Where Murray’s sound gestures toward continuity and protection, Chacon’s functions as warning—a sonic fence line that marks what cannot be entered. Both artists, in different registers, confront the limits of visibility and access, asking what remains when the body is withheld from view.

That question reverberates through the work of multidisciplinary artist Kimowan Metchewais, who made abstraction his primary mode of survival. Working largely in solitude in North Carolina, far from major art centers that rarely welcome Native artists, Metchewais experienced the isolation that defined a generation of Native abstractionists. He died young after years of inadequate healthcare despite federal trust obligations, his life and work marked by the same structural neglect that shaped so many Native artists’ trajectories. Even when working contemporaneously with white modernists, Native artists were routinely excluded from museum networks and residencies, prevented from meeting, collaborating or developing community through institutional support. Modernism’s vaunted “universalism” was thus sustained through Indigenous exclusion.

Metchewais’ Chief’s Blanket (2002) evokes the iconic Navajo chief’s blanket pattern and the relational stories embedded in its form and meaning. Created with photo paper, ink, pigment, watercolor and pencil—materials grounding the work in the present—it fuses landscape photography with the blanket’s horizontal stripes, rendered here in ruddy hues like dried blood. The result is a dark yet resilient meditation on Indigenous history, where bloodshed marks both landscape and the domestic intimacy of cloth. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Ronan Robe #1 and #2 (1977) extend this thread, employing canvas as a rich stand-in for the animal hides used to construct Plains tipis. Together, Metchewais and Quick-to-See Smith evoke home, safety and storytelling—shot through the memory of violence—abstracting Native materials and motifs just enough to register as contemporary art.

Other artists approach ontological themes with less material and conceptual rigor. Teresa Baker’s Throw It to the Ocean (2025), a work evoking water through astroturf photographs well, but it appears sophomoric in person. Her consistent use of scale throughout her practice over the past decade attempts to lend gravitas but only magnifies puerile material choices and execution. Perhaps the astroturf reminds me of forced soccer practices or defunded public school art classes, but the work’s employment of synthetic craft materials feels unrefined. A closer look reveals hastily cut edges and visible glue beneath lonely yarn strands. The scale insists on distance—where the work indeed photographs better—but up close, the slapstick craft-store aesthetic fails to conjure oceanic vastness. Her past work with the unmysterious turf material—which she once described as emulating prairie grass—dressed up in red, yellow, green and pink craft-store yarn, evinces the suggestion that anyone can create art. Cut like a vessel lying on its side, the circular base, below the lip, is bisected by a ladder, while the right side is ornamented with small strips of teal and black yarn—some perpendicular, some crossed—appearing like fish, birds or stars. The bright blue vase’s mouth bears wandering borders made of a tawny-orange yarn, filled in with the same tawny color paint. Foucault once asked, “Couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?” Despite her MFA, Baker’s crude execution ironically proves the opposite.

Humor permeates throughout, from caption to composition in Anna Tsouhlarakis’s IF SHE WAS AT THE PARTY, SHE WOULD HAVE DUMPED MORE THAN TEA (2025), a vacant white particle-board ship prow lined with found objects and animal materials. Both its materials and white coating signal the unsustainability and whitewashing of U.S. life and history. Where guns, cannons and sailors would stand in the ship prow, Tsouhlarakis wryly places a litany of objects that demands to be listed in full: IKEA furniture remnants, aspen, birch, maple, ice pick pole, oars, boat fenders, metal, leather, artificial sinew, tobacco lids, press-on nails, steer horns, artificial elk teeth, horsehair, basketball rim, paint, adhesives, plaster, bed frame, plastic, elk hide, screws, nails, helmet face guard, buffalo nickels and found book objects. The disembodied ice pick and birch and maple poles are particularly effective in pointing to the makeshift, theatrical settler approach to colonization, on land they coerced Native people (e.g., pre-pubescent Mataoka and Sacagawea) to help them colonize. Tsouhlarakis also satirizes “value” in the West—animal pelts are traded for tea, coins for land, trees for flimsy compressed wood that, put together, becomes art: what has value, what is sacred? The gesture toward animal fur evokes the Indigenous adage “use every part of the buffalo”—a wisdom still lost on Americans.

The Navajo and Muscogee Creek artist also grounds the work in Boston lore, making it singularly topical. In 2025, referencing the 1773 Boston Tea Party—a revolt against tea tariffs—she stages an intervention on American ennui, challenging settler complacency in imperialism. Where Murray protects the sacred through ceremony, Tsouhlarakis lets it all hang out.

“An Indigenous Present” offers a gift, unsurprising for its namesake: disquietude for settlers, delight and laughter for Native attendees opening weekend. The exhibition, galvanized by #NoDAPL’s contribution to institutional attention toward Native artists, delivers something beyond representationalism—evolving toward resistance and circumnavigation of the colonial gaze. While some works succeed more than others in translating abstraction’s power, Murray and Tsouhlarakis, though not local, ground the show in Boston, compensating for the absence of Massachusetts peoples. Other works—from Dakota Mace’s silver chemigrams to Kay Walkingstick’s gestural abstractions—deliver not only an offering but temporality, not only the current moment but embodiment, not only lived experience but sovereign display. Gibson and Porter enlist Indigenous principles—reciprocity and gift economies—and in return, viewers laugh, and settlers learn.

“An Indigenous Present” is at ICA Boston through March 8, 2026. From there, the exhibition will move to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville (June 26 through September 27, 2026) and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle (November 7, 2026, through February 14, 2027).

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I can feel it through my thin sweater—a rich light piercing through the mountains, warm and filled with promise, affirming spring’s arrival. On that morning, on the ancestral homelands of the Wabanaki Confederacy, a local Penobscot woman told me that “Sìkʷan” means “it is spring.” As the Maytime sun illuminated the land, another kind of illumination unfolded inside the Hood Museum of Art: the radiant, evocative work of Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero, whose lens casts its own living light on Indigenous presence. And it’s a crucial light, given Romero’s provenance as a California Native artist—a group conspicuously under-recognized in a contemporary art landscape still largely oriented toward Southwestern and Plains Indigenous traditions, to say nothing of the profound erasure of California’s own Native populations.

Romero’s largest solo show to date, “Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)” on through August 9, stages monumental tableaux alive with pop-cultural camp, bright colors and deliberate anachronism—compositions that channel Indigenous memory, humanity and humor with unapologetic clarity.

Consider TV Indians (2011), in which four traditionally dressed figures stand alongside a moribund mound of televisions, their screens flickering with stereotypical images of Native peoples—a stark contrast between embodied presence and media distortion. Here, Romero’s subjects sit en banc, as if deliberating on their own misrepresentation, their collective presence forming a tribunal that judges the very images that have defined them.

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To be Native in America is to inhabit a tension inherent to the national mythology that, consciously or not, reorients the non-Native observer’s gaze. Romero’s design of contemporary visuals is an act of self-possession, echoing Chemehuevi scholar Joshua B. Glenn’s concept of sensate sovereignty: “artistic and sensory forms act both as obstructions to hungry listening and provide a structure of knowledge sharing for Indigenous folks to enter into.” This confrontation with entrenched American myth extends into Romero’s First American Doll portrait series. Featuring an eponymous Amber Morningstar (2022) and other Indigenous individuals, these life-sized dolls, adorned in their chosen vestments, offer a more accurate Native representation, sharply playing on the American Girl Dolls company.

But perhaps it’s Kaa (2017) or Three Sisters (2022) that draws your attention—works that underscore how Romero redefines the ways Native subjects are interpolated by the viewer and the camera alike. Here, her models include her daughter, close family and friends, encompassing women and young men, reflecting the vibrant and diverse community she seeks to represent. But they are not romanticized or hypersexualized; they don’t recapitulate a Pocahontas-type or Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Instead, like children, they are physical hearts outside Romero’s body—and this is the pain and beauty of her work.

In a country that births much of the world’s technological innovation, from A.I. to genetic engineering, a Google image search for “Native American” still yields the expected: staged black-and-white photographs of inaccurately dressed figures posed against disappearing, anonymous landscapes. The myth of the vanishing race persists. What is intelligence without nuance or, dare I say, trauma?

This tension between visibility and absence also haunts the history of Dartmouth College, the site of the museum in which Cara Romero’s show now resides. Samson Occom, the Mohegan minister who helped raise the funds for what would become Dartmouth, never set foot on campus. A painful irony the school seemed to solve—rather neatly—through Occam’s razor: for much of its history, there were simply no Native students to welcome. It wasn’t until 1970 that President John Kemeny sought to turn that absence into presence, launching Dartmouth’s Native American Program and reframing Occom’s erasure as a founding debt.

Romero’s subjectivity challenges a tension familiar in now-critiqued DEI frameworks: the difference between equality and equity. Where equality treats everyone the same, equity recognizes that individuals need tailored tools to succeed. In Amedee (2025), a striking figure from the First American Doll series, a Native Hawaiian woman enrobed in an ochre lei and green hula skirt is encased in a glowing light box. These are accoutrements of her choosing, not props imposed by an outside gaze but cultural markers worn with pride. She radiates power—her gaze direct, her posture authoritative—reclaiming the visual vocabulary of ethnographic display and inverting its colonial gaze.

Alika no. 2 (2024) pushes the refusal of the viewer even further. A side-lying nude figure with green braids and vertical neon stripes—black-and-white under neon light—looks away, withholding eye contact. Her painted body becomes both armor and illusion, a visual static that repels projection. The effect is alienating, even spectral, evoking the blue alien diva from The Fifth Element, whose operatic performance distracts as an audience is silently slaughtered. Here, too, we are made to question what spectacle obscures and what power lies in the act of looking away.

Decoupling outer space from the dominion of Silicon Valley futurism, where private capital lays claim to the stars, The Zenith (2022) offers a retro astronaut adrift in a zero-gravity field of heirloom corn. Suspended beyond linear time, the supine Indigenous figure gazes back, past the viewer, arms slightly raised, clad in a campy blue spacesuit and vintage helmet. Their posture, open yet unknowable, conjures a quiet refusal of conquest. In place of extraction or dominion, this scene seeds space with memory, sustenance and survival. “Panûpünüwügai”’s levity allows it to dance across everything that the light touches. It moves to the Phoenix Art Museum near the Chemehuevi Indian Reservation next year.

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In SFMOMA’s “American Sublime,” Amy Sherald elevates portraiture through fifty luminous paintings that transform both canvas and cultural perspective. Her exhibition’s title resonates on multiple levels—”sublime” suggesting at once transcendent beauty, material transformation and the psychic conversion of raw experience into artistic vision—mirroring how her work reshapes contemporary representation. Her nearly life-sized subjects radiate monumental dignity, while her signature use of grayscale for skin tones suggests a metaphorical transformation that challenges viewers’ assumptions about and disarticulates skin color from race. Through this layered approach, Sherald thoughtfully explores Black identity in America while celebrating her subjects with undeniable beauty and complex interiority. Her artistic journey spans more than two decades, marked by distinct evolutionary phases.

Over the past twenty years, Sherald has been prolific, painting nearly thirty portraits with modest success before gaining renown for painting First Lady Michelle Obama in 2018 and Breonna Taylor in 2020. Yet celebrity and tragedy aren’t her selection criteria. “I look for something I’d call presence—this quiet magnetism that pulls me in,” she told Observer. “It’s really about seeing someone who feels like they already have a story to tell, even before I paint them.” This democratic vision is evident in “American Sublime,” her most comprehensive exhibition to date, which opened in San Francisco in 2024 and travels to the Whitney next year—fulfilling a decade-long ambition. “I wrote in one of my journals that I wanted my first museum show to be at SFMOMA or the Whitney,” she recalled. “I started making work for the Whitney 10 years ago; I would just tell myself: ‘This painting right here is going to go into the Whitney.’ And lo and behold, now it will.”

Despite her rise to prominence through high-profile commissions like Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor’s portraits, Sherald’s artistic vision remains focused on the nuanced humanity of ordinary subjects. Her elevation to preeminent contemporary painter status parallels contemporaries like Kerry James Marshall, who also references and challenges “the lack in the image bank” and recontextualizes the Western canon. As successful Black artists, they also reflect broader institutional shifts, from Sherald’s representation by Hauser & Wirth to Antwaun Sargent’s groundbreaking appointment as Gagosian director. This recognition extends beyond Sherald—Faith Ringgold at the New Museum (2022) paved the way for Black women artists in major institutions; Henry Taylor’s concurrent Whitney retrospective similarly reimagines Black portraiture, using focused detail against deliberately flat areas to capture both individual essence and collective experience. That these shows share space at major institutions reflects the art world’s belated recognition of Black excellence while creating pathways for future artists.

Yet beyond these celebrated portraits lies a deeper artistic project: presenting Black Americans in states of unguarded existence, free from the burden of representation. This approach aligns her with other contemporary Black artists like Jordan Peele and Donald Glover, who similarly confront viewers with direct gazes. However, while Peele and Glover often use this technique to express alienation or critique systemic racism, Sherald’s subjects radiate a quiet dignity that transforms everyday moments into declarations of full personhood.

In her early work from 2007-2011, Sherald developed her signature technical elements—Sherald’s portraits contain a psychological potency telegraphed to the viewer through her subject’s direct gaze and pared-back backgrounds. Her isolated forms and austere settings evoke religious iconography that leverages solitary figures and simple backdrops, dislocating them from worldly distractions and temporal context. She gestures to European painters, applying the old master’s hyperrealistic chiaroscuro technique to her faces while leaving other areas—clothing, peculiar objects, or bodies—flat,  accentuating the subject’s faces and guiding the viewer to their unwavering stares. But above all else, the Surrealist René Magritte is her most frequent referent, as they both use monochromatic backdrops, prop-like objects and clothing that enrobes their figures. The pair of artists’ deployment of theatrical props tends to unmoor viewers, forcing them to question the mental reality of the subjects that the objects reflect. The Rabbit in the Hat (2020), for example, features a citrine-suited dandy—adding personal flair to an otherwise traditional silhouette—clasping a rabbit in a hat, while Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) (2013) reveals a woman with a skull-sized porcelain teacup and saucer—the two visuals juxtaposed evoke Alice in Wonderland’s hallucinogenic journey. In parallel, Magritte’s The Son of Man (1946) features a more ascetically suited gentleman with an apple suspended in the air before his face, obscuring it and subverting the tenets of traditional portraiture and evincing curiosity, anonymity and conformity.

By the mid-2010s, Sherald had refined her approach to color: this masterful manipulation of pigmentation extends beyond mere aesthetic choice into, again, psychological territory. Like Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar, who wields saturated colors to externalize his characters’ inner turmoil and passions—most recently in The Room Next Door where Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore’s performances smolder against rich vermilions and cobalts—Sherald deploys vibrant monochromatic backgrounds as emotional counterpoints to her subjects’ contemplative states. These bold color fields, ranging from electric yellows to deep teals, create tension with her figures’ grisaille rendering, suggesting an interplay between public presentation and private reflection. The stark contrast amplifies the psychological weight of her subjects’ gazes while the pure, unmodulated colors echo the clarity and directness with which they confront the viewer, making the intimate feel monumental.

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The year 2018 marked a pivotal shift in both composition and content. Sherald moved from the single-figure paintings, which had become a signature element for her work, toward incorporating multiple figures, with Planes, Rockets, and Spaces in Between (2018) being her first foray into dual-figure compositions and away from her traditional settings, which were vividly plain (words you don’t often see side-by-side). The tableau reveals the two figures’ dyadic interaction, holding hands before a missile take-off, while the female figure’s frontal view almost breaks the fourth wall, meeting the viewer’s gaze as her companion and foil look on at the spectacular event. If asked which is more dramatic: the opposite-facing young man and young woman’s glimpse or the missile shot, the latter seems obvious if this piece existed in a vacuum. But, within the scope of Sherald’s oeuvre the human behavior is far more stark. Sherald’s subjects face the viewer with impenetrable visual force but are otherwise typically static or merely imply motion. If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It (2019) and Precious Jewels by the Sea (2019) mark a seismic shift beyond single-figure portraits and into more complex environments.

Alongside expanded casting and those new environs, the signification of her figures’ emotional states became clearer through their interactions. Planes, Rockets, and Spaces in Between depicts intimate hand-holding against a dramatic launch, while If You Surrendered to the Air, You Could Ride It captures pure joy through airborne figures. The Bathers (2020), nodding to Renoir and Cezanne while reimagining the classical scene, continues this exploration of figures in the environment. Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons) (2024) pushes this evolution further, using landscape and intergenerational gathering to explore themes of community and inheritance. These multi-figure works create narratives through gesture and relationship, deepening the emotional resonance of Sherald’s portraits while maintaining her signature direct gaze.

As Sherald’s work has evolved technically and thematically through the 2020s, it increasingly engages with broader cultural conversations about representation. While Sherald’s connection to other Black and queer artists may be indirect, her artistic achievement is undeniable. Through her evolution from austere single portraits to complex multi-figure compositions, from minimal backgrounds to rich environments, she has maintained the penetrating psychological power of her subjects’ gazes while expanding their emotional resonance. This technical virtuosity serves a profound democratic vision—one that presents Black Americans existing freely, without the weight of representation or trauma. Sherald’s “American Sublime” realizes both a personal ambition for institutional recognition and a broader transformation in American art, where the everyday becomes transcendent through her subjects’ quiet dignity and unflinching presence.

“Amy Sherald: American Sublime” is on view at SFMOMA through March 9, 2025.

“Upside down, you’re turning me / You’re giving love instinctively / ‘Round and ‘round you’re turning me” are the words I hear as I orient myself to greet the anthropomorphic beings in Rachel Martin’s head-over-heels world. A woman’s body inverted in a backbend, wearing a Tlingít mask, dexterously held up on red-painted nails––her gravityless and playful form welcomes visitors to Martin’s delightfully disorienting first solo show in New York City.

The title “Bending the Rules” befits her exhibition of drawings on paper that politically and cheekily flout convention. But the most meaningful theme in her work is love. This is what appealed to me about the Queens, New York-based artist’s work. Raised between California and the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Poplar, Montana––also my Lakota and Dakota family’s home––Rachel Martin is an enrolled member of the Tsaagweideí, Killer Whale Clan, of the Yellow Cedar House (X̱aai Hit´) Eagle Moiety. She inherited the Pacific Northwest Coast formline technique and draws from Grace Weaver, Matisse and Picasso’s cubist and organic style, producing drawings and sculptures focused on identity, feminism and tribal sovereignty.

Descending the gallery stairs, a sense of abundance fills the medium-sized space with these larger-than-life works adorning the freshly painted walls and a last supper style work occupying its center. Turning left, turning right, flip it and reverse it, the compositions’ revolving perspective is always a return to love, reiterating in my mind Diana Ross’s classic hit; her upended romanticism is mirrored by Love is a tide is a taste is a tree, in which two figures share a cri de cœur for the decolonial return of land and love. As Mojave poet Natalie Diaz reminds us, “These are the settings that I am made from.” With masked subjects kneeling, decorated with moons, fish, rivers and trees, the piece is a monument to Native love, perhaps even a love triangle between the couple and their homelands.

Despite Martin’s abstract style, her techniques and use of color lend a dropped-in realism expressing the subjects’ standpoint, their modernity and inextricability from Tribe, femininity and place. But Martin is also puckish about how Indigenous life is co-constituted by citizenship in Native nations and the United States. Her liminal jocularity is perhaps personified best by She’s a 10 but she boils herring eggs until they’re all white and rubbery (2024). Tongue out, Converse on and strappy dress visible on an exposed shoulder, these items map to the West; whereas the mask and flowing shawl with biological formline motifs correspond to Martin’s heritage.

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Her strikingly heterogeneous use of paper and color to outline and fill in her subject’s skin tone subtly points to the diversity of Native peoples who’ve lived and miscegenated with every community that arrived on Turtle Island since first contact.

Mother of Many Children is a sly tribute to this diversity. Martin deftly uses humor to humanize Indigenous people to broader audiences. While a traditional viewer may see a formline rendition of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, queer audiences recognize this nod to New York’s 1980s and ‘90s ball culture that brought together queer Black, Latiné and Native vogue dancers. Each figure’s gesture reflecting pithy phrases from Black women and LGBTQIA2S folks gone viral on TikTok from “yas” and “it’s giving” to Wendy Williams’ “How you doin’?” and “I love you.”

The 2023 drawing, Yéil’s Sock Money displays an austere figure bearing another example of the Tlingít mask motif tucking cash into their makeshift sock-pocket in preparation for a party, indicating an equilibrium between tradition and pop culture. By extension, Rachel’s self-portrait, Hot Girl Summer (2024), is found under a canopy whose organic architecture, ornamented with a valence of drying hides and fish filets, strikes the same balance. The figures’ transition from rave to repose suggests a final summer celebration before accepting the crescent demure fall (or ‘joyfall’).

Culture Bear(er) Flex is a contemporary yet timeless example of Indigenous wisdom and figurative metamorphosis––the three sets of eyes staring with vivid, emphatic sentience, clueing the viewer into the Native ontological perspective that spirits are not defined along special or linear-time lines. In other words, the “Bear(er)”’s lucid consciousness defies the Western man/nature divide and time functioning along a straight line, but rather views it as a circle.

“Instinctively you give to me / The love that I need / I cherish the moments with you,” Ross’s words evince the presence of community and the meaning of food as medicine in If our table could talk (2024). The grounding central piece around which the rest of the show is framed is also its locus of control, naturally pulling visitors in and––after engaging these animate beings lining the walls at the gallery front––evoking agency, fate and the cycle of life. The shared meal comprising traditional Tlingít dishes of fish heads, filets and guts, lobster and sundry vegetables closes the loop, so to speak, on Martin’s metaphysical commentary and transmogrification of humans and animal spirits. Here, in Martin’s percussive honoring of her art, culture and history, she loves, she laughs and, ultimately, she eats.

“Bending the Rules” is at Hannah Traore Gallery through November 9.