Jeffrey Gibson on 10 Artists to Know this Native American Heritage Month

Where are all the Native American artists? Visit any major American museum today, and you may notice some answers to that question. In 2025, we are in the middle of a Native American art renaissance, where institutions nationwide are clamoring to display—and occasionally acquire—contemporary Native artists. This is thanks in no small part to Jeffrey Gibson, a Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee painter and sculptor, whose seminal 2023 book An Indigenous Present features 60 contemporary Native artists. In a show of the same name, which opened last month at the ICA Boston, 15 of these artists are brought together. Co-curated with independent curator Jenelle Porter, the exhibition ties together broad themes recurring across contemporary Native American art: land, memory, refusal, and humor.

Gibson’s desire to document his fellow Indigenous artists started during graduate school, when he lacked a comprehensive resource on contemporary Native artists. Later, living and working in New York City, he was often the token Indigenous artist in a project or institution. Over the years, Indigenous artists have become increasingly sought-after across North America. For example, painter Kent Monkman currently has a retrospective, “History Is Painted by the Victors,” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Meanwhile, interdisciplinary artist Marie Watt is presenting the full range of her practice at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Portland, Oregon, from print works to monumental steel-and-wool blanket works that recall Mohawk “sky walkers.”

For Artsy, Gibson selected 10 Indigenous artists you should know this Native American Heritage Month.

B. 1985, Outaouais/Ottawa, Canada. Lives and works in Mooniyang/Montreal.

Known for: geometric designs and weavings using construction materials

Caroline Monnet, as Gibson noted, works with “readily available and commercial building materials,” engaging with the impact of colonialism on the land. For her installations, inspired by her father’s career in the goods-producing sector, she chooses to use construction materials. This choice is intended as a critique of inferior and often delayed government-made housing, which is often presented as the only option for First Nations communities in Canada.

Man-made Land (2025), the site-specific installation on view now in the ICA Boston’s foyer, serves as an opener for Gibson’s show, “An Indigenous Present.” It presents a series of “blooms,” reinterpreting historical Anishinaabeg floral motifs that are a symbolic gesture of healing for the Boston waterfront’s storied history. The black-and-white installation, made of Tyvek, plastic, and foil insulation, forms countless cut pieces installed together in floral forms on the diagonal across the museum foyer.

B. 1969, Bethel, Alaska. Lives and works in Anchorage, Alaska.

Known for: suspended organic material-based installations

In her sculpture Salmon Curl (2023), Sonya Kelliher-Combs employs acrylic polymer, reindeer hair, acid-free Mylar, nylon thread, and steel pins to evoke animal skin and guts. “Her work always has a visceral quality and refers to her home community, individualism within a community, and storytelling,” said Gibson. These organic materials, including stretched walrus stomach, were a source of comfort for her—reminding her of her Iñupiaq homeland—while in college at Arizona State University before her career began.

Kelliher-Combs’s work is informed by place and history. Natural Idiot Strings (2023), recently acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, is a sculpture made of reindeer and sheep rawhide, coated in beeswax to make it less susceptible to humidity. The work evokes string-tied mittens hung at a child’s height in a poignant reference to systemic sexual abuse of children by the Jesuit ministry in Alaska in the 20th century.

The confrontational work Bear Smudge (2022) by Audie Murray is a video installation partially displaying and obscuring a ceremony. The work, like many of hers, emphasizes the colonial gaze’s fixation on events that are culturally private. After several minutes of capturing preparation for the rite, the artist wipes bear grease across the camera lens, leaving viewers with only the sound of the video to go on.

Another video work, Enn Modeuz (2020), shows her family processing porcupine roadkill for its quills, anchored by the many hands involved in the work. The video draws attention to the collaboration at the heart of Indigenous making and elevates traditional quillwork from an art object to a spiritual extension of Indigenous kinship, all drawn from personal experience in her life. “Her work often includes autobiographical references that challenge presumptions about contemporary Indigenous cultures,” Gibson said.

“Anna uses biting humor to remind audiences of the Indigenous histories of the land and the people who originate from those homelands,” said Gibson. Inspired by her father, who works in contemporary Native jewelry design and construction, she began working in three dimensions early in life. Her 2019 billboard and banner series for The Native Guide Project presents affirmations like “IT’S GREAT HOW YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT NATIVE AMERICANS ARE STILL HERE.” Her works vary in size, appearing on billboards, bus shelter banners, and other outdoor public signs. These signs are sometimes interpreted as confrontational, but the artist instead intends them to be invitations for self-examination. The works ask viewers to recognize their complicity in the ongoing removal and displacement of Native peoples.

Most recently, Tsouhlarakis has been at work on a video project documenting and exploring over 400 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation and a particular uranium spill that occurred on the land next to her family’s. It is being created in community with younger artists as part of her broader practice of working with and uplifting emerging Native artists.

Her works, especially sculpture, employ contemporary materials—from tobacco tins and press-on nails to steer horns and artificial elk teeth—over traditional ones, which she finds confining. Often referencing external expectations of Native art, her work also lampoons America’s founding mythology and the settler relationship to land.

B. 1984, Ferndale, Washington. Lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Known for: film and colorful photographic superimpositions

Sky Hopinka “creates dreamy, layered imagery…like visual poems that reference the land and Indigenous histories,” according to Gibson. While in college, Hopinka became enthralled with language revitalization, studying chinuk wawa, the Pacific Northwestern pidgin language used historically by Indigenous tribes, to satisfy his foreign language requirement. He is still inspired by the efforts to bring back Indigenous languages that are no longer spoken today. His film Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary (2017) combines images of Native figures and nature, graphic film stills, and audio conversations with elders.

By layering audio over narrative film and overlaying calligraphic text on images of bridges and fireworks, Hopinka examines how oral transmission and written transcripts are underutilized in language revitalization efforts. He particularly makes use of institutional archives that house 19th- and 20th-century anthropological and ethnographic materials: His work transforms banal audio recordings hidden away in archives into engaging audio-visual didactic videos. Today, he is an assistant professor at Harvard University. In 2022, the Pechanga Band of Luiseño artist received the MacArthur “Genius Grant,” an exceptional honor for a member of a California Native tribe, who are underrepresented in contemporary Native art.

B. 1995, Gallup, New Mexico. Lives and works in Gallup.

Known for: monumental installations created with craft-store materials and durational performance

In Eric-Paul Riege’s latest exhibition, “ojo|-|ólǫ́” (2025), he pays tribute to generations of matriarchal weavers, particularly his great-grandmother. Within the two-room installation, a triptych photograph shows his shimá sání (great-grandmother) holding Riege as an infant. This family photograph sits between two classic Diné pictorial weavings—creating a dialogue between photographic portraiture and traditional textile forms. Respect is highly evident in the arrangement: both in the photo and in the innate respect required to spin, dye, and weave the abstract representational textiles that flank it.

Across the installation, a wall-mounted squash blossom necklace made from gray synthetic material faces an empty upright loom warp, surrounded by long earring-like sculptures crafted from faux fur, leather, and plush fabric (in place of the traditional animal fur, silver, and glass beads).The monumental work brings traditional Navajo modes of making—textiles, silversmithing, ceramics—and translates them for viewers in contemporary materials. The installation has familial collaboration at its core—his aunt sourced the show’s sheep hide when it passed through a local trade post, and his father filled black Halloween gourds with synthetic stuffing to create a bead for a monumental earring.

In a three-hour performance that’s part of the show, Riege moved through the space in handmade regalia, his body mimicking the loom’s rhythmic shuttle. Fringed and jingle-adorned pieces brushed the ground near a trickster-like figure—an enduring archetype in Indigenous cosmology—perched on a wooden ladder. Presented at The Bell Gallery at Brown University, the exhibition debuted in October with performances by other Indigenous artists, a gesture of collaboration, kinship, and shared ritual. In Riege’s hands, monumentality becomes a tactile act of remembrance, threading together ancestral memory, craft, and collective endurance.

B. 1979, Vancouver, Canada

Known for: irreverent and colorful painting and sculpture

In 2021, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill created a series for New York’s Museum of Modern Art commemorating the city’s original peoples—the Lenape—and the city itself. These 11 paintings—or “spells,” as the artist calls them—are infused with tobacco oil, a gesture to the original industry in what is now Greenwich Village. One painting, Spell #10, for unsticking (2019), involved coating a paper over and again with tobacco oil, then applying pigments and often waiting months at a time for drying. The final result depicts blackened yellow, red, blue, and purple cobwebs affixed with another printed cobweb, a dollar-store snake charm, and wildflower.

Disintegration (2019), soaked in Virginia and Perique tobacco, references the divergent U.S. and tribal uses of tobacco—one defined by labor extraction, the other, medicinal. The work is a brown 3.5-foot-by-1.5-foot flag with a golden sun-shaped circle, imagining a new, Indigenous flag that returns tobacco to its association with medicine and not chattel slavery and the Confederate South. In the same galleries, several bunnies made out of hosiery were arranged in fours. The tawny-colored rabbits were chosen for their cultural associations. While in the West they’re associated with sexuality and reproduction, they are a source of food and a symbol of cleverness and trickery in Indigenous communities. “Her work brings in references to the body, generational relationships, and care for ourselves and for others,” said Gibson.

B. 1982, Tucson, Arizona. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Known for: campy yet staunchly Indigenous painting, drawing, and sculpture

In the honorifically titled painting My Friend Fred (2024)—a colorful portrait of a woven bear sculpture by his friend Fred—Ishi Glinsky plays with scale and medium. He lends texture to the original, which was made of bear grass and deploys a refracted aesthetic to create a vivid realism.

Glinsky is also known for other whimsical works. As Gibson put it: “large resin versions of Native American jewelry that feature animated characters, including Pink Panther, Mickey Mouse, and Tweety, among others.” The artist’s work is purposely excessive and is inspired by Zuni and Diné artists who interpret Disney characters, such as designer Veronica Poblano, who created a Pink Panther bolo tie that inspired Glinsky’s large-scale interpretation called Light Pink Jazz V.P. (2024), rendered in aluminum, resin, pigment, wood, adhesive, and foam. He has also made an oversized leather jacket, Monuments to Survival (2021), embellished with Indigenous motifs, interpreting pop culture and Native design to maintain visual sovereignty while being hailed by the Western viewer.

B. 1977, Fort Defiance, Arizona. Lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Known for: noisy site-specific installations that won him a Pulitzer Prize for Music

Raven Chacon’s sound works “are meant to be played by himself and others, sometimes in specific places,” Gibson said, referencing the artist’s music scores, which form a large part of his artwork. “These scores are often made into prints, printed onto found surfaces, and he is known for creating immersive sound installations.” Controlled Burn (2025), a site-specific installation for the ICA Boston’s “An Indigenous Present,” is a recording of one of his personal American Ledger army blankets fanning the flames of a burning American flag. It’s played in view of a large American flag before the Boston Harbor. Also in view are two other signifiers of the American Revolutionary War: the white steeple of Old North Church, a stop on Paul Revere’s midnight ride, and the Bunker Hill Monument.

Voiceless Mass, meanwhile, the pipe organ work that Chacon won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022, is a haunting work produced with percussive and string instruments typically found in Christian cathedrals, and evokes the wails of Indigenous ancestors impacted by colonialism.

B. 1985, Watford City, North Dakota. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

Known for: abstract craft-store renditions of maps, evoking global and Indigenous cosmological cartography