Every student of modern art knows how European and American avant-gardists of the early 20th century had their world rocked by Indigenous art—how they swooned over and strove to imitate the dynamic concision they saw in ethnographic exhibitions. How Picasso launched Cubism by sticking African masks on French prostitutes in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. How Marsden Hartley paved his way to abstraction with tepees and Native American symbols. How Jackson Pollock started painting on the floor after seeing a demonstration of Navajo sand painters at the Museum of Modern Art in 1941.
Generally overlooked in Art History 101 was the inverse: how European materials and images were repurposed by Indigenous artists. That 1941 MoMA show was full of ancient Native objects, along with recent work that adhered closely to historic examples. (The catalog advised readers that “Good Indian work, done without the interference of whites, includes restrained colors as well as bright ones, and usually leans to economy rather than complexity of design.”) As with MoMA’s earlier shows of African and folk art, American Indian art merited inclusion in a museum of modernism not because it was modern, but because it offered inspiration to a Euro-American avant-garde. Somehow, modernist aping of Indigenous models got told as a story of increasing originality, while Indigenous adaptation of Western models was seen in terms of decreasing authenticity. The logic was clear enough: The proper job of Western art was forever to point to the future; that of Indigenous art was forever to repeat the past.
It has taken a century for the art world to realize its mistake, but contemporary Indigenous art is now having a moment. Major museums are mounting exhibitions of recent Aboriginal art from Australia and Native art from the Americas. In the imposing nine-pound book Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art, the art historian Ngarino Ellis writes enthusiastically of a new “global Indigenous art world.” Its advent was clear at the 2024 Venice Biennale, which featured Māori artists from New Zealand, Kaqchikel artists from Guatemala, and Nonuya artists from Colombia. The Australian pavilion’s award-winning installation interwove personal genealogy with 65,000 years of Aboriginal history. The Brazilian pavilion was renamed the Hãhãwpuá pavilion by Tupinambá artists, and the Danish pavilion was relabeled Kalaallit Nunaat (the Greenlandic name for Greenland) by the photographer Inuuteq Storch. The U.S. pavilion kept its name, but its mini-Monticello exterior was swathed from pavement to cornice in the eye-popping geometries of the Choctaw/Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson, the first Native American to fill the building with a solo exhibition.
Gibson, whose statues of anthropomorphized animals in Native regalia are currently holding court on the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, is one of the world’s most visible artists. A MacArthur fellow, admired by critics and popular with the art-going public, he has used his platform to normalize the idea of “an Indigenous present.” The phrase, designed to disrupt the equation of Indigenous with cultural stasis, forms the title for both his compendium of contemporary Native art, published in 2023, and a new traveling exhibition of Native abstraction that opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston last fall, before heading to the Frist Museum in Nashville and the Frye Museum in Seattle.
Rambunctious and enticing, the book consists of 450 pages packed with images of works by 60 artists—running the gamut from sassy conceptualism to enigmatic video stills, and from the lyrical painting of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith to Wendy Red Star’s photographic self-portrait as a diorama Indian with an inflatable elk. There is no obvious chronological or typological order to the presentation, nor any of the usual scholarly overviews. The title page doesn’t arrive until page 35.
The “Indigenous Present” exhibition, by contrast, feels almost stately—six dozen works by 15 artists, gracefully laid out in spacious galleries. Given the rubric of abstraction, the Indigenous references don’t jump out the way they do in Red Star’s photograph, but they make themselves felt through what the Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais called “live relics”—attributes of a culture that run beneath the surface, animating everything.
The oldest and oddest works in the show are the “personality prints” (actually triptych drawings) by Mary Sully, who was born in 1896 and died in 1963. Made in the decades before World War II, they depict their subjects in riddle-like sequences that progress from streamlined emblems to decorative patterns. The one dedicated to the aviator Beryl Markham, for example, begins with a cusp of blue water bookended by a pair of coastlines and matching female silhouettes—a tidy graphic summa of Markham’s record-breaking 1936 Atlantic crossing. Below it, a second drawing adapts those elements into a moiré pattern, suggesting both pistons and waves; the third drawing crystallizes the theme with interlocking polygons. Precisely delineated with colored pencil, Sully’s pictures look simultaneously naive and urbanely sophisticated. They echo flapper-era print ads and Art Deco posters and fabric design, as well as the kind of modernist abstract painting she would have encountered while living in New York City, along with the Dakota quillwork she would have learned as a child on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota.
Sully, whose real name was Susan Deloria, was both the great-granddaughter of the English-born painter Thomas Sully (it’s his portrait of Andrew Jackson that glowers at us from $20 bills) and the great-aunt of the Harvard historian Philip Deloria, whose 2019 book, Becoming Mary Sully, first brought her to public attention. A reserved and seemingly fragile person—Deloria calls her “an Indian soulmate to Emily Dickinson”—she never exhibited her work, and we have no idea what her aims were. Her subjects were an eclectic bunch: Bob Ripley (he of “Believe It or Not”), Gertrude Stein (who got rows of roses), the polar explorer Admiral Byrd. It’s hard to cast them all in the same play, maybe because they interested her less as people than as prompts. What seems to have motivated, even delighted, her was not representation but transformation—the transition from real life to geometry, from the anecdotal to the eternal.
Unseen for most of a century, Sully’s drawings can hardly be called influential, but in their multipart format, physical modesty, and casual interlacing of pop culture and Native references, they anticipate much of the show’s later work. The hefty paper sheets of Metchewais’s Luther (Striped Man) (2003) climb the wall with the erratic logic of a Post-it brainstorming session. Creased here and there from previous folding, they are stained rust red and nicotine yellow, and several carry the photographic image of a standing figure shrouded in black-and-white-striped fabric. It has the playfulness of a sheet ghost, Op Art style, while recalling old photographs of Native leaders wrapped in chiefs’ blankets. Taped together on the front rather than the back, Metchewais’s constructions—he called them “paper walls”—wear their contingency on the surface, keeping open the possibility of other potential arrangements, other ways of connecting.
[From the May 2025 issue: Philip J. Deloria on a radical generation of Native American activists]
Almost everybody here has been to art school. Walking through the galleries, you can draw connections to Pop Art or Conceptualism or Bay Area Funk and not be wrong. One room features the familiar minimalist format of near-identical objects arranged in grids, where the viewer’s task is to recognize the conceptual rule underlying their slight differences. Each of the 27 paintings from Kay WalkingStick’s Chief Joseph Series (1974–76) carries four sliced-arc shapes in various arrangements, but the title directs attention not to abstract concepts but to a real person: the Nez Percé leader who guided his followers on a 1,000-mile trek in pursuit of self-determination. Suddenly those sliced arcs begin to look like strung bows, and her muted palette begins to feel like an elegy. Similarly, the angular shapes that repeat across Dakota Mace’s 80 chemigrams (created by painting photo developer and other materials onto light-sensitive paper) are Diné symbols, linking land and lore.
For an exhibition of serious contemporary art, “An Indigenous Present” feels uncommonly light on its feet. These gridded installations lay claim to a lot of real estate, but the objects they are built from could fit in a backpack. Sully’s oeuvre spent decades in a suitcase. Untaped and folded, Metchewais’s “walls” could be carried under an arm. Such rejections of monumentality are not rare in contemporary art, but they usually appear as a reaction against what came before—a swerve away from the bombast of Expressionism, the hard shells of Minimalism, the slickness of Pop. What you see in “An Indigenous Present,” however, feels less like refutation than a willing handshake with the past—but it’s a different past.
Indigeneity is by definition site-specific—a statement of cultural continuity between a particular place and its people for time out of mind. Discussions of a “global Indigenous art world” thus raise the question of what a Choctaw/Cherokee MacArthur fellow working in the Hudson Valley and an illiterate Anmatyerr woman working in Australia’s Central Desert might have in common. The obvious answer is a shared legacy of colonial dispossession, racism, and cultural condescension, and plenty of Indigenous art calls out injustice in explicit terms.
But that’s not the central focus of “An Indigenous Present,” nor of the expansive survey “The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art,” organized by the National Gallery of Victoria, which opened its North American tour at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., in November. And it was nowhere to be seen in the retrospective that Tate Modern in London recently devoted to the groundbreaking Aboriginal painter Emily Kam Kngwarray.
Kngwarray was a phenomenon. Born sometime between 1910 and 1914, she grew up foraging, hunting, and sleeping in grass shelters. She remembered her first sight of a “whitefeller.” (She ran away.) She spoke little English and learned to write her signature only when it was time to endorse her pension checks. For most of her life, her artistic gifts were exercised in body painting and drawing in the sand—crucial elements of the ceremonies through which Aboriginal culture has been maintained down the millennia. But in 1977, Utopia Station, the tiny settlement where she had learned to write her name, began classes in batik, the Indonesian process of using hot wax on fabric as a dye-resist, with the goal of helping Aboriginal women earn money through handicrafts. (Funding agencies doubted the capacity of Aboriginal women for such fine work. They needn’t have worried, as the luminous silks teeming with squiggles, dots, and flattened lizards at Tate Modern showed.) Kngwarray was in her late 70s when she began working with acrylic, and in her final eight years, she produced thousands of paintings, some the size of a school bus. Video footage shows her dabbing paint insistently on canvases laid out on the ground. As the global audience for Aboriginal art grew, she emerged as a star. A year after her death, Kngwarray’s work was in the 1997 Venice Biennale. Today it can be seen cladding a Qantas 787 Dreamliner in giant red webs and white spots.
For non-Australian viewers, the Tate show was a revelation. Juddering across her 1991 painting Kam, spots of color—yellow, white, ochre—cluster and disperse amid darkness. The canvas is nearly 10 feet long and 4.5 feet tall but feels bigger, as if it stretched not just side to side and up and down but also back in space and even time. It is a knock-your-socks-off painting, engrossing and peculiar. The only visual analogues that spring to mind for its inchoate choreography are Hubble Space Telescope images of cosmic clouds and nascent nebulae, unimaginably distant and impossibly large. Read the label, though, and you find the picture rooted to the ground: In Kngwarray’s native Anmatyerr language, kam is the name for the tiny seeds and seedpods of the pencil yam for which she was named, a vital resource for Aboriginal people in Australia’s Central Desert. Limitless space collapses into something small, local, and edible.
“The Stars We Do Not See” includes photography, video, and conceptual art, but what makes it astonishing is the breadth of painting produced by Aboriginal artists over the past 50 years. After centuries of images that were either ephemeral (body painting; drawing in loose earth) or immovable (rock art), numerous Aboriginal groups in the 1970s and ’80s began making things that white audiences could recognize as art. In Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, artists expanded the practice of bark painting, using hand-ground ochre to portray loose-jointed human figures. In the Western Desert settlement of Papunya, they worked with industrially made boards and paints to create pictures in which arrays of dots nestle and collide. In Utopia Station, they started with batik. Most compositions run edge-to-edge with interwoven lines, wavering zigzags, or fields of dots dancing over and under other shapes. There are no horizons, no evidence for up or down. Why would there be in imagery that arose from the practice of drawing on the ground?
In the context of Tate Modern or the National Gallery’s East Building, it is tempting to see echoes of Western postwar abstraction—early Philip Guston, late Larry Poons, Brice Marden in his tangled-line phase—but those references would have been as alien to Kngwarray or Papunya artists as the experience of foraging for yams is to most of us. Whatever we may think we are seeing, they were not painting “abstractions”; they were painting “Country.”
That word, capitalized, appears 212 times in the Kngwarray catalog and 189 times in “The Stars We Do Not See” catalog, but its meaning remains elusive. It can refer to the native territory of a people, or more broadly to “the lands, salt and fresh waters, the subterranean and the cosmos to which they are connected,” the curator Kimberley Moulton writes. Inseparable from the ancestral stories called Dreamings, it also encompasses “law, place, custom, languages, spiritual belief, cultural practice, family and identity.” With such an extensive crib sheet, all kinds of things can be read into these images—cracked earth, reflected light on water, night skies, ecological awareness, metaphysics.
The enormous painting that greets visitors to the National Gallery show, Ngayartu Kujarra (2009), is mostly occupied by a single white shape, wobbly at the edges, some 13 feet long and seven feet high. Around the white, patches of variegated color swell and thin in the way littoral landscapes do—a scrubby green bit here, a sandy pink bit there, a shoal-like shape pushing up into the whiteness. The intimation of topography is confirmed by the label: Ngayartu Kujarra is the Punmu name for a seasonal salt lake also known as Lake Dora. The large blue dots that appear at the edge of the composition are sacred watering holes in the surrounding desert.
The canvas—a collaborative project by 12 Punmu women—was painted over the course of a week on-site, outdoors, in 118-degree heat. Led by a “senior custodian” of Punmu culture, the women sang, then walked onto the canvas to paint. When they finished, they laid the canvas on the lake’s crusted-salt surface, where it was celebrated with further song and dance. Finally, the National Gallery of Victoria reports, it was taken inside, and a last white coat was added “because it was too dirty from all of the dogs and cups of tea and little kids touching it.”
The curators are keen to educate visitors about Aboriginal life and worldviews. Wall panels offer primers on the central role of Country and Dreamings. Photographs show landscapes whose patchy growth patterns reverberate through the paintings. Videos let us hear the languages being spoken. But there are limits to what is being shared, we are informed. In Aboriginal societies, access to certain knowledge, designs, and even pigments may be restricted by age, gender, genealogy, or status within the community. Some of this is negotiable (initially the painters were all men), but much is not.
Maintaining these constraints in a world of oral transmission is one thing, but paintings can be carried anywhere and seen by anyone. While many artists saw painting as a way of keeping their culture alive for younger generations who may or may not live in their historic Country, traditionalists worried about how geographic or spiritual information appeared and what outside audiences were told.
All of this required invention. One reason for all of those dots, scholars have suggested, might be that they act a bit like pebble glass in a bathroom, diffusing without denying that which should not be shared. In addition to finding pictorial solutions to the problems of protected knowledge, Aboriginal artists needed to create a new language to translate the social, performative, and transient experience of ceremonies into the step-back, stand-still experience of a picture hung on a wall. Like artists everywhere, they were navigating between inherited cultures and present-day opportunities. The Yolngu artist Nonggirrnga Marawili painted on tubes made of rolled bark, a form that imitates the hollow logs once used by the Yolngu as ossuaries. Her grid designs refer both to a network of water holes and to the fish traps of ancestral hunters, but their magenta hues come from recycled toner cartridges. The 12 Punmu women were inspired to make their painting of Lake Dora after seeing it from a plane.
It would be foolish to make broad statements about Indigenous art on the basis of three exhibitions. But one thing that seemed distinctive—a contrast to the general tenor of contemporary art on other floors in the same buildings—was the solicitousness with which the artists approached their cultural inheritance. Western art likes to move forward by rebelling against its parents. Never mind that it does so through old-fashioned means, such as oil on canvas and cast metal: The rhetoric is one of rupture. In these shows, the rhetoric is different—neither rejection nor blind adherence to tradition, but simply respect, and an affirmation of a vital and lasting universe.
One of the mesmerizing works in “An Indigenous Present” is Audie Murray’s video installation Bear Smudge (2022). For most of its 30-minute run time, all you see is a field of flickering pastels, like a glitchy, pixelated Monet landscape. You can hear wind, shuffling footsteps, and what sounds like the striking of a match. Sometimes a distinctive motion within the static hints at the presence of a person. The wall text explains that you’re watching the artist perform a ceremony after smearing bear grease on the camera lens. What exactly she is doing on the other side of that bear grease is not explained, though anyone who has binge-watched Reservation Dogs or Resident Alien may recognize the practice of wafting cleansing smoke, and it’s easy enough to look up Native American smudging rituals on your phone. Objects spread out on the gallery floor offer clues, but the game of deduction is far less engaging than the scintillating field on the wall.
The visual effect is oddly reminiscent of Kngwarray’s Kam. Both convey a sense of particles in motion and of events taking place below the surface—some organizing engine hovering just out of view. The video and the painting were made in different centuries on opposite ends of the Earth, but they walk the same delicate line between making something visible and making it clear. Both artists were creating work that they knew would be seen by viewers unversed in their traditions and perhaps unmoored from the very idea of reverence.
Talking about his “Indigenous Present” exhibition, Jeffrey Gibson posed a set of questions rare in the usual run of contemporary art: “What is meant to be seen? How do you protect something? How do you transform something so you can share it, but not reveal it?” Most spiritual traditions—Indigenous and otherwise—restrict access to the sacred. But even beyond religious mystery, it can be salutary to be reminded of the existence of things beyond your ken. The title of “The Stars We Do Not See” was inspired by the Yolngu concept of “the stars behind the stars”—everything that exists yet escapes perception.
“It turns out,” Metchewais wrote in a 2009 Facebook post, “the thing in the modern world that most matches the Indian psyche is the web.” This might seem a reach, but as the technology historian James Gleick pointed out in a recent essay, Tim Berners-Lee’s crucial insight in creating the web was that “what matters is not objects but relationships.” The observation made me think of the 12 women working together on the huge salt-lake painting, and of Sully’s drawings, where what happens between each section feels more meaningful than what happens within any given one. In the “Indigenous Present” book, the curator Candice Hopkins argues that modernists missed the point by adopting the look of Indigenous objects while doing “away with any social role of that cultural belonging.” It occurred to me that if you relocate Gibson’s question about how to share and yet protect something, you have the essential conundrum of the internet age.
The art world is a fickle place. Inevitably the buzz around Indigenous art will fade away. The art itself, however, is likely to remain—not because of any high-minded notion of equal representation in institutional settings, or even for the window it opens onto worlds we may not know, but because of the light it shines on the one we’re all in.
This article appears in the March 2026 print edition with the headline “The Secrets of Indigenous Art.”
