Arts and Cultures

Indigenous artwork is taking to the streets, the sides of buildings and the landscaped grounds of major institutions, a movement toward accessible expression that our Museum is supporting. We present a long, but by no means exhaustive, sampling.

Long a leader in Southwest design, Patricia Michaels (Taos Pueblo) made a national breakthrough, for herself and for indigenous designers, as a star of the television competition show Project Runway. She recently returned to Manhattan, along with Diné designer Orlando Dugi, with a spectacular Style Fashion Week presentation in the elegant Hammerstein Ballroom.

Steven Paul Judd (Kiowa) gives a unique twist to some well known images. The results are pointed and hilarious.

New York’s exposure to the broad range of Indigenous couture continues in February at the Museum’s George Gustav Heye Center in lower Manhattan with the arrival of the travelling exhibition Native Fashion Now.

The Alaska-born artist works ink into paper with a variety of found objects, including tire strips, but excluding brushes, to fashion huge artworks inspired by the majestic landscapes of her youth.

For centuries, tribes of the Northwest Coast have used only four colors for their sacred and material culture, but the chemical composition of their blues and greens have remained a mystery until very recently. The author, an indigenous artist herself, uncovered the secret while trying to learn traditional skills.

A powerful production dramatizes the struggle to give Reservation women protection from abuse.

The vast majority of the holdings in our Museum, and ethnographic museums around the world, are the work of women plying a broad range of crafts.

The Seminole/Apache artist from New Mexico reviews a thriving career in New York City’s lively American Indian art scene.

In a lifetime of varied styles, the Cherokee artist returned again and again to landscapes, “a living synthesis of human presence and place.”