{"id":20106,"date":"2026-01-12T17:42:33","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T17:42:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/12\/review-jeffrey-gibsons-an-indigenous-present-at-ica-boston\/"},"modified":"2026-01-12T17:42:37","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T17:42:37","slug":"review-jeffrey-gibsons-an-indigenous-present-at-ica-boston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/12\/review-jeffrey-gibsons-an-indigenous-present-at-ica-boston\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Jeffrey Gibson\u2019s \u201cAn Indigenous Present\u201d at ICA Boston"},"content":{"rendered":"
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George Longfish, I Will Never Be the Same When I Leave My Father\u2019s Lodge<\/em>, 1978-82. Courtesy The Fine Arts Collection, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California at Davis \u00a9 George Longfish, Photo by Mel Taing<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

People often relegate Nativeness to November, Native American Heritage Month, but from September through December, we celebrate like it\u2019s the high holidays. In early October, I visited the long-awaited show \u201cAn Indigenous Present,\u201d co-organized by Jeffrey Gibson<\/a> and Jenelle Porter<\/a> at ICA Boston. The show features the work of 15 abstract Native artists\u2014none 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\u2019s 2023 book, references Indigenous gift economies and the persistent gaps in Native art resources he experienced during his education.<\/p>\n

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This show elevates abstraction not only as a style but as a mode of experience for Native people living intermundane lives\u2014between Native America and the United States. Some expect a panegyric from a Lakota\/Dakota writer engaging with Indigenous curation, but I can\u2019t ignore the absence of a Wampanoag, Nipmuc or Massachusett artist in this contemporary vanguard\u2014a 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<\/a> and George Morrison<\/a>, Gibson\u2019s introduction questions the segregated position of Native contemporary artists and underscores humor as the project\u2019s most electrifying throughline.<\/p>\n

Cara Romero<\/a> creates campy photography, James Luna<\/a> molds sculptural lampoons and Wendy Red Star<\/a> arranges sarcastic tableaus. Gibson\u2019s curation untangles these artists from \u201cfine art\u201d rhetoric by bringing together diverse Native culture bearers\u2014visual artists, poets, historians\u2014who share space within Indigenous contexts but are rarely united in Western institutions. He juxtaposes Jamie Okuma<\/a>\u2019s cradleboard beside Philip J. Deloria<\/a>\u2019s essay, Layli Long Soldier<\/a>\u2019s poem next to Marie Watt<\/a>\u2019s 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\u2014an expansive format demonstrating the breadth of contemporary Native abstraction. Gabrielle L\u2019Hirondelle Hill\u2019s work occupied two rooms, though the reasoning behind the placement was unclear, making it feel both prominent and enigmatic. In other areas, the show\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Pink Slips 2<\/em>, 2023. Acrylic polymer, cotton muslin, steel pin and paper. 44 1\/4 x 22 inches (112.4 x 55.9 cm.)(each). Courtesy the artist and Tureen, Dallas.\u00a9 Sonya Kelliher-Combs<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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<\/a>\u2014an NEA grant recipient whose wampum work honors historical traditions\u2014exemplifies 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 \u201ccontemporary\u201d enough nor within the geographic or institutional orbit that Gibson\u2019s curation privileges. Despite the disciplinary schism, the show succeeds in broadly reflecting Native aesthetics with undeniable visual and conceptual splendor. Sonya Kelliher-Combs<\/a>\u2019 Salmon Curl<\/i> (2023) emulates sanguine salmon flesh with acrylic polymer and reindeer hair, satisfyingly reminding one of the violent beauty of life\u2019s cycles across species. Mary Sully\u2019s Met show of recently unearthed colored pencil, graphite and watercolor on paper portraits of white celebrities\u2014Admiral Byrd<\/a>, Bob Ripley<\/a>, Thomas Edison<\/a>, Amelia Earhart<\/a>\u2014quietly lampoon the very culture that excluded her, reimagining fame through a Dakota aesthetic lens. George Longfish<\/a> deploys similar wit in paintings like Take Two Aspirins and Call Me in the Morning, You Are on Target<\/i> (1984), where medical dismissiveness and violence collide in sardonic titles. Sully\u2019s panache and posthumous show created demand from the exhibition\u2019s artists to be hung next to her works, from Kelliher-Combs to Teresa Baker<\/a>, according to Erika Umali<\/a>, their collections curator. Gibson relied on Porter\u2019s robust publishing background to manifest the book and publish it before the show, affecting the exhibition\u2019s equally nontraditional approach; instead of defining strictly by theme, material or signifiers, they create cogency with a m\u00e9lange of humor, sound, materials and the land. \u201cThese are not storytelling paintings, these are abstractions, but they do tell a story in a way, and they tell an emotive story,\u201d said Kay WalkingStick<\/a>, a Citizen Band Potawatomi\/Cherokee painter whose work appears in the exhibition. \u201cWhen you move past them, you are encouraged to look at them and stand back and move.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teasing the show\u2019s primary theme, Man-made Land<\/i> (2025), commissioned from Caroline Monnet<\/a>, is installed diagonally in ICA\u2019s 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\u2019s edge that perform land repair and establish Indigenous demesne\u2014land claimed and held in our own right, not granted by colonial powers. In front of Monnet\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Installed between two galleries in the ICA\u2019s Poss Family Mediatheque, Hassanamisco Nipmuc photographer Scott Strong Hawk Foster<\/a>\u2019s \u201cHere We Stay\u201d 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\u2014and robust lineup of performances throughout the exhibition\u2019s run\u2014might soothe institutional anxieties about reciprocity and other cultural protocols. It gestures toward Gibson\u2019s stated investment in relational ethics with local community, but looking at Foster\u2019s portraits\u2014faces of all ages illuminated against a field of black\u2014another antinomy comes into view: how abstraction can both protect and erase Native bodies.<\/p>\n

While the No Dakota Access Pipeline struggle placed Native bodies in imperialism\u2019s way\u2014forcing a reckoning for settlers and the world about delusions of historical distance from colonialism\u2014abstraction presents an unexpected consequence: obscuring Native bodies from view on this land. Audie Murray<\/a>\u2019s video performance Bear Smudge<\/i> (2022) is an exception. We see Murray, a M\u00e9tis artist, setting down ceremonial paraphernalia\u2014a blanket, a jar of bear grease\u2014in a verdant field. She performs historical traditions in the present, adding definition to the show\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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Installation view, Caroline Monnet\u2019s Man-made Land<\/em> at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Photo by Mel Taing<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Murray recalls Betonie from Silko\u2019s Ceremony<\/i>\u2014the 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<\/a> turn figures away and Nicole Miller<\/a> silences interview subjects beneath instrumental sound. Murray\u2019s refusal is gentler, tactile: she doesn\u2019t deny access so much as consecrate the limits of it. The work\u2019s clarity\u2014visibly M\u00e9tis, performing recognizable ceremony\u2014makes its moment of disappearance even more powerful.<\/p>\n

Sound reappears elsewhere in the show, most notably in Raven Chacon<\/a>\u2019s Controlled Burn<\/i> (2025), a low, percussive installation that hums like a distant engine. Where Murray\u2019s sound gestures toward continuity and protection, Chacon\u2019s functions as warning\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n

That question reverberates through the work of multidisciplinary artist Kimowan Metchewais<\/a>, 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\u2019 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\u2019s vaunted \u201cuniversalism\u201d was thus sustained through Indigenous exclusion.<\/p>\n

Metchewais\u2019 Chief\u2019s Blanket<\/i> (2002) evokes the iconic Navajo chief\u2019s blanket pattern and the relational stories embedded in its form and meaning. Created with photo paper, ink, pigment, watercolor and pencil\u2014materials grounding the work in the present\u2014it fuses landscape photography with the blanket\u2019s 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<\/a>\u2019s Ronan Robe #1<\/i> and #2<\/i> (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\u2014shot through the memory of violence\u2014abstracting Native materials and motifs just enough to register as contemporary art.<\/p>\n

Other artists approach ontological themes with less material and conceptual rigor. Teresa Baker\u2019s Throw It to the Ocean<\/i> (2025), a work evoking water<\/keyword> 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\u2019s 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\u2014where the work indeed photographs better\u2014but up close, the slapstick craft-store aesthetic fails to conjure oceanic vastness. Her past work with the unmysterious turf material\u2014which she once described as emulating prairie grass\u2014dressed 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\u2014some perpendicular, some crossed\u2014appearing like fish, birds or stars. The bright blue vase\u2019s mouth bears wandering borders made of a tawny-orange yarn, filled in with the same tawny color paint. Foucault once asked, \u201cCouldn\u2019t everyone\u2019s life become a work of art?\u201d Despite her MFA, Baker\u2019s crude execution ironically proves the opposite.<\/p>\n

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Caroline Monnet, When Will They See Us<\/em>, 2019. Tyvek and fabric. 67 1\/2 \u00d7 73 1\/2 \u00d7 7 1\/2 inches (171.5 \u00d7 186.7 \u00d7 19.1 cm.). Courtesy the artist and Blouin Division, Montreal. \u00a9 Caroline Monnet<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Humor permeates throughout, from caption to composition in Anna Tsouhlarakis<\/a>\u2019s IF SHE WAS AT THE PARTY, SHE WOULD HAVE DUMPED MORE THAN TEA<\/i> (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 \u201cvalue\u201d in the West\u2014animal 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 \u201cuse every part of the buffalo\u201d\u2014a wisdom still lost on Americans.<\/p>\n

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\u2014a revolt against tea tariffs\u2014she stages an intervention on American ennui, challenging settler complacency in imperialism. Where Murray protects the sacred through ceremony, Tsouhlarakis lets it all hang out.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn Indigenous Present\u201d offers a gift, unsurprising for its namesake: disquietude for settlers, delight and laughter for Native attendees opening weekend. The exhibition, galvanized by #NoDAPL\u2019s contribution to institutional attention toward Native artists, delivers something beyond representationalism\u2014evolving toward resistance and circumnavigation of the colonial gaze. While some works succeed more than others in translating abstraction\u2019s power, Murray and Tsouhlarakis, though not local, ground the show in Boston, compensating for the absence of Massachusetts peoples. Other works\u2014from Dakota Mace<\/a>\u2019s silver chemigrams to Kay Walkingstick\u2019s gestural abstractions\u2014deliver 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\u2014reciprocity and gift economies\u2014and in return, viewers laugh, and settlers learn.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/b>An Indigenous Present<\/b><\/a>\u201d 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).<\/b><\/p>\n

More exhibition reviews<\/b><\/h3>\n

\t\t\t\t\"In<\/p><\/div>\n