The Frist Highlights Elders and Emerging Makers Through September
When folks think about Native American or indigenous art, the mind might more often than not picture native artifacts over modern art. People might even imagine a slim selection of items to represent the vast communities of native people who have lived in North America.
A new exhibition at The Frist Art Museum called An Indigenous Present requires viewers to reconceptualize art made by indigenous people by pulling in artists whose work spans only the past century. The idea is to move past traditional artistic expectations put on native artists and move toward more freedom in expression. The 15 artists represented in the exhibition were selected for their pursuit of abstraction as a tool for achieving that expression. Most of the artists whose work is on display are still living and practicing art. In these works, you might see traces or pieces of what might be traditionally called Native American art, but these artists are doing a lot to deconstruct those ideas and visuals.
George Morrison. Three Surrealist Forms, Automatic, 1984. Colored pencil, ink, and wash on paper; 17 x 15 in. Courtesy the George Morrison Estate and Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis. © George Morrison Estate 
George Longfish. Take Two Aspirins and Call Me In The Morning, You Are On Target, 1984. Acrylic on canvas; 85 x 117 in. Courtesy The Fine Arts Collection, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis. © George Longfish. Photo: Cleber Bonato 
Kimowan Metchewais. Chief’s Blanket, 2002. Photo paper, ink, pigments, watercolor, and colored pencil on paper; 46 7/8 x 70 in. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution. Photo: NMAI Photo Services 
Mary Sully. Bishop Hare, ca. late 1920s–early 1940s. Colored pencil, graphite, and watercolor on paper; three parts: 12 7/8 x 18 in., 12 x 19 in., 9 1/2 x 12 in. Courtesy The Mary Sully Foundation. Photo: Charles Meyer Photography 
Mary Sully. Annie Stein, ca. late 1920s–early 1940s. Colored pencil and graphite on paper; three parts: 12 7/8 x 18 in., 12 x 19 in., 9 1/2 x 12 in. Courtesy The Mary Sully Foundation. Photo: Charles Meyer Photography 
Teresa Baker. Knife River, 2024. Yarn, buckskin, artificial sinew, and willow on AstroTurf; 63 x 107 in. Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Acquired through the generosity of the Acquisitions Circle. Image courtesy of the artist and Broadway Gallery, New York. © Teresa Baker. Photo: Ruben Diaz
“We chose artists who have pushed traditional forms of cultural abstraction into realms that don’t directly reference specific cultural traditions,” says Jeffrey Gibson, co-curator of the collection of work in An Indigenous Present. “They are experimenting with it, pushing it into places where it’s still tethered to where the reference originates from, but in a new format that can make it almost unrecognizable.”
The exhibition is culled from a volume put together by Gibson in 2023, a book full of contemporary Native North American artists, musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, architects, writers, photographers, designers and more. This year’s show at The Frist was co-curated by independent curator Jenelle Porter.
“We consider this exhibition a chapter in the project that is An Indigenous Present — hence our repetition of the title — one in which we envision the ways abstraction can dissolve the hierarchies and categories that confine making, seeing, and thinking,” wrote exhibition co-curators Gibson and Porter.
In the same year Gibson released the volume, The Frist hosted his solo show called The Body Electric, a stunning, bold and vivid collection that ranged from paintings to sculpture and video as well as intricate installations. Gibson, who is of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee descent, shows diverse approaches to Indigenous art in his personal work, but the beauty of showcasing an array of artists is that the viewer sees the scope and modern creative practices of each.
The Frist says this exhibition “centers individual practices, while acknowledging shared histories, to create a visual experience that foregrounds diverse approaches to concept, form and medium as well as connection, influence, conversation and collaboration. An Indigenous Present foregrounds transculturalism over affiliation and contemporaneity over outmoded categories.”
In a conversation about the development of the exhibition, co-curator Porter said, “Abstraction is this incredibly flexible tool that allows artists a liberated field in which to make and think and see and hear. But we’ve included artists who use abstraction in ways that counter what is typically expected of contemporary Indigenous artists.”
At The Frist, visitors can listen to a podcast produced by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and WBUR. In a series of conversations, the co-curators discuss the exhibition and are joined by artists Teresa Baker, Raven Chacon, Sky Hopinka, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Caroline Monnet, and Anna Tsouhlarakis and scholar Philip Deloria, who found Sully’s art under a bed after she passed away and brought it to light. Deloria is Sully’s great-nephew.
The exhibition is organized into five interconnected thematic sections. It begins with the work of George Morrison and Sully, both of whom are considered integral to developing modern Indigenous art.
Sully was born a Dakota Sioux citizen in 1986 at Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota. Sully’s early deconstructions of Native art built the foundation for this modern abstraction movement. When scholar and relative Deloria found her drawings, hardly anyone had seen them. While they maintain the tether to traditional Native art, the representation in pattern and play with form made them unique.
“I remember opening the box that held them and being both mystified and captivated by the drawings,” Deloria said in a 2024 interview. “I had heard bits and pieces about my great-aunt, including that she had artistic ambitions. No one had really taken those ambitions seriously, however, and it wasn’t quite clear just what it was we were looking at. The works had names attached to them and, while we knew some, many were completely unfamiliar. My mother, more than any of us, recognized them as something potentially important and so worked to keep them safe over the ensuing years.”
In this exhibition, works are presented in contrast and community, placing emerging artists in dialogue with folks who came before them, providing and showing a connectedness across time. Sully and Morrison are only the start of the journey. For example, Kay WalkingStick and Dakota Mace both approach repetition, pattern and seriality, though their works were created 50 years apart. WalkingStick’s Chief Joseph Series, which is an honoring of the heroic Niimíipuu /Nez Perce chief displays 27 paintings in grid format. The artist’s representation shows the serial forms and storytelling. Mace’s So’ II (Stars II) is composed of 40 unique chemigram prints that draw on Diné (Navajo) design histories and heritage.
Morrison and Teresa Baker both find color and form to represent their own ancestral homelands. Morrison trained alongside abstract expressionist painters in New York in the 1950s and uses vibrant compositions inspired by the horizon near his home in Lake Superior, Minn. Baker creates more large-scale pieces, using yarn, paint, willow and hide on irregularly cut artificial turf to build abstractions. Baker draws from her own home from her youth in Northern Plains to convey “memories of place” as well as “legacies of color field painting and collage.”
In connecting these dots, Gibson and Porter allow and push for a future for indigenous artists where they are linked to the past, but not bound by it.
An Indigenous Present opened on June 26, and it will run through Sept. 27. It was organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston,and will be on view in the Frist’s Upper-Level Galleries.