New Acquisitions: 2011–2017 highlights newly acquired work over the past six years from MoCNA’s Permanent Collection and demonstrates the museum’s commitment to collect works that are visionary and a testament to IAIA’s innovative spirit. The selected artworks complement each other through aesthetic, color, and form, but also share an expansive vision collectively.

Desert ArtLAB is an interdisciplinary art collaborative, established by museum curator and educator April Bojorquez (Chicana/Rarámuri) and artist and educator Matthew Garcia (Chicano). The collaborative reconceptualizes desert/dryland ecologies not as post-apocalyptic growth of wasteland, but as an ecological opportunity.

MoCNA is pleased to present the digital works of filmmaker Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians). Hopinka’s work is both multifaceted conceptually and formally, with involved tiers of images and narratives. Beautiful and mysterious, thick with color and gesture, his films are filled with notions and confluences around tribal identity, language and land.

Connective Tissue: New Approaches to Fiber in Contemporary Native Art features contemporary Native American artists who integrate various forms of fiber art media and methods to achieve their visions and to make their statements. They share an interest in the materiality and technique of fiber art.

Action Abstraction Redefined features paintings and works on paper from the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) permanent collection created in the 1960s and 1970s. The artists in this exhibition challenged stereotypical expectations of Indian art by experimenting with American modern art movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Color Field and Hard-edge Painting combined with art influences from their own cultural heritage.