Exhibitions

The exhibition examines Dwayne Wilcox’s (Oglala Lakota) own lived experience as an artist creating work that is linked to historic forms of narrative communication of his Lakota people and post-modernism in its powerfully ironic stance.

#NoFilter: IAIA 2019 BFA Exhibition showcases the diversity of work being created by IAIA seniors trained in studio and cinematic arts. The selected works by these artists are grounded in ideas of personal, political, social, cultural, or historical import—and reflect an earnest exploration of the artists’s chosen media.

MoCNA presents two feature-length films directed by Zacharias Kunuk, in conjunction with the exhibition Art for a New Understanding: Native Perspectives, 1950 to Now.

Art for a New Understanding: Native Perspectives, 1950s to Now seeks to expand and reposition art in the U.S. and Canada since 1950. It is the first exhibition to chart the development of contemporary Indigenous art from the United States and Canada.

Wayne Nez Gaussoin’s (Diné/Picuris Pueblo) Adobobot is a modern modular robot with a Southwestern adobe façade.

Animation has been a part of everyday life in mainstream America and Native American communities for decades. Contemporary Indigenous artists, animators, actors, directors, producers, and script writers, now more than ever, offer audiences a new angle on Native American culture in developing animation to voice Indigenous narratives both present and traditional.

Meeting the Clouds Halfway is a collaboration between Tohono O’odham basket weaver Terrol Dew Johnson and architects Aranda\Lasch (Ben Aranda and Chris Lasch) from Tucson and New York. The exhibition features contemporary basketry and architecture that blend traditional craft with modern design.

Expanding Horizons highlights new abstract landscapes by Darren Vigil Gray (Jicarilla Apache/Kiowa Apache). The works reflect Gray’s personal approach to the subject “landscape,” and his spontaneous painting method inspired by abstract expressionism and his inner self.

Holly Wilson (Delaware Tribe of Western Oklahoma/Cherokee) presents her new narrative works created in a variety of media including bronze, wood, and encaustic. Her figures serve as her storytellers to the world. They often resemble stick figures or animals with human characteristics.

MoCNA is pleased to present six innovative films made by Southwestern based Native American directors and their teams of writers, producers, editors, and actors.

Without Boundaries is an exhibition that grew out of a series of Curated Conversations led by guest curator and artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs at the Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, Alaska. The exhibition features Indigenous leaders in the arts and the work of contemporary artists whose work encourages social action.

The Institute of America Indian Arts’s 2018 BFA thesis exhibition at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts showcases the diversity of work created by the artists trained at IAIA.

This exhibition highlights works from The Harjo Family Collection. The major art collection was recently donated to the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and contains about sixty artworks. These works were purchased or gifted to Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee), an important American Indian activist, lobbyist, policy maker, and 2011 recipient of an IAIA Honorary Doctorate.

Through the use of Ojibway, Cree, and Inuit syllabics, Souliere utilizes aspects of this writing system to engage in ideas about space, color, form, symbolism, surface movement, and language. Her new mural project is an exploration into the parallels and the multifaceted ways in which simple geometric building blocks such as chevrons, circles, and rectangles have a profound affinity with Indigenous language, culture, and abstraction in Western art.

MoCNA is please to collaborate with the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in the presentation of films that reflect both home-grown cinematic influences in Alaskan film and works generated by UAF students and alumni.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) presents IN CONCLUSION, a BFA exhibition showcasing the graduating class of 2016–2017. IAIA continually inspires the next generation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists alike.

IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) created a 10-day Social Engagement Art residency program which offers four Native artists a year an opportunity to create socially engaged art. The museum serves as a catalyst for artists to generate community dialogue and dynamic experiences. The MoCNA Social Engagement Residency realizes socially engaged art projects that […]

Daniel McCoy’s art addresses contemporary Native American issues, past triumphs, current disasters, and is inspired by underground comics, album covers, as well as Oklahoma flat style painting. His new mural project for IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) further develops themes and characters of his previous works which are based in Native culture and […]

Recent works by IAIA Artist-in-Residence (A-i-R) artists explore current themes and trends in contemporary Native American art, including Indigenous science fiction and visionary Native histories. Several of the works are inspired by Native abstract symbolism of the past and their futuristic aesthetics, while others respond to popular culture and investigate the role of Star Wars™ in […]

This solo exhibition showcases recent drawings and paintings by artist Athena LaTocha (Hunkpapa Lakota and Ojibwe) based on her recent experiences in Santa Fe. Her contemporary landscape paintings focus on the dynamic gesture and atmosphere that recall nature’s powerful forces. LaTocha’s unorthodox approach to the subject ‘landscape’ involves personal memories and the use of unusual […]

Organized by the International Print Center New York, New Impressions: Experiments in Contemporary Native American Printmaking showcases over forty prints by twelve contemporary Native American printmakers. Grounding their work in the images, textures, and experiences that shaped their lives, artists layer old and new, past and present to explore how the attitudes that informed the […]

This film program features SWAIA’s 2016 Indian Market Moving Image Classification X winners. Awards for Narrative Short, Documentary Short, Animation Short, Experimental Short, Music Video, and Youth Winners, recognize dedication and skill in working with new media and innovative art forms while retaining a commitment to traditional creation and technique. Award-winning films will be shown […]

Selected scenes from Moving Mountains (20 minutes), an upcoming feature documentary about The Repellent Fence, a two-mile long ephemeral monument created by Indigenous art collective Postcommodity that spanned the United States and Mexico border for three days in October, 2015. Download and view the .

Organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, the exhibition represents 40 years of work by the Native American artist. More than 120 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints will be on view in “Rick Bartow: Things You Know But Cannot Explain,” a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Jordan Schnitzer […]

The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) is proud to present the IAIA annual BFA graduating student exhibition. This year’s exhibition celebrates the class of 2015–2016 and showcases a diversity of styles that combine traditional skill with contemporary vision. These artists represent the future of Native art, charting a path for others to follow. […]

Now in its third year, IAIA’s Department of Cinematic Arts is encouraging, training, and inspiring a new generation of Native filmmakers by providing them with the tools and a curriculum founded on the principles of meaningful storytelling, technical proficiency, ethical behavior, and a knowledge of cinematic history and concepts. IAIA is taking a leadership role […]

Lloyd Kiva New: Art features nearly thirty paintings by Cherokee artist Lloyd Henri “Kiva” New (1916–2002) completed between 1938–1995. New is best known for fashion design and the development of innovative concepts in cultural based education for Native people. Extravagant handbags, dresses, and modern design are calling cards of New’s art career, but his two-dimensional […]

Loosely translated, the Inuktitut word Akunnittinni means “between us.” This exhibition chronicles a visual dialogue between an Inuk grandmother, mother, and daughter—Pitseolak Ashoona (1904-1983), Napachie Pootoogook (1938-2002), and Annie Pootoogook (1969- ). Their artworks provide a personal and cultural history of three generations of Inuit women whose art practices included autobiographic narratives and have chronicled […]

Perhaps we yearn to make our lives good and find balance because even when we feel completely challenged there is the unrelenting proof in each of us that we are survivors, that we are the result of our ancestors histories and that eventually we will become ancestors.  This collection of work interprets facets of this […]

Lloyd Kiva New: Art, Design, and Influence celebrates the work of Cherokee artist and educator Lloyd Henri “Kiva” New (1916-2002). This exhibition observes New’s 100th birthday and draws on three major themes of his legacy, each tied to his innovative concepts in Native art and culturally-based education. Lloyd Kiva New: Art, Design, and Influence includes […]

This film program features SWAIA’s Indian Market Moving Image Classification X winners. Awards for Animation Short, Documentary Short, Experimental Short, Narrative Short, Music Video, and Youth Short, recognize the artist’s dedication and skill in working with new media and innovative art forms while retaining a commitment to traditional creation and technique. 2015 Class X Winners Animated Short How […]

Meryl McMaster’s work demonstrates a continually evolving exploration of the artist’s own relationship to cultural and familial heritage within the larger framework of historical and contemporary Indigenous identities. As a person with both Indigenous and European familial lineages, McMaster treats identity subjectively, as something that is never complete, always in process, but invariably shaped by […]

This group exhibition takes the idea of the Apocalypse and reimagines it. The fiction novel by Santa Fe author Cormac McCarthy, The Blood Meridian, which traces the violent journey of a ragtag group of men across the American West and Mexico, inspired the exhibition’s title. The end of the world, implied by the word Apocalypse, […]

LaFountain’s work plays in the intersections of photography, film, and sound. In several of her works she creates her own ceremonies in order to understand traditions. She asks: “How do I, a contemporary mixed blood woman, hold onto heritage, learn my tribal language and connect with the ways my ancestors lived? I don’t have buffalo […]

IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts’s (MoCNA) new permanent collection gallery highlights the exhibition Visions and Visionaries. Drawing from the strength and diversity of the permanent collection, the works enable us to see IAIA’s history and the world through different eyes, as well as highlight the role of visionaries who forged new paths that we […]

LaDonna Harris: Indian 101 (63 minutes) chronicles the life of Comanche activist and national civil rights leader LaDonna Harris and the role that she has played in Native and mainstream American history since the 1960s. Harris’s activism began in Oklahoma, fighting segregation and assisting grassroots Native and women’s groups. She continued her work in Washington, […]

This exhibition is a collection of recent works on paper by Minneapolis-based artist Julie Buffalohead. Known for her deft use of allegory and archetype, Buffalohead’s narrative drawings are dreamscapes consisting of a rich cast of characters, trickster coyotes and rabbits as well as turtles, deer, birds, and rodents. In her works animals often take the […]

The exhibition You Are On Indian Land presents the work of leading contemporary American Indian and First Nations artists from across the North American continent. The participating artists actively engage the notion of pop-culture, misappropriation, and representation in their work. This multi-site exhibition premiered at Radiator Gallery in New York on April 17, 2015 featuring […]

The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts is proud to present the IAIA annual BFA graduating student exhibition. The exhibition celebrates the class of 2014–2015 and showcases a diversity of styles that combine traditional skill with contemporary vision. The artists represent the future of Native art, charting a path for others to follow. Like all […]

This exhibition, a mix of new and recent works, includes drawings and paintings in Chris Pappan’s signature style of contemporary ledger art. The mid 1800s saw the unprecedented expansion of the American empire, and with it, catastrophic changes for Indigenous people. Beginning in the 1860s, paper was introduced to the plains via ledger books and […]

Dark Light is the first traveling exhibition of this groundbreaking Navajo (Diné) artist. McHorse, a first-generation potter, is considered among the most innovative artists working today creating vessel-based art that is undecorated and abstract, with formal qualities indebted more to modern sculpture than to Southwestern culture. With the urge to transgress and blur the boundaries […]

All of the works in this exhibition have something to do with war, but depict very little gore or physical violence. The armed conflicts referenced in these artworks span 500 years, from the Spanish and Pueblo conquest, to World War II, Vietnam, Wounded Knee, the Mohawk and Oka Crisis, and present-day conflicts. This selection of […]

This film program features SWAIA’s Indian Market Moving Image Classification X winners. This category is one of the most recent classifications to be added to the juried market. These awards recognize an artist’s dedication and skill in working with new media and innovative art forms while retaining a commitment to traditional creation and technique. 2014 […]

Mario Martinez’s artwork always pays reverence to nature through the influences derived from his deeply rooted Yaqui cultural background and allure to Western Modernism. The visual density of his paintings in his solo exhibition The Desert Never Left “The City” reflect upon the magic and power encoded within the spiritual and natural eco-systems conceptualized from […]

"Breach" is an exploration of historical ties to water and whale; imposed law; and a current relationship of material sustainability. Navigation lies within visual translation, acceptance, and pursuit of process. Charting exists as a logging of record; documentation and mapping of each point where the surface breaks. BREACH: LOG 14 catalogs the expedition, encounters, and […]

MoCNA hosts a traveling exhibition of the paintings and related works of Spokane artist Ric Gendron (pronounced zhan-drea), a dual-enrolled member of the Arrow Lakes Band of Confederated Tribes of the Colville and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla. Gendron is little-known established artist, and the exhibition and monograph Rattlebone feature more that 30 years […]

Alaskan artist Da-ka-xeen Mehner celebrates the lasting and profound relationship between Tlingit language and song in the exhibition Saligaaw (it is loud-voiced). Like many Native American families, Mehner’s grandmother and grandfather were from a generation who were punished for speaking their language. Inspired by a collective tenacity of maintaining traditional language and song, Mehner’s installation […]

Andrea Geyer digs into the complexities of narrative and imagery to consider how they become solidified into history and art. Her series Spiral Lands concerns history’s tendency to repeat itself. Created at a time when American exceptionalism was coloring the invasion of Iraq, for Geyer, the rhetoric justifying the invasion was reminiscent of that of […]

A documentary film directed by Daniel Hyde and Blackhorse Lowe. Part of the TIME project, which documents the site-specific land art project by artists Ai Weiwei and Bert Benally. A new media installation as part of Pull of the Moon, a site-specific land art project by artists Ai Weiwei and Bert Benally is featured in […]

Featuring films from Sundance Institute’s Native American and Indigenous Program Sikumi (On the Ice) An Iñuit hunter takes his dog team out on the frozen Arctic Ocean in search of seals and inadvertently becomes a witness to a murder. Director: Andrew Okpeaha MacLean (Inupiaq) (15 mins.) Nikamowin (Song) Deconstructing and reconstructing Cree narrative, this film […]

The Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was founded to support the creation, documentation and preservation of a legacy of culturally diverse American art and ensuring the participation of multi-ethnic artists in the field of fine art printmaking and related media technologies. The organization recently donated a collection of works by Indigenous artists to the IAIA […]

Bon à Tirer, or more commonly seen written as “B.A.T.” on a fine art print, is a French term meaning good to pull. Dating back to the late 1800s, a French master printmaking atelier (studio) required a signature and the initials B.A.T. from the artist for whom the atelier was creating an edition, usually a […]

We Hold These Truths features contemporary baskets made from paper that have been inspired by traditional techniques, shapes, patterns and functions of Cherokee baskets. Shan Goshorn examines and manipulates the material and authority of paper (and the written word) as a weapon aimed against Native Americans in the form of treaties, ancestry rolls, laws, restrictions, […]

Internationally renowned graphic artist Kenojuak Ashevak (b. 1927) passed away in 2013 at the age of 85. While we mourn the loss of one of the most significant Inuit artists of the modern era, she leaves behind an unparalleled artistic legacy in prints and drawings created over 50 years of uninterrupted production. The selection of […]

A selection of prints from the Crow’s Shadow Press signifies the ever-growing portfolio of prints produced over a 20-year period since the founding of the Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts located in Pendleton, Oregon. The exhibition encompasses the work of many outstanding artists of diverse backgrounds and media, and includes Rick Bartow, Wendy Red […]

The two-person exhibition The Place Between draws from and expands upon the conceptual basis of the original multiple supported by the printmaking process and potential for creative manipulation to interpret a sense of place. Paschall’s approach utilizes a base of intaglio ImagOn and lithographic prints that include crystal forms found in the geologic minerals of […]

Tony Tiger’s work speaks to a philosophy of contemporary Native soul. His work honors the truth and spirit of Native peoples’ endurance. In the mixed-media exhibition Full Consciousness of Being, Tiger’s context for expression arises from the totality of his personal observations related to intercultural experiences, while drawing on the critical influence Native people have […]

David Sloan’s installation of monoprints include silkscreened images of endangered species with their Diné names over lithograph reproductions of old 1970’s Navajo Times newspaper ads. Sloan’s conscious intentions compare and contrast eco-philosophies of American consumer culture with traditional Diné world perspective. The disparity of the animal images on top of the propaganda style-like advertisements promoting […]

Traces of the Plains consists of works on paper.  A multimedia installation of printed matter and video, the exhibition references the trauma of war and fragility of life. Artist John Hitchcock sets familiar images of U.S. military weaponry against unfamiliar mythological and hybrid creatures originating from the Wichita Mountains in western Oklahoma to allegorically explore […]

Grab is an intimate portrait of the little-documented Grab Day in the villages of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, whose people annually throw water and food items from the rooftop of a home to people standing below. A community-wide prayer of abundance, thanks, and renewal, Grab Day exists at the intersection of traditional Native and contemporary Western cultures.

Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 3/Contemporary Native North American Art from the Northeast and Southeast, Selected Works concludes a cycle of landmark exhibitions conceived and organized to present a comprehensive and in-depth cross section of innovative and groundbreaking work by contemporary Indigenous artists.  These creative individuals express a new vitality and spirit of experimentation in […]

Steven J. Yazzie’s work is about land, as a place of personal reflection, a framework for Indigenous cultural relevance, and a point of reference to changing politics related to urbanization. For the exhibition The Mountain, Yazzie recognizes place as an entity with multidimensional interpretations and has become an essential location for his creative investigations as […]

In the exhibition Divided Lines, artist Jacob Meders examines the complex misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples in North American artistic depictions prevalent in 15th and 16th century European society. By incorporating an aesthetic that emulates historic woodcuts, Meders’ panoramic installation toys with the idea of assimilation, reimagining figures with a likeness to Indigenous and western European […]

“Native American” is an umbrella term for the Indigenous population of North America. This term, being so broad, has allowed for many external interpretations, from anthropologists to Hollywood directors, to define who Native Americans are. The reality of the matter is that the continent of North America is vast, with environmental and cultural complexity that […]

Métis artist Rosalie Favell’s series, Facing the Camera (2008–present), is a growing suite of photographic portraiture that documents individuals from a growing Indigenous arts community. Through these images, Favell sees the photograph as a performance space where identity is constantly worked and reworked, represented, and perhaps hidden. Facing The Camera: The “Santa Fe Suite” was […]

Stands with a Fist is a multi-disciplinary art exhibition that is a unique platform for cultivating, celebrating, and declaring a continual presence of visual expression created by contemporary Native women artists. The exhibition demonstrates the ways that women boldly fit into, redefine, or turn upside down the usual categories of art and art-making, while re-interpreting and drawing from their rich cultural heritage. Collectively, their work expresses a unique Indigenous relationship to the land, contemporary worldview, and sense of obligation to their culture.