Indigenous Art as a Healing Response to Centuries of Colonization

It is inspiring to witness how Native American artists are expressing with ever-increasing freedom their inherent creativity.

Indigenous art is inspiring for its imaginative artistry and themes. Even more significant is its mission to address the mistreatment and colonization of Indigenous people in our country and beyond. The artwork is often a response to the fraught heritage of Native Americans over the last several centuries.

Stirs Up the Dust, 2011. Courtesy of Wendy Red Star. Autry Museum of the American West

Maltreatment of Indigenous people in America hearkens back to our continent’s discovery by European explorers centuries ago, and later to the 19th-century belief in Manifest Destiny, asserting that white settlers and their governments had the divine right to overtake the North American continent. That creed was employed to defend the United States,’ Canada’s and several other countries forced removal of Native people from their homes and from the land they had occupied for 20,000 years.

Artists and museums have been wrestling with the social fallout from these draconian measures for decades. While other marginalized groups assert their presence through activism and art, Indigenous people have a unique history as the first inhabitants of our country, possessing a powerful identity and a many-centuries-long cultural output. Their descendants today, drawing from that legacy, are creating inimitable artworks while confronting the stereotyped depictions of “Indians” as objects in film, television sand the visual arts.

Wendy Red Star, (Apsaalooké, Crow), a 2024 MacArthur Genius Grant winner, recasts historical images of Indigenous people into healing visual statements. Among her most well-known work is 1880 Crow Peace Delegation series (2014), composed of 10 reproduced, manipulated photos of 19th century Native American men from the National Archives. Red Star first reproduced the photos of the men wearing decorative Indian regalia — forced on them by ambitious photographers — and then inscribed on them red inked narratives, describing what she presumes the men were thinking. One narrative reads, “I am ashamed your self-pity has stolen your courage, robbed you of your spirit and self-respect. Stop mourning the old days. They are gone with the buffalo.”

Wendy Red Star (Apsaalooke (Crow)). Alaxchiiaahush / Many War Achievements / Plenty Coups. 2014. Baltimore Museum of Art

Red Star’s series has been exhibited in museums throughout this country, including at The Baltimore Art Museum in Preoccupied, Indigenizing the Museum (2024). The show exposed and demystified colonial influences on Indigenous people from the 19th century to the present. In the exhibition catalog, Leila Grothe, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, wrote, “Projects like ‘Preoccupied’ may help broaden awareness of the vital contributions to our collective past, present, and future generated by individuals influenced by their personal Native experience.” Dale Turner, Curator of Indigenous Art, Brooklyn Museum, also wrote, “By curating historic and contemporary Native art, I hope to both honor my ancestors and offer a Native vision of the future…It challenges all museums to interrogate their colonial roots and make space for new ways of thinking, learning, and being.”

Kent Monkman (Fisher River Band Cree), “The Scream,” 2017, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum. © Kent Monkman

The Denver Art Museum, which has been collecting and displaying Indigenous art for 100 years, is also featured in the Preoccupied catalog with an essay by John Lukavic, Curator of Native Arts. He wrote, “The Denver Art Museum’s Commitment to Indigenous Communities opens with a formal land acknowledgment and recognizes how we are complicit in harming originating communities.” Lukavic asserts that DAM must change and recognize how central Indigenous people and arts are to the museum.

Artwork by Canadian Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree Nation) is prominently displayed at the Denver Art Museum. His 11-foot-wide acrylic painting The Scream (2017) dramatically illustrates the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, priests and nuns from 100 years ago, abducting Indigenous children from their parents to send them to Indian boarding schools. The painting is a powerful statement about the diaspora of Native Americans through colonization, trauma and loss. Another dramatic artwork at DAM is Rose Simpson’s (Santa Clara Pueblo) mixed media Warrior (2012), a life-size sculpture of a woman expressing energy, self-actualization and empowerment to deal with life’s challenges.

Rose Simpson, (Santa Clara Pueblo), “Warrior,” 2012, clay and mixed media. Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum. © Rose B. Simpson

At the Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, “Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology (through June 21, 2026) addresses Native art with an adventurous approach. The massive exhibition, “explores the role of Indigenous Futurisms, a wide-ranging and fast-growing movement in Indigenous literature, visual art, and other media that draws on worlds past to imagine worlds to come,” according to the catalogue. Time travel and cosmic phenomena have been employed in Indigenous art for decades as a means of addressing colonization, environmental degradation and stereotypes.

The exhibition includes examples of Indigenous couture, and features clothing blending ancestral Native fashion with contemporary modes to express power, presence and style. Some designs were created by victims of sexual assault, as Native women are, “Almost 40 percent more likely to be assaulted, raped, or murdered than their non-Native peers,” according to the catalogue.

Red Star appears here with her installation, Stirs Up the Dust (2011), of a female mannequin clad in a powwow dance costume. Adorned with candy-colored streamers, an elaborate bustle and a conceptual headpiece, the artist places her cosmic dancer in a Martian landscape.

Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo), “Recon Watchmen,” 2022, ceramic, video, and vinyl (artist's proposal for his installation at the Autry Museum)

ReVOlt 1680/2180: Sirens & Sikas by Cochiti Pueblo artist Virgil Ortiz is the most dramatic of several videos on display in Future Imaginaries. The sci-fi style film depicts the 1680 Native Pueblo Revolt, a response to the Spanish colonizers’ efforts to ravage their landscape and decimate their population. The historic Pueblo uprising expelled the colonizers and freed the Natives until 1692, when the Spanish returned and stole the lands again. The video, recasting that demoralizing history, engages time travelers from 2180 to return to 1680, to aid and record their ancestors’ culture. Accompanied by Native chanting combined with electronic music, the video brings viewers into a futuristic world of healing and creativity.

A recent Indigenous-themed exhibition is Jeffrey Gibson’s the space in which to place me at The Broad museum in Los Angeles, through September 28, 2025. Featuring a variety of art pieces in a kaleidoscope of colors, the show’s title is from the Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier’s poem, “Ȟe Sápa,” which contemplates Indigeneity. (Gibson, born in 1972, is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent.)

The more than 30 murals, flags, paintings, birds, sculptural pieces, busts and other shapes in this show reflect a variety of influences. These include traditional Native art, modernism, popular culture, dancing, pow wows, music and Gibson’s philosophy of interconnectedness.

BIRDS FLYING HIGH YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL, 2024, Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio

Many artworks, emblazoned with statements reflecting Indigenous philosophies, are painted in block shapes, evoking Native graphic representations. Statements include: “THE GREAT SPIRIT IS IN ALL THINGS,” “WE WILL BE KNOWN FOREVER BY THE TRACKS WE LEAVE” and “IF YOU WANT TO LIFT YOURSELF UP LIFT UP SOMEBODY ELSE.”

To fully appreciate this exhibition is to embrace the artist’s explorations of his creative instincts, authenticity, resilience, joy and his positive view of Native perspectives. Most pieces in this show were created in 2024 for its previous showing at the U.S. Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, where Gibson was the first Indigenous artist representing the United States with a solo show.

Near the exhibition entrance, the 30-foot-wide mural, Birds Flying High You Know How I Feel is displayed, with its title taken from lyrics by Nina Simone in 1965. The piece presents a multitude of synchronized abstract avian shapes in vibrant colors, and features a glowing sun in the background. The effect is of unrestrained freedom and joy, qualities that Gibson has pursued since his impoverished childhood in the south.

Mirroring the mural’s message are two multi-colored bird sculptures, we are the witnesses and if there is no struggle there is no progress, each meticulously fashioned from beads, sequins, acrylic felt and more. Their messages and complex constructions reveal an artist who transcends the limits that society tries to place on him. Other framed pieces, echoing the colors and shapes of Birds, contain beads and found objects.

Nearby, the seven-foot tall The Enforcer and the nine-foot-tall We Want to be Free are human shaped sculptures with bird-like heads and block-shaped messages on their chests. These elegant pieces differ from others in the show with their endless nylon fringes and grosgrain ribbons flowing from their sculptural bodies, embracing the ground. The sculptures messages recall those of the welcoming females from Gibson’s childhood—women who were always there for him.

The nine-foot-long bronze 1900s sculpture, The Dying Indian of a slumped over Native American by Charles Cary Rumsey, borrowed from the Brooklyn Museum, fills up an entire gallery. Added to the Indian’s feet are finely crafted buckskin moccasins, titled with the Roberta Flack lyrics, I’m going to run with every minute I can borrow. (2019). Commissioned by Gibson, the moccasins were created by John Little Sun Murie (Pawnee/Cree, born in 1975). While “The Dying Indian” is about, “that history of envisioning the demise of indigenous people,” according to Gibson, the addition of the moccasins brings the piece into the artist’s realm of joy, resilience and interconnectedness.

Apocalypse in the lives of Indigenous people, artist Rose Simpson explains, “is an opportunity for innovation and for reflection and renewal. In a sense ... Indigenous people have been at a privilege when it comes to any kind of hardship because we’ve already survived.” Her soulful self-reflection is manifested in the creations of many Indigenous artists today.