Installation view, “Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons,” part of the Chicago Works exhibition series at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Aug. 3, 2024 – Feb. 2, 2025, now at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. (photo by Robert Chase Heishman)
Native contemporary exhibitions at area museums make for a blockbuster fall in the visual arts
Incredibly, it was just five summers ago, in 2020, that the National Gallery of Art acquired its first major work by a Native American artist: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s “I See Red: Target” (1992), an 11-foot-tall mixed-media work on canvas. At the beginning of 2025, Smith passed away at age 85, having broken what she called the “buckskin ceiling” on behalf of generations of Indigenous artists who had gained international renown for more than a century and had received painfully little attention or respect at home.
If progress is being made on collecting and exhibiting Native artists, it can be seen in a recent announcement by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and Art Bridges Foundation in Bentonville, Arkansas. They have acquired 90 works of contemporary Native art from the St. Louis-based John and Susan Horseman Collection.
Now, in the wake of three decades of trailblazing efforts by Bruce Hartman, retired founding executive director and chief curator of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the institutional art world is making up for lost time with a slew of exciting exhibitions hosted and originated by other Kansas City area museums. This new attention on contemporary Indigenous art is an overdue signal that arts organizations are practicing more inclusive methods of organizing exhibitions that consider the experiences and center the artistic practices of First Americans. The shows:
Americans, Aug. 23 – Oct. 5, Watkins Museum of History, Lawrence, www.watkinsmuseum.org
Having survived an untimely round of federal funding cuts and a change of venue, “Americans” is a traveling Smithsonian exhibition that examines the origins of our nation’s visual history and continuously finds representations of First Americans right up to our present pop culture moment. Hosted by the Watkins Museum of History in Lawrence, in collaboration with Haskell Indian Nations University and Haskell Cultural Center and Museum, this exhibition traces the astonishing variety of American Indian imagery saturated into our national identity. How do you think Native people like being America’s mascot?
From currency to stamps, toys to travel posters, butter, beer or motorcycle brands, countless depictions of Native people have been appropriated and commodified as place names, corporate logos, and mascots of schools and professional sports franchises. While the tide has been turning in recent years with Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians changing to the Guardians and the National Football League’s Washington Redskins to the Commanders, “Americans” goes to the heart of the matter to remind us of deeper questions: “Who are we as Americans? Who are American Indians in relation to the United States?” Originated at the National Museum of the American Indian, the exhibition reevaluates enduring historical narratives around Thanksgiving, the historical person of Pocahontas, the Indian Removal Act and the Battle of the Little Bighorn through the questionable legacy of visual representations.
Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons, Aug. 29, 2025 – Feb. 15, 2026, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, www.kemperart.org
Like that movie poster that stops you in your tracks, a powerful graphic intensity surges through Andrea Carlson’s huge, horizontal mixed-media paintings on paper. Her multi-layered imagery has the bold compositional energy of the Mexican muralists and a sophisticated late-pop art sensibility, as in James Rosenquist’s largest works. The visual storytelling motifs the artist employs reference landscape, figuration and text, interlaced with geometric, botanical and animal designs related to her Anishinaabe heritage, a people based near Lake Superior. Carlson’s work actively reflects on the dispossession, assimilation and colonial erasure of several bands of Ojibwe People in northern Minnesota, and Native People in general. In addition to paintings, “Shimmer on Horizons” includes works in video and large wood sculpture showing us what a decolonized, revitalized Indigenous futurity looks like.
Teresa Baker: Somewhere Between Earth and Sky, Sept. 5, 2025 – Feb. 8, 2026, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, camstl.org
Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Teresa Baker has developed her own visual language of abstraction informed by her Hidatsa/Mandan heritage of the Northern Plains. Her large, irregularly shaped artificial turf canvases combine spray-painted fields of color divided and decorated with meaningful organic materials like corn husks, bison hide, willow and yarn. The intentional contrasts and careful handling of artificial and natural materials create unusual textures, lines and shapes that call to mind topographic forms.
Baker’s poetic abstractions, however, remain conversant with 20th-century expressionist and minimalist readings as well; imagine touches of George Morrison, Richard Diebenkorn, and Fred Sandback. “Somewhere Between Earth and Sky” also presents Baker’s work in other media: bronze sculptures, woven baskets and works on paper, revealing a refreshing mix of traditional and contemporary Indigenous culture with unexpected materials and compositions.
In’zhúje’waxóbe Return of the Sacred Red Rock, Sept. 9, 2025 – Jan. 25, 2026, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, www.spencerart.ku.edu
Go ahead and test your Kaw pronunciation skills; “In’zhúje’waxóbe” is the Kaw name of the Sacred Red Rock, a 28-ton boulder of red Siouxan quartzite that was deposited by an ancient glacier at the confluence of the Kaw River and Shunganunga Creek, not far from present day Topeka. The Rock holds great spiritual importance to the Kaw Nation, who were forced from their Kansas homeland and separated from “In’zhúje’waxóbe” in 1873.
After a century as an appropriated monument at a Lawrence city park, the boulder was successfully repatriated to the Kaw Nation in 2024 after years of advocacy. It now has a new home at the Allegawaho Memorial Heritage Park, on land owned by Kaw Nation near Council Grove, Kansas. This unique exhibition, led by Sydney Pursel, the Spencer Museum’s curator of public practice, and an advisory group of Kaw Nation citizens, engages artists and tribal citizens in telling the extraordinary tale of how the desecration of Indigenous cultural heritage can be responsibly acknowledged, sincerely apologized for and restored, in part, through the social art practice of community engagement.
ReVision, Sept. 24, 2025 – Jan. 4, 2026, Salina Art Center, www.salinaartcenter.org
Salina Art Center embraces a new generation of contemporary Indigenous art with “ReVision,” an exhibition of 15 artists from across disciplines that centers “present-day Indigenous experiences and artistic voices.” Curated by teaching artist, printmaker and cultural advocate, Taiomah Rutledge, “ReVision” aspires to be a “a platform for dialogue, education, and belonging.” Rutledge, a member of the Ojibwe, Meskwaki and Dakota nations, is co-founder of the Wichita-based Warclan Collective.
Beyond the art exhibition, Rutledge and the Art Center are planning a program of artist-led workshops, film screenings, performances and culinary events to engage visitors “more deeply with the artists’ stories, techniques and cultural heritage.” One expects from “ReVision” and its emerging First Nations artist/curator Rutledge, a multidisciplinary extravaganza of creativity, challenging perspectives and some participatory good vibes. It is yet another step in the right direction —the institutional foregrounding of contemporary Indigenous artists — one of the artistic powerhouses of our Great Plains region.
Raven Halfmoon, Nov. 14, 2025 – April 19, 2026, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, www.kemperart.org
Staggered later in the fall to overlap with the Andrea Carlson exhibit, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art has commissioned the talented Caddo ceramicist, Raven Halfmoon, to create “site-responsive” works that engage “the material, Indigenous, and cultural histories of Kansas City.” Halfmoon, who lives in Norman, Oklahoma, works consciously from a traditional method of handling clay — Caddo coil building — only she turns it up to not 10, but 11 with her monumental figurative stoneware sculptures that have been lighting up the art world from Omaha to Santa Fe to New York.
Her recent bodies of work feature largely female ancestral figures often twinned or joined side by side or back-to-back, standing on legs the width of tree trunks, with thick manes of hair cascading down sturdy torsos like lava flows. Their faces are intense, softened by a range of pinched clay textures from Godzilla gnarly to feathered funk, every inch indicating the all-over hands of the artist. Splashy, drippy glazes in jarring whites, reds and blacks echo the ancient use of clay pigments as bodily adornment and ceramic decoration. Colors and markings carry symbolic and place meanings grounded in the artist’s ancestry: Caddo, Choctaw, Delaware and Otoe-Missouria. The Kemper Museum commission marks a milestone in this artist’s career. Chief Curator Jessica S. Hong predicts “a bold expansion of her creative practice.” Just how will Raven Halfmoon connect with Kansas City? What will happen? Given the artist’s trajectory, bet on big.
Homeland: The Osage in Missouri, March 21, 2026 – March 28, 2027, The Museum of Kansas City, museumofkansascity.org
Looking ahead to the United States’ 250th anniversary next year, the Museum of Kansas City announced a pair of ambitious exhibitions to commemorate the event by honoring the area’s Indigenous cultural heritage and art.
“Homeland: The Osage in Missouri,” curated by Jimmy Lee Beason II, Osage Nation citizen, author and professor at Haskell Indian Nations University, taps into the museum’s collection for historical materials and art objects to explore the seldom told, centuries-long story of the influential Osage and their ancestral settlements in what is now Missouri, upper Arkansas and eastern Kansas. The exhibition will provide insight into how “The People of the Middle Waters” developed kinship groups, lifeways and cosmology deeply related to the land, rivers and animal life, and a vast hunting and trading territory that spanned from woodland to plains. Though displaced by waves of colonization over the last two centuries, the Osage Nation, now based in northeastern Oklahoma, continues to adapt and thrive very near its homeland. The exhibition promises to deepen one’s understanding and appreciation for the people called Wahzhazhe.
Voices Now: Contemporary Native American Art, March 21, 2026 – March 28, 2027, The Museum of Kansas City, museumofkansascity.org
Thanks to a substantial philanthropic grant from Kansas City’s Jedel Family Foundation, the Museum of Kansas City will present “Voices Now,” an unprecedented original exhibition focusing on “contemporary Native American artists with roots in the Kansas City region.” Led by the curatorial duo of Dr. Jami Powell, Osage Nation citizen and associate director for curatorial affairs at the Hood Museum of Art, and Bruce Hartman, independent curator and retired founding executive director and chief curator of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the show will include an array of artistic forms from traditional textiles, bead and ribbon work to contemporary painting, ceramic and video. Their vision aims to celebrate living artists from the same Indigenous communities that occupied the lands around the confluence of the Kaw and Missouri Rivers: the Osage (Wahzhazhe), Kanza (Kaw), Nutachi (Missouria), Jiwere (Otoe), Wandat (Wyandotte), Ponca and Shawnee nations. Themes of kinship, identity, removal, erasure, memory, resilience and self-representation will give shape to this showcase of living talent.
