For Indigenous communities across the United States and beyond, art has long served as a language of survival – a means to hold on to culture in the face of erasure, to resist narratives of disappearance, and to imagine worlds rooted in relationship and sovereignty. It’s a tool for decolonization.
This Indigenous History Month, I invite you to explore the works of these featured Indigenous artists who challenge dominant narratives and call upon us to reckon with the past and the present.
Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota)
Cannupa Hanska Luger centers community, ceremony, and collective action. One of his most powerful projects, Every One, responds to the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Queer, and Two-Spirit relatives (MMIWG2S+). Community members created over 4,000 handmade clay beads, which Luger assembled into a monumental portrait mural as an act of shared witness and grief transformed into solidarity.
I’m particularly moved by his recent project, ENCODED: Change the Story, Change the Future, which launched at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2025. This exhibit allowed patrons to use their phones for an augmented reality experience. The app he created guided patrons through 25 target artworks. Through their phones’ cameras, patrons could see an “intervention” that places native peoples into the gallery art, especially so-called classical landscape art that depicts colonial United States as empty land devoid of people and/or culture. See some of these interventions on Instagram.
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Tania Willard (Secwepemc Nation)
Tania Willard challenges the idea that Indigenous art belongs in the past. Through printmaking, installation, and community-centered curation, she creates spaces where Indigenous presence is undeniable and contemporary.
Her BUSH Gallery operates outside institutional walls, in the outdoors on Secwepemc land, reframing land as both gallery and teacher. It’s a refusal of art spaces that exclude, tokenize, or extract.
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Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota)
Dyani White Hawk creates textile-inspired painting and beadwork installations that reclaim visual languages from mainstream art institutions that have historically ignored or appropriated Indigenous art and artists. She positions Lakota aesthetics as equal to and in dialogue with “Western” abstraction, not derivative of it.
Her art asks viewers to understand Indigenous art not as “craft” but as advanced, intellectual, and conceptually rigorous.
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Jordan Ann Craig (Northern Cheyenne)
Jordan Ann Craig draws on Northern Cheyenne patterns, star knowledge, and stories held in family memory. Her paintings explore geometric repetition as prayer, grounding, and identity. She also teaches printmaking to Native youth, reinforcing that art is a collective inheritance.
In 2025 Craig debuted a new exhibit at Northwestern University’s The Block Museum, titled it takes a long time to stay here. This exhibit features seven paintings that represent her exploration of traditional Indigenous art forms like beadwork, pottery, and textiles.
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Recognizing Indigenous art as resistance pushes us past tokenism. It reminds us that Indigenous communities are not artifacts – they’re still here. They have always been here, and they will always continue to be here – adapting, creating, resisting, and leading.
Art isn’t just what we hang on walls. It’s how communities remember. It’s how people stay alive. It’s how we imagine the world we’re trying to build. May we continue to learn from and support the Indigenous artists who show us how to do that work with courage, beauty, and love.
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