Showcasing Indigenous Artist and Studios
Digital Art Features
Native Artist Margaret Nazon: Saturn Beaded Work
Margaret Nazon, the visionary artist behind Nomad Designs, transforms the mysteries of the cosmos into intricate beadwork that bridges Indigenous tradition and contemporary art. Based in Tsiigehtchic, Northwest Territories, Nazon began her creative journey as a seamstress before evolving into a textile artist.
Native Artist Margaret Nazon: Milky Way Starry Night Beaded Work
Nazon's artwork is characterized by its abstract, whimsical, and beautiful nature, often sparking conversations about our limited understanding of the universe. Her piece "Night Sky," also known as "Milky Way, Starry Night #2," exemplifies the constellations of Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, and Orion, along with black holes, auroras, and a comet.
Navajo Crystal Storm Pattern Rug with Valero Stars, c. 1930s
This 10'1" x 6'2.5" tightly woven rug from the Crystal trading post area features classic Storm Pattern design with hand-spun wool. Natural gray and cream tones contrast with aniline-dyed blacks, browns, and reds. Notable details include a symbolic red warp yarn (representing rain) and a spirit line.
Native Artist Christine McHorse: Wolves Courting at Full Moon
Christine McHorse blends tradition and innovation in this mica clay bowl, crafted from earth near Taos Pueblo. Departing from Navajo norms, she fires her work in an electric kiln and adds imagery like the crow—symbol of the supernatural—and the wolf, a figure of wisdom. Embracing her own path, McHorse creates new traditions while honoring her cultural roots.
Native Artist Gerald Dawavendewa: Earth Bundle
This historic 6” canvas print is a tribute to Hopi cosmology. Created on buckskin and flown aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1994, Dawavendewa’s artwork centers Taawa, the Sun, surrounded by the Earth, Moon, Milky Way, and four corn plants—symbols of life. Encircled by a rainbow, representing water, the piece honors both the celestial and the sacred.
Native Artist Oscar Ramirez: Star Seed Pot
This handcrafted seed pot by artist Oscar Ramirez highlights a rich cultural heritage. Inspired by ancient Native American traditions of storing seeds for survival, modern seed pots have become decorative treasures. This large, round pot features a star-shaped opening and intricate polychrome designs including a sgraffito butterfly, mesh, and geometric patterns.
Native Artist Fred Cruz: Horse & Rider – A Woven Tribute
This piece highlights the extraordinary craftsmanship of Tohono O’odham artist Fred Cruz. Handwoven from native Sonoran Desert plants—such as Beargrass, Soaptree Yucca, and Devil’s Claw—and accented with leather, this 10-inch sculpture blends tradition, storytelling, and natural materials into a striking three-dimensional form.
Native Artist Gerald Dawavendewa: Hisatsinom Migration
Crafted on handmade Amate bark paper with mineral pigments and acrylics, Hisatsinom Migration honors the ancestral journeys of the Hopi people across the Southwest. Inspired by ancient pottery shards left behind along migration routes, the piece serves as a visual map of history—each fragment symbolizing clouds, animals, ceremonies, and the natural world.
Native Artist Ruby Manuelito (Diné): Nightway Chant Tapestry
This sandpainting weaving by Navajo artist Ruby Manuelito depicts figures from the sacred Nightway Chant, including Holy People and Whirling Logs. Measuring just over 3 feet square, the tapestry continues a powerful legacy of spiritual storytelling through textile art. Born into a lineage of master weavers and connected to the legendary Hastiin Klah.
Native Artist Terrol Dew Johnson Collaboration: Coil & Cloud
This beautiful collection is the result of the powerful intersection of tradition and innovation featuring the collaborative works of Tohono O’odham artist Terrol Dew Johnson and design studio Aranda\Lasch. Fusing Indigenous basketry with computational design, these sculptural forms speak to cultural memory, technology, and the future of making. This virtual presentation honors Johnson’s legacy as an artist, activist, and community leader.
Native Artist Lehuauakea: Mele O Nā Kaukani Wai (Song of a Thousand Waters)
Spanning 11 by 8 feet, Mele O Nā Kaukani Wai is a striking textile installation by Lehuauakea, a Native Hawaiian interdisciplinary artist and kapa-maker from Pāpaʻikou, Hawaiʻi. Rooted in the rich traditions of Hawaiian barkcloth (kapa), natural dyeing, and ʻohe kāpala (bamboo stamping), the work is both ancestral and contemporary—a tactile song honoring water as a life-giving force and spiritual lineage.
Native Artist “KITE” or Suzanne Kite: Cosmos Cinema
Cosmos Cinema is a powerful sculptural and spatial installation that weaves Indigenous knowledge systems into global conversations about the cosmos. Cosmos Cinema explored humanity’s relationship to the universe through cinematic principles—light, shadow, and time—as metaphors for cultural perception, connection, and storytelling.
Native Artist Terrol Dew Johnson Collaboration: Wire Coil 05 w/ Yucca 2016
This piece is part of a collaborative series by Aranda\Lasch, a design team operating between New York and Tucson, and Terrol Dew Johnson, a Tohono O’odham artist, educator, and activist. Their works reimagine traditional basket. Grounded in the Tohono O’odham basketmaking tradition, the work transforms natural fibers through industrial materials, symbolizing cultural continuation and creative evolution
Native Artist Marie Watt: Tuning to the Sounds of the Skies
In this suspended installation, Seneca Nation artist Marie Watt weaves together history, healing, and collective memory through form, sound, and storytelling. Drawing from the Haudenosaunee tradition and inspired by the Coast Salish story Lifting the Sky, the sculpture invites viewers to gather beneath a canopy of tin jingles—delicate yet resonant forms rooted in the Ojibwe Jingle Dress Dance, a ceremonial response to illness and colonization.
Native Artist Frank Tuttle (Yuki Wailaki/Konkow Maidu): A Dancing Cape, 1987.
Tuttle’s work often celebrates Indigenous cosmologies and the layered experiences of Native life, merging ancestral motifs with a contemporary palette. In A Dancing Cape, sweeping brushstrokes and feather-like forms reflect the movement and spirit of ceremonial regalia—an homage to the power of dance, identity, and connection to the natural and spiritual worlds.
Native Artist Thomas “Breeze” Marcus (Tohono O’odham): Stars Over Ce:dagi Wahia
This piece blends street art techniques with ancestral vision, mapping celestial knowledge onto canvas. Using acrylic, spray paint, and oil paint pen, Marcus reinterprets the night sky as seen over Ce:dagi Wahia, sacred land within Tohono O’odham territory.
The layered, rhythmic lines recall both constellations and desert landscapes, bridging graffiti aesthetics with Indigenous cosmology. This piece speaks to the O’odham people’s long relationship with the stars as guides, storytellers, and seasonal markers, reasserting Indigenous presence in both the land and sky.
Native Artist Goompi Ugerabah (Pialba in Queensland): Energy Lines (2025)
Goompi Ugerabah maps the unseen forces that connect land, spirit, and memory. Painted in bold acrylic strokes on canvas, this work draws from Aboriginal design traditions—interpreting Songlines, ley lines, and energetic currents that flow across Country. Each line is a path, a pulse, a story encoded in motion.
Ugerabah’s work is deeply rooted in his Indigenous Australian identity, embodying a visual language that speaks to movement through time and the interconnectedness of all beings.
Native Artist Lehuauakea (Hawaiian): Since The Beginning and End of Time
This striking kapa cloak by Native Hawaiian artist Lehuauakea is a powerful tribute to Indigenous relationships with the stars. Made from hand-stitched, indigo-dyed kapa and adorned with shell buttons and thousands of embroidered stars, the garment reflects ancestral knowledge, celestial navigation, and the enduring presence of Native peoples. Through this wearable work of art, Lehuauakea honors Indigenous resilience and the sacred connections between earth, sky, and spirit.
Native Artist Sally Black (Navajo): Creation Story Basket
This basket (2000) by Sally Black is a woven story of a Diné creation. Split into day and night, the composition features Coyote on the light half, carefully placing stars in the sky, while the dark half depicts the Navajo Ancient One casting stars outward in a cosmic sweep.
Hand-coiled from sumac and dyed with natural pigments, the basket blends technical mastery with deep cultural storytelling. Its spiral form mirrors the motion of creation, while the pictorial elements preserve a sacred narrative in a tactile, visual form.
Native Artist Louisa Keyser (Dat So La Lee): Myriads of Stars Shine Over Our Dead Ancestors 1916
One of the most celebrated Native American basket weavers of the 20th century, Dat So La Lee transformed Washoe basketry into fine art. Her perfectly spherical degikup forms and bold abstract designs redefined tradition, blending technical mastery with modern artistry. Today, her rare works are held in major museums worldwide.
Native Artist Napaljarri-warnu Jukurrpa (Aboriginal): Seven Sisters Dreaming
Napaljarri-warnu Jukurrpa’s stunning the Seven Sisters Dreaming piece. Seven Sisters Dreaming is significant in Aboriginal cosmology tracing the journey of ancestral women across the land and sky, evading pursuit while shaping Country with their presence.
The circular motifs ripple like constellations, recalling the sisters’ transformation into the star cluster known globally as the Pleiades. Flowing organic forms suggest both the earthly landscapes they traversed and the celestial pathways they continue to mark.
Native Artist Marques Hanalei Marzan (Hawaiian): Space Between (2009)
In Space Between, Native Hawaiian artist Marques Hanalei Marzan bridges ancestral practice with contemporary form. Constructed with split reed, this dynamic sculpture echoes traditional Hawaiian basketry while exploring space, movement, and identity in a modern context. Its flowing, interwoven shapes suggest the unseen connections between past and present, land and ocean, self and community.
Native Artist Bernadine Johnson: Bush Medicine Leaves
Flowing with rhythm and healing, Bush Medicine Leaves is more than a painting—it’s a tribute to ancestral knowledge and the sacred role of women in Aboriginal culture. Bernadine, from the renowned Petyarre family of artists, carries forward the tradition of depicting bush medicine leaves—plants gathered by Anmatyerre women for their medicinal properties. Her fine, layered brushwork captures the motion of leaves on the wind, symbolizing both physical healing and spiritual renewal.
Native Artist Jamie Okuma (Luiseño and Shoshone-Bannock): Radiant Beaded Backpack
This radiant beaded shield-like form by acclaimed artist Jamie Okuma pulses with history, resistance, and reinvention. Surrounded by radiating gold and black spikes, its surface is densely covered in vibrant beadwork—drawing on centuries-old Indigenous design language while asserting a boldly contemporary aesthetic.
Native Artist John Terriak (Inuit): Sea Light (Oil Lamp)
With Sea Light, master carver John Terriak (Inuit) transforms stone into a vessel of warmth, reflection, and memory. Carved from soapstone with a cotton wick, this sculptural oil lamp echoes the Arctic landscape: a jagged sea of movement surrounding a calm, glowing center.
A practicing artist since the 1980s, Terriak draws from both dream and environment, crafting forms that are functional, symbolic, and rooted in Inuit life. In Sea Light, the undulating surface evokes ocean waves, while the still center holds space for illumination—light breaking through the dark.
Native Artist Melissa Concho Antonio (Acoma Pueblo): Eye Dazzler Kokopelli Pattern
Rooted in ancient Acoma traditions and guided by the stars, Melissa Concho Antonio shows how Indigenous artistry embodies both rhythm and earthly reverence.
Hand-coiled using ancestral techniques and painted with extraordinary precision, the pot features a mesmerizing “Eye Dazzler” pattern—a geometric design that echoes the visual complexity of the night sky and celestial motion. Flowing across the surface is a band of Kokopelli figures, the flutist fertility deity of the Southwest, often associated with rain, transformation, and cosmic cycles.
Native Artist Darryl Baker (Haida Nation): Owl And Frog Mask, Ca. 1990
This striking cedar mask brings to life two powerful beings from Indigenous Northwest Coast mythology: the owl, symbol of wisdom and vision, and the frog, guardian of transformation and renewal.
Baker’s masterful craftsmanship and elegant design reflect the heartbeat of Haida cultural expression—where every curve tells a story, and every being connects land, water, and spirit. This piece invites viewers to explore duality, balance, and the enduring strength of ancestral knowledge.
Native Artist Sandra Victorino (Acoma Pueblo): Three Acoma pottery vessels, early 21st century
The three vessels —a seed pot, a vase-form vessel, and a globular bud vase—exemplify her mastery. Each is coil-built and painted using beeweed for the black or brownish designs and native red clay slip for warm accents. The seed pot and bud vase are covered in allover fineline patterns with kiva step elements, while the larger vase features rhythmic geometric arrangements that shift in scale, creating visual movement. Victorino’s work often plays with optical perception, as patterns expand, contract, and flow across a vessel’s form.
Native Artist Al Qöyawayma (Hopi): Kiva Bowl 1990
This bowl by Hopi potter Al Qöyawayma features an intricately carved kiva, a ceremonial space central to Pueblo communities. Known for his repoussé technique and stone-polished surfaces, Qöyawayma blends traditional Hopi artistry with a refined, contemporary aesthetic. The subtle carving and architectural detail invite viewers to reflect on the sacred spaces of community life while appreciating the sculptural precision of the piece.
Native Artist Jacquie Stevens (Winnebago/Ho-Chunk): White Corrugated “Bag” Jar 1988
Jacquie Stevens is renowned for transforming Native pottery with her bold reinterpretations of form and texture. Drawing inspiration from her Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) heritage, Stevens infused her ceramic vessels with the sensibility of basketry, leatherwork, and organic asymmetry.
This striking piece, known as a “Bag” jar, exemplifies her innovative approach. With an undulating, oval body and a softly asymmetric rim, the vessel mimics the pliability of leather rather than rigid clay. A hand-laced opening with leather, beads, and abalone shell suggests a bag that could be drawn closed—blurring the boundary between function and imagination.
Native Artist Lonnie Vigil (Nambé Pueblo): Gourd Shaped Vessel with Triangular Opening, 2023
Internationally recognized for transforming traditional micaceous clay pottery into fine art, Lonnie Vigil (Nambé Pueblo) continues to innovate while honoring ancestral forms. This gourd-shaped vessel with a triangular opening radiates warmth through its shimmering clay and fire-clouded surface. Its organic curves evoke both the earth and flame, embodying Vigil’s mastery in balancing tradition and contemporary expression. His work elevates utilitarian pottery into vessels of cultural memory and artistic excellence.
Native Artist Terrol Dew Johnson (Tohono O’odham Nation) with Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch): Endless Knot (2006)
This collaborative work merges modern design with Indigenous weaving traditions. Endless Knot is an intricate sculpture that embodies continuity and interconnectedness, combining contemporary architectural forms with the deep cultural knowledge of basket weaving. The piece exemplifies how Indigenous artistry evolves in dialogue with modern materials and technologies, while never losing its grounding in ancestral practice. Johnson’s weaving techniques, rooted in Tohono O’odham traditions, transform into large-scale sculptural language when paired with Aranda\Lasch’s architectural explorations. Together, they expand the meaning of Indigenous craft beyond function into the realm of conceptual art.
Native Artist Sarah Rosalena: Installation of Unending Spiral, BLUM Los Angeles, 2025
In Unending Spiral, Sarah Rosalena (Wixárika) uses digital imagery of spirals found in nature and galaxies, Rosalena translates these celestial forms into handwoven patterns and 3D-printed ceramic vessels. Her hybrid works begin with technological precision—3D-printed coils referencing both galactic structure and ancestral coil pottery—then shift into the irregular beauty of handwoven pine needle basketry
Native Artist Lucy Lewis (Acoma Pueblo): Early Acoma Polychrome Canteen
This striking Acoma canteen, painted with intricate fine-line “snowflake” patterns, reflects the natural knowledge embedded in Pueblo pottery traditions. Attributed to legendary potter Lucy Lewis, this early 1930s work embodies a worldview in which geometry, nature, and the cosmos are intimately interconnected.
The repeating star-like design is more than decorative—it’s symbolic of the Acoma people’s reverence for cycles, symmetry, and celestial balance.
Native Artist Goompi Ugerabah (Pialba in Queensland): Energy Lines (2025)
Goompi Ugerabah maps the unseen forces that connect land, spirit, and memory. Painted in bold acrylic strokes on canvas, this work draws from Aboriginal design traditions—interpreting Songlines, ley lines, and energetic currents that flow across Country. Each line is a path, a pulse, a story encoded in motion.
Ugerabah’s work is deeply rooted in his Indigenous Australian identity, embodying a visual language that speaks to movement through time and the interconnectedness of all beings.
Native Artist Molly Murphy Adams (descendant Oglala/Lakota): Hide Robe in Gold
Hide Robe in Gold is a striking synthesis of traditional Indigenous design and contemporary abstraction. Created by Molly Murphy Adams, an artist and scholar whose heritage bridges Indigenous and settler traditions, this work honors the visual language of tribal art forms while engaging in a modern dialogue on politics, history, and identity.
The composition features symmetrical diamond motifs in gold, accented by beadwork-inspired patterns in vivid reds, blues, and blacks, flanked by linear elements.
Native Artist Goompi Ugerabah (Aboriginal artist): Creation of Life 2024
Renowned Aboriginal artist Goompi Ugerabah is celebrated for his intricate line work and contemporary expressions of cultural heritage. In Creation of Life, his signature precision and movement create a striking visual rhythm, showcasing the depth, skill, and storytelling that define his artistic voice.
Native Artist Marie Watt (Seneca Nation Tribe): Sky Dances Light
Marie Watt’s Sky Dances Light is a monumental sculptural installation that transforms the gallery into a shimmering, immersive environment. Suspended from the ceiling, cascading forms made of thousands of hand-rolled metal cones—known as jingles—evoke both celestial phenomena and the power of communal tradition. In Watt’s work, these forms multiply into cloud-like constellations, their metallic surfaces catching and scattering light across the room.
Native Artist David Ruben Piqtoukun (Inuit):
Spirit World of the Inuit 1985
Carved in 1985, Spirit World of the Inuit embodies the deep connections between shamanic storytelling, ancestral spirits, and the natural world. Faces of humans, animals, and spirits intertwine in a single, fluid form—supported by the presence of the powerful bear-spirit. The sculpture reflects the Inuit worldview that all beings—human and nonhuman—are bound together through story and survival.
David Ruben Piqtoukun, born in Paulatuk, Northwest Territories, began carving in 1972 under the guidance of his brother Abraham Anghik Ruben. His work combines traditional Inuit knowledge with modern sculptural sensibilities, using stone, antler, and mixed media to create powerful visual narratives.
Native Artist Gulumbu Yunupingu (Yolŋu artist): Garak, the Universe 2008
Gulumbu Yunupingu brings the cosmos to life in Garak, the Universe. Painted with earth pigments on stringybark, this work embodies both the physical and spiritual dimensions of the night sky.
The intricate networks of star-like forms transcend Western astronomy, instead representing Yolŋu knowledge systems, kinship, and ancestral connections woven into the universe. For Gulumbu, the stars are more than celestial bodies—they are threads linking people, ancestors, and the cosmos across time.