250 Years, Indigenous Futures @ Haines Gallery
With Maize Black, Victoria Grace Canby, Keith Secola, and Drew Valencia, moderated by Sharaya Souza
Join the American Indian Cultural District (AICD) and Haines for a panel discussion on Native American Art and cultural resilience, with artists Maize Black (Akwesasne Mohawk), Victoria Grace Canby (Diné), Keith Secola (Northern Ute/Anishinaabe), and Andrew (Drew) Valencia (Pomo), and moderated by Sharaya Souza (Taos Pueblo, Ute, Kiowa), co-founder and Executive Director, AICD.
This discussion brings together artists participating in AICD’s newest public art project, comprising a series of large-scale installations at the 16th Street BART Plaza and Fort Mason Center for Arts & Center, and in Haines’ exhibition 250 Years, Indigenous Futures. As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, these presentations reframe commemoration by foregrounding Native sovereignty and resilience, creativity and cultural revitalization, and healing.
About the Exhibition
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, Haines Gallery presents 250 Years, Indigenous Futures, a group exhibition centering the work of leading Native American artists, including Victoria Grace Canby, Jordan Ann Craig, Sky Hopinka, Brad Kahlhamer, Terran Last Gun, Jamie Okuma, Wendy Red Star, and Keith Secola. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and film, these artists engage contemporary culture, Nation-specific visual traditions, and personal histories in distinct and expansive ways.
While occasioned by this anniversary, 250 Years, Indigenous Futures does not commemorate it. Rather, the exhibition recognizes 1776 as only one moment within much longer histories of Indigenous presence, adaptation, and sovereignty. Creating space for artists to define their own terms of engagement, the exhibition aims to bring forward concerns central to their practices. The works on view draw inspiration from a vivid range of sources: boldly painted Piikani lodges; the precise geometry of Northern Cheyenne beadwork; the Indians of All Tribes’ occupation of Alcatraz; cars adorned with blankets and regalia for the annual Crow Fair; blood-soaked horror films; and archival photographs whose subjects meet the visitor’s gaze.
Editor’s Pick
“Two hundred and fifty messy years of these United States haven’t quite landed us the happiness we’ve so doggedly pursued, but through all of it, and for millennia before, Indigenous peoples have persisted. But 250 Years, Indigenous Futures is neither open wound nor kumbaya, with Sky Hopinka, Wendy Red Star, Brad Kahlhamer, Terran Last Gun, Victoria Grace Canby, Jordan Ann Craig, Keith Secola, and Jamie Okuma simply making some of the best art anywhere. Within sight of Alcatraz, occupied by Indians of All Tribes from 1969 to 1971 in a landmark assertion of Indigenous sovereignty, the point isn’t merely that Indigenous cultures have endured, but that they are still here, various, unruly, and very much at work.”
— Andrew Berardini