25 Native American Artists to Know

Tlingit weaver Sydney Akagi (born 1989) employs conventional Ravenstail and Chilkat methods and supplies to create her signature masks, tunics, and mantles. Born in Southeast Alaska and an enrolled member of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, she made her first wall hanging in 2018, studying from her mentor, Lily Hope. The Chilkat formline motifs in weavings like Ceremonial Woven Tunic, Ravenstail and Chilkat, which Akagi created for the Native Arts and Cultures Basis, traditionally declared secular and social standing throughout the tribe; for Akagi, they usually commemorate occasions in her personal life.

Born in Honolulu, Bernice Akamine(1949–2024) was a Native Hawaiian sculptor, set up artist, and self-identified maker whose compositions in paper, glass, and metallic critique the continuing American colonial affect on Hawaii. Akamine acquired an MFA in glass and sculpture from the College of Hawaii in 1999. She is finest identified for her 87-sculpture set up on the 2019 Hawaiian Biennial, Kalo, honoring Hui Aloha ‘Āina, a corporation supporting Hawaiian sovereignty. Equally political, her work Papahanaumokua (2018) is a collection of glass-tipped bullet casings full of ‘alaea, Hawaiian earth pigments that referred to the 2018 false missile menace alert acquired (however not taken completely critically) by locals aware of the variety of navy websites on the primary island. One among her later items earlier than passing in 2024, Kapa Moe: Hae Hawaiʻi (2021), is a quilt of kapa bark protesting the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.

Melissa Cody (b. 1983) is a fourth-generation Navajo weaver whose brightly coloured works join weaving to video video games—each requiring singular focus and providing an escape from the monotony of childhood on the rez— the X- and Y-axes of her gridded patterns resembling video games like Mario Kart and Pac-Man. Cody additionally adopts the visuals of glitches that recur in older digital video games, explaining, “Glitches and separation of time and house occur; I like having the ability to type of make them intentional.” Her flamboyant fashion may be traced again to the matrilineal guild of weavers who fostered and apprenticed Cody in her youth, at the same time as her work affords ever new definitions of the shape.

Jeremy Dennis (b. 1990) is a Shinnecock photographer primarily based on his Lengthy Island, New York, reservation, identified for staging revenge fantasies in his pictures. In his photograph collection “Nothing Occurred Right here” (2016–2017), Dennis depicts trendy white People struck by a number of arrows, evoking the paradox of settler violence and nonviolent ideologies: Whether or not the violence is direct or oblique, the existence of settlers on Homeland is a perpetual confrontation and derailing of Native sovereignty. In his four-minute movie Hearthless: Or (The Surprising Advantage of Destitute) (2015), impressed by Homer’s Iliad, Dennis attracts parallels between the “othering” of the Greek epic protagonist and that of Native peoples. The brief, a collage of clips from such movies as Dances with Wolves and The Outlaw Josey Wales, displays on the distinction between Native and non-Native lived expertise in america whereas endowing the movies’ stereotyped characters with new complexity.

Demian DinéYazhi′ (b. 1983) is a trans nonbinary artist belonging to the Zuni Clan Water’s Edge and Bitter Water clans throughout the Navajo Nation. Their work has decried extractive and performative funding in Indigenous artists, and in a latest BOFFO residency on Fireplace Island, they examined settler colonialism by way of a queer lens. The mission culminated in a littoral spoken-word efficiency and two banners, one stating “Stolen + colonized / sacred + ancestral / UNKECHAUG LAND” and the opposite “all we all know is our ancestors have been as wild as comets and cosmic wind.” Their prose additionally appeared in “Encoded,” a digital actuality exhibition within the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing, superimposed on a panorama portray, flashing between “we demand assets over acknowledgments” and “we need survival over statements.”

Maidu and two-spirit (“third gender”) multidisciplinary artist Tyler Eash (b. 1988) works primarily in efficiency, portray, and sculpture to raise postcolonial expressions of queerness, class, and Indigeneity. His work employs historic and new supplies and sometimes focuses on the physique. Produced by Eash’s alter-ego Loreum and recalling ecofeminist works of the Seventies, Angel/Kákkini #4 (2022) is each panorama and ethnography––a triptych painted on cowhide that feedback on the artist’s California hometown. The purple, pink, white, and black prime part conjures each the evening sky and the California hills; the central wings, rendered in black, tan, and white, characterize the darkness of Marysville’s poverty and drug issues; and the bottom evokes the state’s fires of latest years. Parabole II is a satellite tv for pc dish reworked in plaster resin, auto paint, and abalone shell––generally known as “grandmother shell” amongst West Coast tribes.

In 2024 Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972) grew to become the primary Native American to characterize america on the Venice Biennale. He’s a self-described painter whose works make use of scale, shade, and materials to dismantle synthetic divides between Native and non-Native, human and animal, and have a good time relationality amongst dwelling beings. In Gibson’s “Energy Full As a result of We’re Completely different” (2025), an immersive set up at MASS MoCA on view by way of September 7, 2026, he employs vivid ribbon-embroidered materials, metallic-colored coils, and ethereal chiffon to discover the fluidity of gender roles in Native societies. In his 4 Metropolitan Museum façade sculptures honoring a deer, coyote, squirrel, and hawk, on view by way of June 9, 2026, he invitations viewers to know these beings’ insights—the squirrel’s foresight, the hawk’s perspective for essential choices, and so forth.

Lenny Harmon (1983), a Lenape mixed-media artist residing in Philadelphia, attracts from historic traditions however is especially self-taught. His Imaginative and prescient of Division (2025) combines a repeated {photograph} of an elder in powwow regalia with a bifurcating crimson paper strip affixed with silver discs. Lifted Journey (2025) is a nonrepresentational panorama in shades of yellow, black, white, and crimson, framed in crimson, pink, child blue, and gold stripes evoking a standard blanket, and embellished with a black-and-white {photograph} of a Native couple with their horse and teepee skins and poles. Harmon is collected by museums together with the Heard Museum in Phoenix and is among the few acknowledged modern Lenape artists immediately.

Sky Hopinka (b. 1984) is a member of the Pachanga band of Luiseño Indians in Southern California and the Ho-Chunk Nation. A 2022 MacArthur Basis Grant recipient and an assistant professor at Harvard College, the artist is lauded for his work in language reclamation and multimodal documentary movie. His linguistic revitalization work started in school when he took Chinuk Wawa––a language native to the Decrease Columbia River Basin the place he was raised––sarcastically––to fulfill a overseas language requirement. His movie Anti-Objects, or House With out Path or Boundary (2017) juxtaposes clips of Native appearing and nature, graphic movie stills, and audio from conversations with elders. His intention was to revamp storytelling and language transmission from the stale and moribund anthropological information in college archives into dynamic media accessible to modern group members.

Patrick Dean Hubbell (b. 1986), a Diné artist, attracts parallels between deconstructed canvases and blankets, that are ubiquitous in Indigenous gifting cultures. Your Perseverance Taught Us to Rise to Every New Day (2025) Hubbell’s contribution to “The Canvas Can Do Miracles,” a present exhibition at Austin Modern (on view by way of January 11, 2026), consists of draped canvases painted with vivid acrylics. In one other work, Throughout the Darkness, the Stars within the Evening Sky Got here to Reclaim Their Tales and Their Songs (2023), 5 generic “Native impressed” blankets hung from a stretcher bar are spattered with white paint. Right here, Hubbell lampoons cultural appropriation by utilizing heritage manufacturers like Pendleton and Ralph Lauren as he continues his crucial engagement with white concepts about Natives.

Panorama portray turns into literal within the works of Athena LaTocha (b. 1969), a Hunkpapa Lakota and Ojibwe artist primarily based in Brooklyn. Beforehand a smaller-scale painter, she now creates monumental items by laying resin-coated photographic paper on the ground after which pouring and diffusing swimming pools of ink, mounds of soil, and different supplies, permitting them to permeate the floor earlier than scraping off the detritus.Referencing the historical past of tribal lands, from Mexican mesas and Ozark bluffs to Louisiana wetlands, LaTocha’s compositions have just lately targeted on New York Metropolis. LaTocha visits building websites and cemeteries to gather supplies and dust as soon as involved with the town’s authentic folks. By doing so she creates a monument to the Lenape of New York (now of Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Canada).

Lehuauakea (b. 1996) is a mixed-Native Hawaiian multidisciplinary artist whose work employs conventional supplies and designs whereas gesturing to the complexity of mixed-Indigenous id. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1996 and self-identified as māhūwahine, a Native Hawaiian third-gender id, Lehuauakea developed a give attention to conventional kapa-bark fabric portray whereas attending an all-Native Hawaiian faculty. She honed her creative follow on the Pacific Northwest Faculty of Artwork in Oregon, the place she developed her signature items inscribed with historic motifs. Lehuauakea’s E Hoʻāla Ka Lupe: To Awaken the Kite (2022) honors conventional kites, or lupe, and associated mythology, whereas Mele o Nā Kaukani Wai (Music of a Thousand Waters) (2018) factors to the necessity to combine Indigenous data into Western local weather science.

Rachel Martin (b. 1954) is a Tlingít artist and enrolled member of the Tsaagweideí, Killer Whale Clan, of the Yellow Cedar Home (X̱aai Hit´) Eagle Moiety. She grew up in California and Montana and now resides in New York Metropolis. Working primarily in sculpture and drawing, Martin is an heir of the Pacific Northwest line drawing custom, whose cosmological symbols—like bears, fish, and frogs—she locations in feminist tableaux. Bending the Guidelines (2024), in coloured pencil on paper with a collaged masks, includes a bare-chested girl bent over backwards. Been Prepared (2023) affords the identical cheekiness, with a Tlingít masks serving as the pinnacle of a girl in profile, her cutout legs caught in mid-sprint. The masks has a stuck-out tongue, Martin’s gesture towards the determine of the trickster in Tlingít mythology.

Often known as the matriarch of Native American pottery, Maria Martinez (1887–1980) reworked Indigenous ceramics from craft into positive artwork although her black-on-black pottery method. Working together with her husband, Julian Martinez, and different members of the family from her house in San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, she achieved what few Native artists of her time may: widespread recognition within the artwork world. Her journey started with archaeology; she studied historic pottery shards at a time when earthenware was being deserted for Spanish tin and English porcelain. Martinez reinvented historic methods, creating a particular fashion that artwork critics would later evaluate to modernist masters like Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko. Martinez’s creative achievements earned her historic recognition: she met 4 U.S. presidents, attracted the patronage of the Rockefeller household, and have become maybe probably the most well-known Native American artist in historical past. Her timeless black pottery, with matte designs painted by Julian, continues to affect modern ceramics and stands as a testomony to Indigenous innovation.

The Cree multidisciplinary artist Kent Monkman (b. 1965) is finest identified for injecting his Cree gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, into work that reference the types of Hudson River Faculty landscapes, Edward Curtis’s photographic portraits, and Eugene Delacroix’s realist figuration. Miss Chief’s presence within the monumental work, usually dressed suggestively in vertiginous heels and flowing materials, upends colonial notions of gender and interrupts the narratives codified by conventional Western tableaux. Monkman’s present retrospective on the Montreal Museum of Positive Arts (on view by way of March 8, 2026) excavates suppressed histories of america’ and Canada’s colonial origins, providing viewers a reckoning with narratives lengthy obscured.

Famend fourth-generation Diné (Navajo) weaver Louise Nez (b. 1942) was born in Sand Springs, Arizona. Within the Eighties, after creating a whole lot of works utilizing motifs developed within the Nineteenth-century commercialization of Navajo rugs, she started producing woven pictures of life on the rez. Her best-known wall hanging, Reservation Scene (1992), options brightly coloured figures crafting, herding, and touring by Nineteenth-century wagon. Impressed by her grandson’s coloring books, Nez has additionally included dinosaurs in weavings like Dinosaur Pictorial Weaving (date unknown) retained by the Gochman Assortment.

Self-taught beader Sandra Okuma (b. 1945) is a Luiseño and Shoshone-Bannock artist whose luxurious beaded luggage are influenced by her coaching as a painter and work as a graphic designer for the music trade. Hailing from the La Jolla Indian Reservation in California, she has been a fixture of the Santa Fe Indian Market since 1998. Her works, like this purse owned by the Nationwide Museum of the American Indian, boast sudden shade palettes—on this case, shades of ruby, saffron, and sky blue. Sandra shares a sales space on the Santa Fe Indian Market together with her daughter Jamie Okuma, a clothes designer; the 2 often work collectively on collaborative initiatives. The pair’s refined designs have garnered appreciation in each the artwork and trend worlds.

The multimedia artist Virgil Ortiz (b. 1969), from Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico, initially labored in ceramics, which he started studying from his mom at age six. Constructing on a historic fashion outlined by black mineral and vegetable pigments and motifs drawn from the panorama and cosmology, Ortiz’s interpretations are distinctly trendy. Up to now twenty years he has expanded into new mediums, from portray and glass-blowing to trend and inside design. Ortiz creates with élan, introducing gender play, science fiction, and kink into his ceramic and glass vessels, busts, and figures. Grasp and Tics (2002) is a black, white, and crimson Cochiti clay triad of Monos figures: a two-headed horned being strolling leashed four-legged creatures. Rise Up (2017), a black, white, and crimson clay vessel, reveals Donald Trump using a black snake, which historically represents fertility or an underworld connection—although on this case it extra seemingly displays the reptile’s broader Indigenous affiliation with the Dakota Entry Pipeline.

Jaune Fast-to-See Smith (1940–2025), an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, was a groundbreaking visible artist, curator, and activist. She labored tirelessly to interrupt the “buckskin ceiling,” serving to pave the way in which for a brand new Native vanguard of Indigenous artists. Her huge oeuvre, developed over 50 years, mixed incisive political humor with poeticism and spanned portray, collage, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Her works gesture to the lands, cultures, and philosophies of Native peoples, asserting sovereignty in her illustration of tribes’ previous, current, and future. A present she curated, “Indigenous Identities: Right here, Now & All the time,” is at present on view on the Zimmerli Artwork Museum in New Brunswick, New Jersey. With greater than 100 works by 97 artists, it’s the largest modern Native American artwork exhibition up to now.

Diné multidisciplinary artist Eric-Paul Riege (b. 1994) honors conventional Navajo modes of creating, deciphering them by way of craft-store supplies and in collaboration with members of the family. Riege’s work significantly salutes matriarchal weavers like his great-grandmother, who’s featured in his set up, ojo|-|ólǫ́ (2025), on view by way of December 7 at Brown College’s Bell Gallery. The set up additionally features a wall-mounted squash blossom necklace created from grey artificial materials, a suspended and empty upright loom warp, and a number of lengthy earrings constructed from fake fur, leather-based, and plushy cloth. In a three-hour efficiency, Riege paced the size of the set up, mimicking the actions of a loom’s shuttle and whipping fringed and jingle-adorned objects on the ft of a trickster-like determine.

Sara Siestreem(b. 1976)is a Hanis Coos artist primarily based in Oregon. The Pratt MFA graduate’s works embody ceramics, images, weaving, portray, and set up. Skyline (2024)is a collection of conventional Hanis Coos baskets solid in clay and topped in gold, evoking the commodification of Native tradition by trendy inside design. Minion (2024) consists of 4 ceramic black and white ceremonial caps underpinned by cascading scarlet beads, referencing systemic violence in opposition to Indigenous girls and women. Un-ring Bells (2013) incorporates images and representations of oyster shells Siestreem discovered alongside the native Coos and Millicoma Rivers’ shores lengthy after the extinction of native tribes, the impact of white settlement and industrial fishing. Siestreem’s work gestures at each the presence and absence of Native communities and their relationships with the land in trendy American life.

Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983) is a multimedia artist identified for her ceramic and metallic sculptures, installations, and efficiency items. Born in 1983 in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, Simpson comes from a matriarchy of ceramicists. Although accepted to Dartmouth, she selected to attend the College of New Mexico to keep up her formative ties to the land. She earned MFAs from the Rhode Island Faculty of Design and the Institute of American Indian Arts and studied pottery in Japan and South Korea. Her work innovates on the intersection of crimson clay pottery and figurative sculpture, pushing the boundaries of Pueblo artwork. A present set up on the de Younger Musuem in San Francisco consists of two basic vehicles custom-made by the artist.

Painter and sculptor Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma with Cherokee/Anglo heritage. Featured on the 2024 Venice Biennale, she is at present experiencing a major second of recognition. In her lengthy profession WalkingStick has embraced quite a lot of types and codecs, although her touchstone, since encountering the feminist and American Indian actions of the Seventies, has all the time been her id as a Native American and biracial girl. She has produced summary work like Archetypal Picture (1975), which discovered commonality between the shapes of teepees and the nets hanging underneath NYC bridges; Pop Artwork-inflected nudes; and diptychs that includes symbols on one aspect and landscapes on the opposite. Most just lately she has made panorama work inscribed with Indigenous motifs, suggesting that the terrain is being seen from a pre-contact vantage level. As she advised the New York Occasions in 2023, the American panorama she is portray—from the Grand Canyon to Niagara Falls—was depicted by Nineteenth-century white artists as empty. After all,” she advised the New York Occasions in 2023, “it was not empty; it was populated. . . . I consider [my paintings] as a reminder that we’re all dwelling on Indian Territory.”

Modern multidisciplinary artist and curator Dyani White Hawk (b. 1976) is of Sicangu Lakota and white descent. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, she attended the Institute of American Indian Arts and the College of Wisconsin–Madison and was the curator on the Native-owned All My Relations gallery in Minneapolis from 2010 to 2015 earlier than turning solely to studio follow. White Hawk’s work applies Lakota traditions like porcupine quillwork, beadwork, and rawhide portray to critiques of a white creative hierarchy that has traditionally subordinated Native artwork. She additionally does installations, images, and performances that promote the Lakota philosophical and ethical precept mitákuye oyás’iŋ: We’re all associated. She introduced this idea to life in early 2024 with the totemic rectangular sculpture Visiting (2024), comprising 4 collaged panels of beadwork; going through an not possible deadline, White Hawk recruited her household and group to complete the fee, which was proven on the 2024 Armory Present in New York Metropolis.

A Navajo painter from New Mexico, Emmi Whitehorse (b. 1957) creates layered abstractions influenced by her rural upbringing. Her early life grounded her follow in a standard ecological worldview. “When you acquired sick and one thing was unsuitable, it meant that psychically you have been falling out of rhythm with nature,” she explains. “So that you went about therapeutic by surrounding your self with magnificence and nature; that applies to my portray.” Whitehorse’s meditative landscapes make use of a private symbology of place and time, her gradient washes suggesting each serenity and fixed change. In a signature work, Firelight II (2024), she interweaves abstracted botanical varieties, dotted strains, gridded axes, and surveillance drone symbols topped with infinity indicators, creating a fancy cartography that maps each bodily and non secular terrain.