Contemporary Perspectives in Indigenous Art

Artists have ways of shedding light onto histories and truths in ways that leave lasting impressions. From forced relocation to the generational traumas of residential schools to internal strength and self-awareness, Indigenous contemporary artists add to our understanding of such histories, truths, and lived experiences.

The Denver Art Museum was one of the first art museums in the United States to collect Indigenous arts from North America. Today, the museum has over 18,000 works by artists from over 250 Indigenous nations that encapsulate multiple artistic traditions from these cultures, and range from ancestral times to the present.

Because of the early commitment to collecting and preserving Indigenous arts, the Denver Art Museum today has one of the strongest and most comprehensive collections of Indigenous arts from North America in the world. The depth of our collection allows visitors to explore the visual diversity and excellence of Indigenous arts as well as to consider the contributions that Native artists have made to artistic conversations throughout time. These works also illuminate themes such as identity, history, survivance, land, place, and community.

Drawing inspiration from the natural world, she depicits monumental landscapes and Native places with the intention to glorify our land and honor those who first lived upon it. Her work expresses her own Native heritage as well as the non-native identity and mutual recognition of humanity we share as human beings.

Taking inspiration from abstract expressionism and from painters such as Bacon, Goya, and Gauguin, Scholder’s work reveals the raw reality of being an American Indian through the eyes—and palette—of an artist who openly defied the label of "Native American artist."

Monkman’s gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, often appears in his work as a time-traveling, shape-shifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples.

Deeply personal yet undeniably political, his paintings reflected his cultural heritage, experience as a Vietnam War veteran, and the turbulent social and political period during which he worked. Through bold colors and mashups of Native and non-Native elements, Cannon interrogated American history and popular culture through a fresh, distinctive Native lens.

Galanin’s work expands and refocuses the intersections of culture, centering Indigeneity through concept, form, image, and sound. His works are vessels for knowledge, culture and technology—inherently political, generous, unflinching, insistent, and poetic.

Her work seeks to build tools to use to heal the damages we experience as human beings in the postmodern and postcolonial era—objectification, stereotyping, and the disempowering detachment of our creative selves through the ease of modern technology. These tools are sculptural pieces of art that function in the psychological, emotional, social, cultural, spiritual, intellectual, and physical realms with the intention to cure, to provoke, and to start a dialogue.

These life-size ceramic figures signify the artist’s own self-actualization and empowerment. In Warrior, Rose Simpson strategically places items that represent energy on the figure’s body. Simpson sees these as the tools needed to confront any situation. The crouching figure, Explorer, represents someone passing through a transformative dimension or event. The other standing figure, Nurturer, gently cradles an adult in a woven pod, questioning a person’s relationship to one’s self.

He created sculpture, painting, drawing, and prints over the course of his nearly 40-year career as an artist, and is considered one of the most important leaders in contemporary Native American art. His works often depicted figures in transformation, humans becoming all kinds of animals and birds, and references to Indian leaders, dance, and ceremony.