Haines Gallery: 250 Years, Indigenous Futures

Victoria Grace Canby (Diné, b. 1978, Albuquerque, NM). Marin-based artist Victoria Grace Canby’s new works on paper, created for the exhibition, depict the Three Sisters – corn, beans, and squash – as a living model of resilience, healing, and collective care that connects Indigenous Peoples throughout the Americas. “Through fostering our connection to these plants’ powers,” Canby notes, “we can overcome the impacts of colonization.”

Jordan Ann Craig (Northern Cheyenne, b. 1992, San Jose, CA). Jordan Ann Craig’s paintings draw from references ranging from Northern Cheyenne beadwork and quillwork to the postwar abstraction of Agnes Martin, all of which she translates into exacting, poetic fields of color and form. In works such as “Miss Your Musk” (2024), Craig foregrounds Indigenous abstraction as a living and evolving practice – one capable of holding personal narrative, formal experimentation, and cultural continuity without being reduced to any single source or meaning.

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians; b. 1984, Ferndale, WA). Sky Hopinka’s film Sunflower Siege Engine (2022) brings together distinct Indigenous sites and histories, connecting the Indians of All Tribes’ occupation of nearby Alcatraz Island (1969–1971) with Illinois’ Cahokia Mounds, one of the largest pre-contact urban centers in North America and a site from which ancestral remains continue to be repatriated.

Brad Kahlhamer (Native American ancestry; b. 1956, Tucson, AZ). Painted in acrylic, ink, and pencil on a bedsheet, “Pima Air + Space” (2025) belongs to Kahlhamer’s recent “dream sheet” paintings. Its title recalls Arizona’s Pima Air & Space Museum, while birds, horses, masked figures, and a spectral presence drift through an aurora borealis of saturated color.

Terran Last Gun, Saakwaynaamah’kaa (Last Gun) (Piikani / Blackfoot; b. 1989, Browning, MT on the Blackfeet Nation Reservation). Inspired by the bold geometric designs of Piikani painted lodges, Terran Last Gun has created a suite of works for the exhibition: precise compositions on vintage ledger paper that bring ancestral forms, colonial records, and the ongoing vitality of Indigenous abstraction into charged relation.

Jamie Okuma (Luiseño, Shoshone-Bannock, Wailaki, Okinawan, and La Jolla; b. 1977, Glendale, CA). In “Of Love and Sacrifice: Motherhood” (2026), Jamie Okuma deploys her signature single-stitch beadwork to transform a brain-tanned deerskin handbag into a dazzling portrayal of two figures from Luca Guadagnino’s horror film Suspiria (2018). Drawing bracing cinematic imagery into dialogue with exacting Payómkawichum (Luiseño) beadwork techniques, Okuma conjures the selfless and steadfast power of maternal love.

Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke; b. 1981, Billings, MT). Wendy Red Star’s works from “The (HUD)” series focus on the colorful facades of houses built through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on Montana’s Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation, where the artist was raised. Though their hues were chosen not by residents but by a government agency, Red Star’s images reveal signs of domestic beauty that exceed the mandates of bureaucracy.

Keith Secola (Northern Ute / Anishinaabe; b. 1988, Randlett, UT on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation) Keith Secola screen-prints archival portraits of Native Americans onto the covers of vintage books, placing Indigenous presence in direct tension with exclusionary narratives of America’s past. Secola’s images depict subjects who often look directly back at the camera, meeting its gaze with a quiet intensity that transcends time and negates erasure.