Three Indigenous Artists on Why Community-Building is Inherent to Their Work

Every artist’s perspective is in some way shaped by the people who have surrounded them and the places they’re from. But for sculptor and performance artist Rose B. Simpson, painter, printmaker, sculptor, and collagist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and photographer Jeremy Dennis, the idea of home plays an especially urgent role in their work. All three are enrolled Indigenous American tribal members, and their practices don’t just honor their individual Native histories, cultures, environments, and traditions, they also seek to ignite conversations about historical oppression and the land theft their communities continue to face.

Both Simpson and Smith have had expansive exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art this year, symbolizing what is an encouraging yet long-overdue shift in how institutions are showcasing and giving platforms to art made by Indigenous artists.

A member of New Mexico’s Kah’p’oo Owinge tribe, Simpson is best known for her mixed-media sculptures of large-scale beings, which she creates using a traditional hand-coiled method that she learned from her mother, a potter. Five such sculptures, part of a larger work called Counterculture, are on view at the Whitney through January 21. Simpson's next show, Skeena, opening on November 9 at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco, will debut 10 new beings alongside a hanging wall work.

Smith, a Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribal member, had her first New York retrospective, “Memory Map,” at the Whitney this spring, bringing together nearly five decades of her work. Her latest curatorial effort, “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans,” on view through January 15 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., highlights work by a range of artists who deal with Indigenous knowledge of their natural surroundings.

Dennis is the founder of Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, a nonprofit and artist residency located in his childhood home and birthplace on Long Island’s Shinnecock Indian Reservation, which provides a space for marginalized artists to create and engage with one another. His cinematic fine-art photographs, which comment on the misrepresentation of Indigenous people in American media, probe subjects such as identity, cultural practice, and the history of forced Native assimilation. Dennis’s ongoing project On This Site maps out and documents ancestral lands throughout Long Island.

Simpson, Smith, and Dennis recently connected to discuss how their physical and ancestral homes inform their work, effecting change in the art world, and why community-building is inherent to what they do.

ROSE B. SIMPSON: I don’t think I really knew how impacted by home I was as an artist. I had to leave my ancestral homelands where I grew up and was born, in northern New Mexico, to realize how important it is to me—that it is not just the people but the place that is family to me. I feel like that lack of consciousness around our beings, our physical and spiritual and social existence, keeps us from identifying and having respect for home.

“I’m so proud of the place I call home, and I try to bring that with me when I leave the reservation.” —Jeremy Dennis

JEREMY DENNIS: I’m from Shinnecock, born and raised. Everyone there is related. There are about 600 of us, more or less. As an artist and a tribal member, I’m so proud of the place I get to call home, and I try to bring that with me when I leave the reservation. One way I do that as an artist is by making portraits of some of my relatives. I do interviews. Sometimes they share stories of resilience and pride or conflict and strain on the community. There’s so much of our important history that isn’t represented in photos or paintings or inscriptions. So, my work is about showing that history is always relevant and that how we’re living today is informed by the path that our community has traveled and survived.

JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH: I am a mixture of Métis-Cree and Salish and am from the northern border of the United States in Montana. I was born at the St. Ignatius Mission on the Flathead Reservation, at a time when one in 10 babies born there lived. My dad was a horse trader and moved around often; when we were down-and-out broke, we had to go to a reservation. My sister was born at Hoopa, and I lived at Muckleshoot and Nisqually. In Nisqually, we had a one-room cabin that didn’t have furniture. There were three families of us in there. We didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity. I remember being sick all the time and always being hungry. That was a normal upbringing for someone my age. I knew early on that white people had different lives than we Indian people. It was so distinct. I’m still riffing off of that in my work and with all my Native friends. My home is with them. It is on the reservation. But I’ve been living here in New Mexico for quite a few years, and it’s like another home. I have family everywhere when I get together with all the Indian artists because they are my family too.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Indian Madonna Enthroned, 1974, Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchased with funds from the Director’s Discretionary Fund, Fabricated by Andy Ambrose

JD: One experience that keeps recurring for me, unfortunately—and I’m sure we all share it—is I’ll get invited to do a show during November, Native American Heritage Month, and then it’s quiet the rest of the year. I’m always trying to advocate for Indigenous inclusion. We can participate anytime. It's so important for our art to be institutionalized. When I think about themes of joy and beauty in Indigenous art, I think they come out of approaching difficult subjects and conflicts in our history. When we talk about these things, it’s a form of healing. The arts, especially, bring together different communities, so when I see work about colonization or suffering, I think it’s a step in moving toward a better future.

JS: In all my 50 years of traveling and lecturing and sharing slides of contemporary art by Native people, George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and Standing Rock have all changed the scene. All of a sudden, museums and galleries were like, “Oh, we’re not including everybody.” We’ve been saying that for 50 years now! All of a sudden, though, arts institutions have started giving out fellowships and grants to Native people, and my younger brothers and sisters are all having big, major museum exhibitions. That is so incredible. That never was there for us. Before I curated “The Land Carries Our Ancestors” for the National Gallery of Art, the museum hadn’t had a show on Native art in 30 years. When the Whitney contacted me, I think they were nervous about it. But it actually was a good exhibition; it brought people to the museum, and we got a lot of press, which was shocking to me. I don’t know how long this is going to last, it's like manna from heaven. But I’m doing it, and I’ll keep doing it if I can get the door cracked so that I can bring my community in with me.

“We are so dynamic, and we come from so many different stories.” —Rose B. Simpson

RS: I think often about how those artists that came before us really did wedge that door. Someone said to me recently, “The water is rising for us all.” It’s rising, and we’re all floating together. I have the privilege to question whether the institution is the source of all power. Why do we give those colonial institutions the right to say we are someone and what we say is important? The reason that I feel grateful to be included in these exhibitions and spaces is that they reach the people I’m trying to have the conversation with. My work isn’t directed at my community here at Santa Clara; I’m trying to communicate something across a line that hasn’t been open to communication for a really long time. There are all these things—exploitation, stereotyping—that we all have to combat. I’m not Shinnecock, you know what I mean? I am not Salish. I’m a Pueblo person, and I’m from a specific pueblo, and I’m from a specific family. We are so dynamic, and we come from so many different stories. It’s so important to have that full spectrum of Indigenous experience in those spaces.

Ron Amstutz

Installation view of “Rose B. Simpson: Counterculture” (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 4, 2023–January 21, 2024)

JS: They stereotype us. I remember when I was going around to all of these galleries and museums, talking about contemporary art by Native people, and they said, “What is that?” And I said, “Well, we are not what you would call traditional. We are not weaving blankets, and we’re not making silver jewelry, but we are making art from our own experience.” That’s the point. We make art from our own experience just like all the white artists do. And there isn’t one style for white artists, but they expect it to be one style for us. Jeremy’s making art and creating Ma’s House and doing all those wonderful things that are community-building. I think each of us in our own way realizes that we have to do some of that, we have to do both things. We tend our work, and then at the same time we reach out to each other and make plans to do stuff together. Part of it is having each other's backs. Part of it is being a support system. Our lives and our work are so fragile because there aren’t millions of us.

“Our lives and our work are so fragile because there aren’t millions of us.”—Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

RS: The pieces at the Whitney right now are five from an original series of 12. They are set up outside on the museum’s roof, and they’re called Counterculture. The original spot for them was [supposed to be] at Plymouth Rock. What I wanted to say with the pieces was, “You’re being watched.” Most people forget that we’re being watched by things that we deem inanimate. I think one of the main reasons that colonization happened in the way that it did was that colonizers had forgotten they were being held accountable by beings beyond people. I had qualms about putting my work at Plymouth Rock. I felt like I didn’t have the right to speak on behalf of all Native people. The organizers were approached by the Wampanoag community, which said to them, “This isn’t who we want making this work there.” That was a blessing for me. Who am I, a Pueblo person from New Mexico, having this conversation about an experience that was very much not mine? The work then got installed in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 2022, where we built some programming around it with the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican community. It felt really good to move it to where it was wanted. Now the other seven pieces are at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. After they were moved, we took some of the clay from where the pieces were originally installed in Williamstown and made beads with the Wisconsin Stockbridge-Munsee community. We sat around and told stories and then fired the beads and made necklaces. That felt like the most important part of the whole exhibit. That piece taught me a lot about how to trust the art itself and where it needs to go.

Jeremy Dennis

Jeremy Dennis, untitled from “Sacredness of Hills,” 2020, Archival Inkjet Print, 30 x 40 in

JD: I do landscape photography, portraiture, and staged photography. I have a personal series from 2018 called “Rise,” and it’s all about reoccupying ancestral lands. It asks, what if Indigenous people never left? What if they’d continued to maintain their footprint and witnessed the transformation of the land, the colonization, the desecration of sacred sites? I also explore home in terms of expansion and abundance rather than being confined to the reservation. That's just one of the unfortunate realities of growing up on a reservation; there are pluses, but at the same time, many tribal members never leave the territory. It becomes a small bubble of where we're supposed to belong. We're supposed to be not only invisible, but also non-existent. I think about what is owed to us and what we can still do to grant us that sense of home. Part of how I do that is through Ma’s House, which we started in 2020. It’s in an old family home on the Shinnecock reservation that was built in the 1960s by my grandfather, Peter Silva Sr. My mom and her five siblings grew up in it, and I did too, with my older sister. Probably 90 percent of my photography work gets done at residencies, so I wanted to offer that resource and space to other artists. Of course, it opened during a time of racial awakening in the nation, so it became a focus to support BIPOC artists. Since opening, we’ve had about 30 artists come through. We’ve had a couple of major exhibits. We’ve also had weekly workshops by my mother, including a leather-belt-making workshop. As we’ve been saying, new spaces are very much needed. Jaune, tell us about the show you curated this fall.

JS: The National Gallery of Art contacted me to curate a show there through my gallery. For two years, I worked on every committee that they offered, whether it was for the catalog, installation, or design. I had a road map in my head. For one, I wanted to make it about land, because the Land Back movement is front and center right now. I wanted the show to have parity between men and women and ages. There were limitations on the size of the space, so I came up with this idea: At home in Montana, we have checkerboard land. In 1887, the government came to the Flathead Reservation and divided up our land, which had been communal, and gave us allotments, which is not our way of life. Then they took the leftover land, put ads on posters for it in New York City, and invited people to come and farm it for free. So, for the exhibition, I made a checkerboard wall. It was my way of getting almost 50 people in the exhibition instead of 25. That’s our secret.

Ariana Marsh is Harper Bazaar’s senior features editor. Working across print and digital, she covers the arts, culture, fashion, literature, and entertainment—and a bit of everything in between.

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