25 Native American Artists to Know

Born in Honolulu, Bernice Akamine(1949–2024) was a Native Hawaiian sculptor, installation artist, and self-identified maker whose compositions in paper, glass, and metal critique the ongoing American colonial impact on Hawaii. Akamine received an MFA in glass and sculpture from the University of Hawaii in 1999. She is best known for her 87-sculpture installation at the 2019 Hawaiian Biennial, Kalo, honoring Hui Aloha ‘Āina, an organization supporting Hawaiian sovereignty. Equally political, her work Papahanaumokua (2018) is a series of glass-tipped bullet casings filled with ‘alaea, Hawaiian earth pigments that referred to the 2018 false missile threat alert received (but not taken entirely seriously) by locals conscious of the number of military sites on the main island. One of her later pieces before 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 colored works connect weaving to video games—both requiring singular focus and offering an escape from the monotony of childhood on the rez— the X- and Y-axes of her gridded patterns resembling games like Mario Kart and Pac-Man. Cody also adopts the visuals of glitches that recur in older electronic games, explaining, “Glitches and separation of time and space happen; I like being able to kind of make them intentional.” Her flamboyant style can be traced back to the matrilineal guild of weavers who fostered and apprenticed Cody in her youth, even as her work offers ever new definitions of the form.

Jeremy Dennis (b. 1990) is a Shinnecock photographer based on his Long Island, New York, reservation, known for staging revenge fantasies in his images. In his photo series “Nothing Happened Here” (2016–2017), Dennis depicts modern white Americans struck by one or more arrows, evoking the paradox of settler violence and nonviolent ideologies: Whether the violence is direct or indirect, the existence of settlers on Native land is a perpetual confrontation and derailing of Native sovereignty. In his four-minute film Hearthless: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Destitute) (2015), inspired by Homer’s Iliad, Dennis draws parallels between the “othering” of the Greek epic protagonist and that of Native peoples. The short, a collage of clips from such films as Dances with Wolves and The Outlaw Josey Wales, reflects on the contrast between Native and non-Native lived experience in the United States while endowing the films’ 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 within the Navajo Nation. Their work has decried extractive and performative investment in Indigenous artists, and in a recent BOFFO residency on Fire Island, they examined settler colonialism through a queer lens. The project culminated in a littoral spoken-word performance and two banners, one stating “Stolen + colonized / sacred + ancestral / UNKECHAUG LAND” and the other “all we know is our ancestors were as wild as comets and cosmic wind.” Their prose also appeared in “Encoded,” a virtual reality exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum’s American Wing, superimposed on a landscape painting, flashing between “we demand resources over acknowledgments” and “we desire survival over statements.”

Maidu and two-spirit (“third gender”) multidisciplinary artist Tyler Eash (b. 1988) works primarily in performance, painting, and sculpture to elevate postcolonial expressions of queerness, class, and Indigeneity. His work employs historical and new materials and often focuses on the body. Produced by Eash’s alter-ego Loreum and recalling ecofeminist works of the 1970s, Angel/Kákkini #4 (2022) is both landscape and ethnography––a triptych painted on cowhide that comments on the artist’s California hometown. The purple, pink, white, and black top section conjures both the night sky and the California hills; the central wings, rendered in black, tan, and white, represent the darkness of Marysville’s poverty and drug problems; and the base evokes the state’s fires of recent years. Parabole II is a satellite dish reworked in plaster resin, auto paint, and abalone shell––known as “grandmother shell” among West Coast tribes.

In 2024 Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972) became the first Native American to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. He is a self-described painter whose works employ scale, color, and material to dismantle artificial divides between Native and non-Native, human and animal, and celebrate relationality among living beings. In Gibson’s “Power Full Because We’re Different” (2025), an immersive installation at MASS MoCA on view through September 7, 2026, he employs bright ribbon-embroidered fabrics, metallic-colored coils, and ethereal chiffon to explore the fluidity of gender roles in Native societies. In his four Metropolitan Museum façade sculptures honoring a deer, coyote, squirrel, and hawk, on view through June 9, 2026, he invites viewers to understand these beings’ insights—the squirrel’s foresight, the hawk’s perspective for crucial decisions, and so on.

Lenny Harmon (1983), a Lenape mixed-media artist residing in Philadelphia, draws from historical traditions but is mainly self-taught. His Vision of Division (2025) combines a repeated photograph of an elder in powwow regalia with a bifurcating red paper strip affixed with silver discs. Lifted Journey (2025) is a nonrepresentational landscape in shades of yellow, black, white, and red, framed in red, pink, baby blue, and gold stripes evoking a traditional 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 including the Heard Museum in Phoenix and is one of the few recognized contemporary Lenape artists today.

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 Foundation Grant recipient and an assistant professor at Harvard University, the artist is lauded for his work in language reclamation and multimodal documentary film. His linguistic revitalization work began in college when he took Chinuk Wawa––a language local to the Lower Columbia River Basin where he was raised––ironically––to satisfy a foreign language requirement. His film Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary (2017) juxtaposes clips of Native acting and nature, graphic film stills, and audio from conversations with elders. His intention was to redesign storytelling and language transmission from the stale and moribund anthropological records in university archives into dynamic media accessible to contemporary community members.

Patrick Dean Hubbell (b. 1986), a Diné artist, draws parallels between deconstructed canvases and blankets, which are ubiquitous in Indigenous gifting cultures. Your Perseverance Taught Us to Rise to Each New Day (2025) Hubbell’s contribution to “The Canvas Can Do Miracles,” a current exhibition at Austin Contemporary (on view through January 11, 2026), consists of draped canvases painted with bright acrylics. In another work, Within the Darkness, the Stars in the Night Sky Came to Reclaim Their Stories and Their Songs (2023), five generic “Native inspired” blankets hung from a stretcher bar are spattered with white paint. Here, Hubbell lampoons cultural appropriation by using heritage brands like Pendleton and Ralph Lauren as he continues his critical engagement with white ideas about Natives.

Landscape painting becomes literal in the works of Athena LaTocha (b. 1969), a Hunkpapa Lakota and Ojibwe artist based in Brooklyn. Previously a smaller-scale painter, she now creates monumental pieces by laying resin-coated photographic paper on the floor and then pouring and diffusing pools of ink, mounds of soil, and other materials, allowing them to permeate the surface before scraping off the detritus.Referencing the history of tribal lands, from Mexican mesas and Ozark bluffs to Louisiana wetlands, LaTocha’s compositions have recently focused on New York City. LaTocha visits construction sites and cemeteries to collect materials and dirt once in contact with the city’s original people. 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 traditional materials and designs while gesturing to the complexity of mixed-Indigenous identity. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1996 and self-identified as māhūwahine, a Native Hawaiian third-gender identity, Lehuauakea developed a focus on traditional kapa-bark cloth painting while attending an all-Native Hawaiian school. She honed her artistic practice at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Oregon, where she developed her signature pieces inscribed with historical motifs. Lehuauakea’s E Hoʻāla Ka Lupe: To Awaken the Kite (2022) honors traditional kites, or lupe, and related mythology, while Mele o Nā Kaukani Wai (Song of a Thousand Waters) (2018) points to the need to integrate Indigenous knowledge into Western climate science.

Rachel Martin (b. 1954) is a Tlingít artist and enrolled member of the Tsaagweideí, Killer Whale Clan, of the Yellow Cedar House (X̱aai Hit´) Eagle Moiety. She grew up in California and Montana and now resides in New York City. Working primarily in sculpture and drawing, Martin is an inheritor of the Pacific Northwest line drawing tradition, whose cosmological symbols—like bears, fish, and frogs—she places in feminist tableaux. Bending the Rules (2024), in colored pencil on paper with a collaged mask, features a bare-chested woman bent over backwards. Been Ready (2023) offers the same cheekiness, with a Tlingít mask serving as the head of a woman in profile, her cutout legs caught in mid-sprint. The mask has a stuck-out tongue, Martin’s gesture toward the figure of the trickster in Tlingít mythology.

Known as the matriarch of Native American pottery, Maria Martinez (1887–1980) transformed Indigenous ceramics from craft into fine art though her black-on-black pottery technique. Working with her husband, Julian Martinez, and other family members from her home in San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, she achieved what few Native artists of her time could: widespread recognition in the art world. Her journey began with archaeology; she studied ancient pottery shards at a time when earthenware was being abandoned for Spanish tin and English porcelain. Martinez reinvented historic techniques, creating a distinctive style that art critics would later compare to modernist masters like Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko. Martinez’s artistic achievements earned her historic recognition: she met four U.S. presidents, attracted the patronage of the Rockefeller family, and became perhaps the most famous Native American artist in history. Her timeless black pottery, with matte designs painted by Julian, continues to influence contemporary ceramics and stands as a testament to Indigenous innovation.

The Cree multidisciplinary artist Kent Monkman (b. 1965) is best known for injecting his Cree gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, into paintings that reference the styles of Hudson River School landscapes, Edward Curtis’s photographic portraits, and Eugene Delacroix’s realist figuration. Miss Chief’s presence in the monumental paintings, often dressed suggestively in vertiginous heels and flowing fabrics, upends colonial notions of gender and interrupts the narratives codified by traditional Western tableaux. Monkman’s current retrospective at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (on view through March 8, 2026) excavates suppressed histories of the United States’ and Canada’s colonial origins, offering viewers a reckoning with narratives long obscured.

Renowned fourth-generation Diné (Navajo) weaver Louise Nez (b. 1942) was born in Sand Springs, Arizona. In the 1980s, after creating hundreds of works using motifs developed in the 19th-century commercialization of Navajo rugs, she began producing woven images of life on the rez. Her best-known wall hanging, Reservation Scene (1992), features brightly colored figures crafting, herding, and traveling by 19th-century wagon. Inspired by her grandson’s coloring books, Nez has also included dinosaurs in weavings like Dinosaur Pictorial Weaving (date unknown) retained by the Gochman Collection.

Self-taught beader Sandra Okuma (b. 1945) is a Luiseño and Shoshone-Bannock artist whose sumptuous beaded bags are influenced by her training as a painter and work as a graphic designer for the music industry. 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 National Museum of the American Indian, boast unexpected color palettes—in this case, shades of ruby, saffron, and sky blue. Sandra shares a booth at the Santa Fe Indian Market with her daughter Jamie Okuma, a clothing designer; the two occasionally work together on collaborative projects. The pair’s sophisticated designs have garnered appreciation in both the art and fashion worlds.

The multimedia artist Virgil Ortiz (b. 1969), from Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico, originally worked in ceramics, which he began learning from his mother at age six. Building on a historical style defined by black mineral and vegetable pigments and motifs drawn from the landscape and cosmology, Ortiz’s interpretations are distinctly modern. In the past two decades he has expanded into new mediums, from painting and glass-blowing to fashion and interior design. Ortiz creates with élan, introducing gender play, science fiction, and kink into his ceramic and glass vessels, busts, and figures. Master and Tics (2002) is a black, white, and red Cochiti clay triad of Monos figures: a two-headed horned being walking leashed four-legged creatures. Rise Up (2017), a black, white, and red clay vessel, shows Donald Trump riding a black snake, which traditionally represents fertility or an underworld connection—though in this case it more likely reflects the reptile’s broader Indigenous association with the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025), an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, was a groundbreaking visual artist, curator, and activist. She worked tirelessly to break the “buckskin ceiling,” helping pave the way for a new Native vanguard of Indigenous artists. Her vast oeuvre, developed over 50 years, combined incisive political humor with poeticism and spanned painting, collage, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Her works gesture to the lands, cultures, and philosophies of Native peoples, asserting sovereignty in her representation of tribes’ past, present, and future. A show she curated, “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always,” is currently on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, New Jersey. With more than 100 works by 97 artists, it is the largest contemporary Native American art exhibition to date.

Diné multidisciplinary artist Eric-Paul Riege (b. 1994) honors traditional Navajo modes of making, interpreting them through craft-store materials and in collaboration with family members. Riege’s work particularly salutes matriarchal weavers like his great-grandmother, who is featured in his installation, ojo|-|ólǫ́ (2025), on view through December 7 at Brown University’s Bell Gallery. The installation also includes a wall-mounted squash blossom necklace created from gray synthetic material, a suspended and empty upright loom warp, and multiple long earrings constructed from faux fur, leather, and plushy fabric. In a three-hour performance, Riege paced the length of the installation, mimicking the movements of a loom’s shuttle and whipping fringed and jingle-adorned items at the feet of a trickster-like figure.

Sara Siestreem(b. 1976)is a Hanis Coos artist based in Oregon. The Pratt MFA graduate’s works include ceramics, photography, weaving, painting, and installation. Skyline (2024)is a series of traditional Hanis Coos baskets cast in clay and topped in gold, evoking the commodification of Native culture by modern interior design. Minion (2024) is composed of four ceramic black and white ceremonial caps underpinned by cascading scarlet beads, referencing systemic violence against Indigenous women and girls. Un-ring Bells (2013) incorporates photographs and representations of oyster shells Siestreem found along the local Coos and Millicoma Rivers’ shores long after the extinction of local tribes, the effect of white settlement and industrial fishing. Siestreem’s work gestures at both the presence and absence of Native communities and their relationships with the land in modern American life.

Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983) is a multimedia artist known for her ceramic and metal sculptures, installations, and performance pieces. Born in 1983 in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, Simpson comes from a matriarchy of ceramicists. Though accepted to Dartmouth, she chose to attend the University of New Mexico to maintain her formative ties to the land. She earned MFAs from the Rhode Island School of Design and the Institute of American Indian Arts and studied pottery in Japan and South Korea. Her work innovates at the intersection of red clay pottery and figurative sculpture, pushing the boundaries of Pueblo art. A current installation at the de Young Musuem in San Francisco consists of two classic cars customized by the artist.

Painter and sculptor Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma with Cherokee/Anglo heritage. Featured at the 2024 Venice Biennale, she is currently experiencing a significant moment of recognition. In her long career WalkingStick has embraced a variety of styles and formats, though her touchstone, since encountering the feminist and American Indian movements of the 1970s, has always been her identity as a Native American and biracial woman. She has produced abstract paintings like Archetypal Image (1975), which found commonality between the shapes of teepees and the nets hanging under NYC bridges; Pop Art-inflected nudes; and diptychs featuring symbols on one side and landscapes on the other. Most recently she has made landscape paintings inscribed with Indigenous motifs, suggesting that the terrain is being viewed from a pre-contact vantage point. As she told the New York Times in 2023, the American landscape she is painting—from the Grand Canyon to Niagara Falls—was depicted by 19th-century white artists as empty. Of course,” she told the New York Times in 2023, “it was not empty; it was populated. . . . I think of [my paintings] as a reminder that we are all living on Indian Territory.”

Contemporary 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 University of Wisconsin–Madison and was the curator at the Native-owned All My Relations gallery in Minneapolis from 2010 to 2015 before turning solely to studio practice. White Hawk’s work applies Lakota traditions like porcupine quillwork, beadwork, and rawhide painting to critiques of a white artistic hierarchy that has historically subordinated Native art. She also does installations, photography, and performances that promote the Lakota philosophical and moral principle mitákuye oyás’iŋ: We are all related. She brought this concept to life in early 2024 with the totemic rectangular sculpture Visiting (2024), comprising four collaged panels of beadwork; facing an impossible deadline, White Hawk recruited her family and community to finish the commission, which was shown at the 2024 Armory Show in New York City.

A Navajo painter from New Mexico, Emmi Whitehorse (b. 1957) creates layered abstractions influenced by her rural upbringing. Her formative years grounded her practice in a traditional ecological worldview. “If you got sick and something was wrong, it meant that psychically you were falling out of rhythm with nature,” she explains. “So you went about healing by surrounding yourself with beauty and nature; that applies to my painting.” Whitehorse’s meditative landscapes employ a personal symbology of place and time, her gradient washes suggesting both serenity and constant change. In a signature work, Firelight II (2024), she interweaves abstracted botanical forms, dotted lines, gridded axes, and surveillance drone symbols topped with infinity signs, creating a complex cartography that maps both physical and spiritual terrain.