CREATE.

Kelliher-Combs is a Nome mixed-media painter and sculptor whose work is intensely personal and intimate. In it, she uses both organic and synthetic materials, creating abstract works that call to mind hair, skin and teeth that remind the viewer not only of the things that make us unique, but that we share. "Through mixed media painting and sculpture I offer a chronicle of the ongoing struggle for self-definition and identity in the Alaskan context," Kelliher-Combs said in her artist's statement.

She's interested especially in the physical, surface-level interactions with culture and society, especially in the Native and Western context. Her use of organic materials is more than a representation of cultural dichotomies; it's an almost metaphorical representation of this cultural skin.

Begay paints lyrical, pointilistic works, the dots of which "repeat like the words of a Navajo prayer," as described on his gallery's website. Begay's work is widely accessible, and in some ways, it's even familiar. It has a gorgeously Impressionistic, even Expressionistic, sensibility. That said, its originality doesn't suffer from this comparison — rather, its beauty is enhanced.

That said, there are some darker historical shadows in his work. In Begay's biography, he has said he survived boarding school because he was able to draw on cultural and spiritual strength, and retreat into his drawings."Arts save lives' has been my mantra ever since," Begay wrote. "Some people did not survive like me. They are walking traumas of my generation."

Jacobs, a Mohawk recipient of the Harpo Foundation's prestigious Native American Residency Fellowship, is one of the only artists on this list who works almost exclusively in one style: abstract metal sculpture. Her works are emotive and sharp, edged with knowledge and heavy with history — but they're not violent or threatening.

She uses contemporary alloyed materials, including steel and pewter, to question how cultures adapt to the art world, Jacobs told Mic. This use of steel is particularly layered with meaning; it references not only strength and resistance, but the weight of culture and the famed Mohawk Ironworkers.
When asked about the way her work reflects the relationship between Natives and the United States, Jacobs said, "There is such a complex relationship between Natives and the U.S. and I think that for survival we have to figure out how to adapt to a contemporary world without losing the essence of culture and meaning. This is one of the major ideas that I am exploring in my work."

Longfish, a retired painter, worked in primarily modernist and politically charged modes. His artwork is credited for leading the Native art movement and the emergence of Native contemporary artists. In his works, he questions the way we define our identity, interrogating those complex political, social, historical and psychological underpinnings.

"The more we are able to own our religious, spiritual, and survival information, and even language, the less we can be controlled," Longfish said in an exhibition statement with Molly McGlennen. "The greatest lesson we can learn is that we can bring our spirituality and warrior information from the past and use it in the present and see that it still works."

Wilson, a Diné photographer who lived in the Navajo Nation, deals with a complicated issue: how cultural identity can be imposed rather than developed, defined through the lens of another. Wilson is also interested in how Native peoples are seen as a people of the past. One of his most renowned projects, the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange, questions and expands upon the image of Native and Indigenous people popularized by photographer Edward Curtis. Wilson notes that Curtis' images are part of what makes Native people "frozen in time," he said in his artist's statement, which was adapted with permission for Mic.

Wilson's photographs "intend to resume the documentary mission of Curtis from the standpoint of a 21st century indigenous, trans-customary, cultural practitioner," according to his artist's statement. "I want to supplant Curtis' Settler gaze and the remarkable body of ethnographic material he compiled with a contemporary vision of Native North America ... These alone — rather than the old paradigm of assimilation — can form the basis for a reimagined vision of who we are as Native people."

Henriquez has a distinctive visual voice expressed primarily on city streets. As a student of street art and graffiti culture, his unique perspective on Native and mainstream U.S. creative expression is especially compelling. Graffiti is deeply tied to New York City's urban environment, especially so in the '70s.
This muralist, street artist and clothing designer works primarily in Los Angeles, but his recent project in collaboration with the Minneapolis American Indian Center will be his largest.

Like so many American street artists, Henriquez and his work both reflect the passion and devotion to community. "L.A. is full of art, crime, justice, abuse and many other things like any other city, but this is where we live," he wrote on Facebook. "So make it a beautiful place!"

In his vibrant, richly saturated, satirical graphic realist paintings, artist Frank Buffalo Hyde (b. 1974) juxtaposes 21st century pop culture signifiers with symbols and themes from his Native American heritage. Born in Santa Fe and raised on his mother’s Onandaga reservation, Hyde seeks to dismantle stereotypes of Native American culture with his work. He takes imagery from pop culture, politics, films, television shows, etc. and overlaps the references to replicate what he refers to as “the collective unconsciousness of the 21st century. In his painting series “In-Appropriate,”

Hyde paints satirical portraits of people wearing “jacked-up portrayal(s) of Native American imagery” that are at once funny and revolting. Hyde overtly defies the aesthetics of what people might think Native American art “should” look like, including subjects such as selfie-sticks, iPhones, cheerleaders and plates of buffalo wings. His narrative series I-Witness Culture explores life as a Native American in the digital age. Hyde’s work addresses contemporary America’s fear of the “other,” and the tendency to homogenize indigenous cultures to counter this fear (which ultimately materializes as racist mascots and costumes).

Matika Wilbur is a photographer and storyteller. She has been traveling across the country for over 5 years, taking portrait photographs of Indian Tribes across the country to reclaim the Native American image, and to effectually change the way that Native Americans are represented. Wilbur has a background in fashion and commercial photography, and despite being very successful in her career, she knew in her heart that she had to use her voice to expose the diverse, unique individual personalities amidst America’s indigenous communities, who are too often either neglected or misrepresented. She began her portrait photo-series titled

Project 562 in order to communicate the lives of neglected and/or misrepresented peoples. Her portraits capture a sense of intimacy and genuine raw emotion, likely because of Martika’s process. Her subjects choose where they want to be photographed, and Martika spends up to multiple days with them, bringing gifts and sharing songs and prayers. She seeks to bring the individual to life in her works, placing her photos side by side with text from the subject. She views herself as a “creator and messenger,” and her project is a form of re-education, offering a comprehensive visual curriculum of contemporary Native culture. She writes "while holding true to my heritage and tradition, I aim to empower contemporary visions. I believe that my work is the answered prayers of my ancestors, as I walk the path they fought to pave.” Wilbur has travelled to over 300 sovereign nations so far, and her photographs capture the vast diversity within and between indigenous communities.

Teri Greeves (b. 1970) is known primarily for her use of the traditional Kiowa art of beading, which she learned from her grandmother. She writes that her grandmother expressed herself through beadwork, and despite working menial jobs as a dishwasher and a cleaner, she was always primarily an artist. Greeves has been working with beads since she was 8 years old, and for her, being an artist is about giving a voice to her ancestors before her. She writes, "I am compelled to do it... I have no choice in the matter. I must express myself and my experience as a 21st Century Kiowa and I do it, like all those unknown artists before me, through beadwork... and though my medium may be considered 'craft' or 'traditional,' my stories are from the same source as the voice running through that first Kiowa beadworker’s needles. It is the voice of my grandmothers." Greeves merges her cultural history with contemporary objects, as in the case of her tennis shoes series (shown above). She blends traditional geometric traditional Kiowa styles with figurative elements of the Shoshone, while also commenting on the derivation of American modernist abstraction from traditional Native American designs. Her figures are adorned with both traditional and contemporary clothing items, as a commentary on being a Native American woman in the modern world.

Merritt Johnson works in sculpture, painting, and video, but has a special affinity for performance art, for the way it allows her to embody the past, present, and future all at once. Her work speaks to the relationship between Native American history and "American" history. She comments on the boundaries that humans create (borders, fences, state lines), as juxtaposed with the natural boundaries of nature (airflow, waterflow). In her performance Clouds Live Where, viewers watch from above as Johnson delineates space using tape, wood barricades, and fabric. The artist attempts to navigate this barricaded space, transporting water back and forth from clouds to land. Says Johnson “tongues and knives cut the intersections of land, culture, sex, and body, so I weave together seen and unseen; looking with closed eyes open, breathing in and out.”

Another recurring theme in her work is camouflage, illuminating the complete disregard of indigenous people as part of American society. Her work plays with the unseen, exploring its “precarious possibility (of) endless creation and destruction. She is interested in the ways that indigenous and non-indigenous people's interpretations of her work differ, specifically with regards to the treatment of land and nature: on the one hand respected and imbued with spiritual qualities and on the other looked at as a resource. Without judgement, she says, humans can feel that all things are ultimately intertwined.

Duane Slick is a Native American painter and storyteller of the Meswaki Nation. His photo-realist paintings on glass and linen have a dream-like, spiritual quality, using subtle shadows, light studies, and layering. His series Disagreeable Coyotes (2015-2016) consists of nine acrylic-on-panel minimal paintings of coyote heads, layered in bright reds, blues, and yellows, reminiscent of a full color 3D film watched without the glasses.

Of the paintings, Slick writes, “In narrative traditions, to tell the story of tragedy one must always begin by telling the ending first. I once believed that the weight of such expectations functioned as a cultural given for the artist of Native American descent. Its rules stated that we cry for a vision and place ourselves in a single grand narrative of history and representation... but the laughter of Coyote saturated and filled our daily lives. It echoed through the lecture halls of histories and it was so powerful and it was so distracting that I forgot my place in linear time and now I work from an untraceable present.”

Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary activist/arts collective consisting of Native American artists Kade L. Twist, Raven Chacon, and Cristóbal Martínez. You may recognize Postcommodity from the collective’s contribution to the Whitney Biennial earlier this year: a dizzying four-channel video sped up and slowed down in conjunction with sound, tracing the fences that line the US-Mexico border. The installation, titled A Very Long Line, demonstrates the "dehumanizing and polarizing constructs of nationalism and globalization through which borders and trade policies have been fabricated.”

In their artists's statement, the collective writes "Postcommodity’s art functions as a shared Indigenous lens... to engage the assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding, multinational, multiracial and multiethnic colonizing force that is defining the 21st Century through ever increasing velocities and complex forms of violence." Borders seem to be a recurring theme; Repellent Fence (2015), an ephemeral land-art installation comprised of 26 enlarged replicas of an ineffective bird-repellent balloon, hovered 50 feet above a two-mile long stretch of land connecting the US and Mexico. The group hopes to incite a constructive conversation about social, political, and economic forces that are destroying communities globally.