Native American Artists Claim Space at Frieze Los Angeles

By Tara Anne Dalbow in Frieze Los Angeles , Frieze Week Magazine | 10 FEB 25

In 2024, Mississippi Choctaw-Cherokee painter, sculptor and filmmaker Jeffrey Gibson made history by becoming the first Native American artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale. His Technicolor pavilion, comprising intricately beaded sculptures, geometric paintings and a kaleidoscopic video installation, was inaugurated by Native American dancers and singers perform­ing the traditional jingle dress dance – another first. Indeed, Adriano Pedrosa’s ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ biennial featured more Indigenous artists than any previous edition. Among them were fellow Native Americans, Navajo painter and printmaker Emmi Whitehorse and Cherokee painter Kay WalkingStick, whose work is also being showcased on the US West Coast for the first time in 40 years at Frieze Los Angeles 2025.

‘There’s definitely market momentum for Indigenous artists,’ says Stuart Morrison, senior director at Hales Gallery, New York, which has represented WalkingStick since 2020 and is hosting a solo presentation of her paintings at the fair. ‘But we’ve been working with artists from underrepresented commu­nities for a long time, and our primary concern is creating longevity and growing supportive networks of collectors, curators, academics and critics.’ Hales’s booth will feature a selection of WalkingStick’s abstractions from the 1970s and ’80s that build on conversations initiated by recent institutional exhibitions: a travelling solo show organised by the New York Historical Society (2023–25); inclusion in Candice Hopkins’s seminal group exhibition ‘Indian Theater’ at Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2023); and the display of an acquisition from the series shown in LA, ‘Genesis/Violent Garden’ (1981), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

‘She’s one of the great figures of American history and she is still marginalized,’ Morrison says. ‘It’s critical that her voice, and those coming up around her, are brought to the fore and formally integrated into the broader narrative of contemporary art.’ For the past 60 years, WalkingStick has composed paint­ings and sculptures that confront both her own fractured identity and that of her country, reinscribing Indigenous presence onto a history from which it has been largely erased. ‘I’m a Cherokee,’ the artist shared in a recent interview with the Smithsonian Museum of Art in Washington, DC. ‘I was raised in a white culture, and both are in everything I do, whether it’s landscape or figures or abstraction. It is always there because I’m there.’

Before focusing on the embodied land­scapes for which she is best known, WalkingStick experimented with increasingly minimalist, geometric abstractions. Collapsing the distinction between sculpture and painting, she imbued dense layers of encaustic paint with an almost bas-relief dimensionality. Linear slashes and curved incisions reveal bands of colour like sedimentary rock beneath the grainy, dark-hued surfaces textured with crushed seashells and pebbles.

Multidisciplinary Libyan-Yurok artist Saif Azzuz, who shows with California-based gallery Anthony Meier, also incorporates natural materials and textures in his paintings. Gathering native and invasive plants from the Yurok reservation where his mother lives, he arranges the clippings on canvas before spraying various pigments – acrylic, dye and ink – over the top, preserving their natural forms. His vibrant plant paintings are part of his solo presentation at Frieze Los Angeles, along with carved wooden sculptures, metal works and a site-specific mural. ‘His work is beautiful,’ says Anthony Meier managing director Kristin Delzell, ‘and people are immediately drawn to it, but the layers of meaning add this other really significant dimension.’

The immersive, mixed-media installation provides viewers with context and highlights the breadth of Azzuz’s artistic practice. Redwood oars featuring intricate inverse basketweave patterning and assemblages composed from discarded metal, wood and plant life are interspersed with large-scale paintings. ‘Azzuz appreciates and respects all living things and sees the use of found materials as a way of extending their lives,’ Delzell explains. ‘The booth is truly a manifestation of his belief that nature is not a resource to be extracted but an integral part of us.’ 

Artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, preserves and venerates nature through his vertiginous, colour-rich films and entrancing photographs – both of which are included in his solo presentation with New York’s Broadway Gallery. ‘Hopinka was the first artist to have a show at the gallery back when we opened in the fall of 2020,’ says co-founder Joe Cole. ‘We’re excited to debut his new work here in LA, where the traditional film and entertainment world will come face to face with one of the great experimental filmmakers of his generation.’

Hopinka’s new two-channel video coalesces documentary storytelling techniques, traditional nature photography, text overlays and washes of abstract imagery with polyphonic archival sound­tracks, poetic recitations and first-person narration to conceptualize, challenge and expand experiences of contemporary Indigeneity. The accompanying photographs, printed from medium-format Hasselblad negatives and inscribed with verse, distil the film’s dynamic expository style and distinct aesthetic atmosphere. Both media intertwine language and landscape, giving rise to a novel form of communication that foregrounds Indigenous wisdom, spiritual teachings and notions of personhood and community that have been denigrated and erased for centuries.

By giving equal weight to words and images, Hopinka’s ethnopoetics enliven historical records and blur the bound­aries between past and present, infusing the mundane with the imaginary, the traumatic with the resilient, and memories with dreams. As Hopinka writes in his poem ‘Ho-Chunk Holy Song’, ‘I don’t remember what was a memory/or what was a dream./I imagine the colors were dreams/and the smells were memories.’ 

 Night Raiders (2021), by Cree-Métis film director Danis Goulet, who hails from Canada, is included in the exhibition ‘Cyberpunk’ at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures as part of Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide programme. For her dystopian film, Goulet sought not to integrate the present with the past but to forecast the future, explaining, ‘It stands as a declaration that we’ve always been here, we are still here and will always be here.’ 

It’s far from being the only exhibition in LA concurrent with Frieze to include a female Native narrative; museums across the city are championing Indige­nous women artists and art. Among them is 2024 MacArthur Fellow Wendy Red Star, a member of the Apsáalooke Nation, whose fantastical regalia is part of ‘Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology’ at the Autry Museum of the American West. Photographs and sculptures by Mercedes Dorame of the Gabrielino/Tongva Nation are included at the Autry, too, and in ‘Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Leah Mata Fragua from the Yak Tityu Tityu Yak Tiłhini (Northern Chumash) tribe is featured with her ephemeral objects in ‘Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art’ at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. 

The variety of Native American contemporary art on display across Los Angeles alone is exciting. The diversity of the formal, material and conceptual engagements suggests that galleries and museums are focused on art-historical significance rather than arbitrary aesthetic trends. This market awareness, combined with momentum from the broader cultural shift toward recognizing marginalized histories, increased scholarship and a new generation of emerging artists who are both realizing and reimagining enduring material traditions, offers promising prospects for the longevity of this newfound interest.

As Goulet’s declaration affirms, what’s new about Native art and artists is not their existence but their long-overdue recognition.

At Frieze Los Angeles 2025, Broadway Gallery is showing Sky Hopinka; Hales Gallery is showing Kay WalkingStick; and Anthony Meier is showing Saif Azzuz.

Exhibitions on view as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, an initiative of Getty with arts institutions across Southern California, include ‘Cyberpunk’, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, until April 12, 2026; ‘Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art’, Fowler Museum, UCLA, until July 13; ‘Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology’, Autry Museum of the American West, until June 21, 2026; and ‘Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Cultures’, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, until March 2.