25 Indigenous American Musicians to Know

Tlingit weaver Sydney Akagi (birthed 1989) uses standard Ravenstail and Chilkat strategies and products to develop her trademark masks, chitons, and mantles. Birthed in Southeast Alaska and a registered participant of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, she made her initial wall surface dangling in 2018, gaining from her advisor, Lily Hope. The Chilkat formline concepts in weavings like Ritualistic Woven Chiton, Ravenstail and Chilkat, which Akagi produced for the Indigenous Arts and Societies Structure, traditionally stated nonreligious and social standing within the people; for Akagi, they usually honor occasions in her very own life.

Birthed in Honolulu, Bernice Akamine( 1949– 2024) was an Indigenous Hawaiian carver, installment musician, and self-identified manufacturer whose structures in paper, glass, and steel review the recurring American colonial influence on Hawaii. Akamine obtained an MFA in glass and sculpture from the College of Hawaii in 1999. She is best understood for her 87-sculpture installment at the 2019 Hawaiian Biennial, Kalo, recognizing Hui Aloha ‘Āina, a company sustaining Hawaiian sovereignty. Just as political, her job Papahanaumokua (2018) is a collection of glass-tipped bullet coverings full of ‘ alaea, Hawaiian planet pigments that described the 2018 incorrect projectile hazard sharp obtained (however not taken totally seriously) by residents mindful of the variety of armed forces websites on the major island. Among her later items prior to coming on 2024, Kapa Moe: Hae Hawaiʻi (2021 ), is a patchwork of kapa bark objecting the topple of the Hawaiian monarchy.

Melissa Cody (b. 1983) is a fourth-generation Navajo weaver whose brilliantly tinted jobs link weaving to computer game– both needing particular emphasis and supplying a retreat from the dullness of youth on the rez– the X- and Y-axes of her gridded patterns appearing like video games like Mario Kart and Pac-Man Cody likewise embraces the visuals of problems that repeat in older video games, discussing, “Problems and splitting up of time and room take place; I such as having the ability to type of make them deliberate.” Her flamboyant design can be mapped back to the matrilineal guild of weavers that cultivated and apprenticed Cody in her young people, also as her job provides ever before brand-new meanings of the kind.

Jeremy Dennis (b. 1990) is a Shinnecock professional photographer based upon his Long Island, New york city, appointment, understood for hosting retribution dreams in his pictures. In his picture collection “Absolutely nothing Occurred Right Here” (2016– 2017), Dennis illustrates contemporary white Americans struck by several arrowheads, stimulating the mystery of inhabitant physical violence and pacifist ideological backgrounds: Whether the physical violence is straight or indirect, the presence of inhabitants on Country of origin is a continuous conflict and hindering of Indigenous sovereignty. In his four-minute movie Hearthless: Or (The Unanticipated Merit of Destitute) ( 2015 ), influenced by Homer’s Iliad, Dennis attracts parallels in between the “othering” of the Greek legendary lead character which of Indigenous individuals The brief, a collection of clips from such movies as Dancings with Wolves and The Criminal Josey Wales, reviews the comparison in between Indigenous and non-Native lived experience in the USA while enhancing the movies’ stereotyped personalities with brand-new intricacy.

Demian DinéYazhi ′ (b. 1983) is a trans nonbinary musician coming from the Zuni Clan Water’s Side and Bitter Water clans within the Navajo Country. Their job has actually decried extractive and performative financial investment in Aboriginal musicians, and in a current BOFFO residency ablaze Island, they analyzed settler manifest destiny with a queer lens. The task finished in a littoral spoken-word efficiency and 2 banners, one mentioning “Stolen + conquered/ spiritual + genealogical/ UNKECHAUG LAND” and the various other “all we understand is our forefathers were as wild as comets and planetary wind.” Their prose likewise showed up in “Encoded,” a digital truth exhibit in the Metropolitan Gallery’s American Wing, laid over on a landscape paint, blinking in between “we require sources over recommendations” and “we prefer survival over declarations.”

Maidu and two-spirit (” 3rd sex”) multidisciplinary musician Tyler Eash (b. 1988) functions largely in efficiency, paint, and sculpture to boost postcolonial expressions of queerness, course, and Indigeneity. His job uses historic and brand-new products and usually concentrates on the body. Generated by Eash’s alter-ego Loreum and remembering ecofeminist jobs of the 1970s, Angel/K ákkini # 4 (2022) is both landscape and ethnography—- a triptych repainted on cowhide that talks about the musician’s The golden state home town. The purple, pink, white, and black leading area raises both the evening skies and the California hillsides; the main wings, provided in black, tan, and white, stand for the darkness of Marysville’s hardship and medication troubles; and the base stimulates the state’s fires of current years. Parabole II is a dish antenna revamped in plaster material, car paint, and abalone covering—- called “grandma covering” amongst West Shore people.

In 2024 Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee musician Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972) ended up being the initial Indigenous American to stand for the USA at the Venice Biennale. He is a self-described painter whose jobs use range, shade, and product to take down man-made splits in between Indigenous and non-Native, human and pet, and commemorate relationality amongst living beings. In Gibson’s “Power Complete Due To The Fact That We’re Various” (2025 ), an immersive installment at MASS MoCA shown with September 7, 2026, he uses intense ribbon-embroidered materials, metallic-colored coils, and aerial chiffon to discover the fluidness of sex duties in Indigenous cultures. In his 4 Metropolitan Gallery frontage sculptures recognizing a deer, prairie wolf, squirrel, and hawk, shown with June 9, 2026, he welcomes customers to recognize these beings’ understandings– the squirrel’s insight, the hawk’s point of view for vital choices, and more.

Lenny Harmon (1983 ), a Lenape mixed-media musician staying in Philly, attracts from historic customs however is generally self-taught. His Vision of Department (2025) incorporates a duplicated picture of a senior in powwow regalia with a bifurcating red paper strip attached with silver discs. Raised Trip (2025) is a nonrepresentational landscape in tones of yellow, black, white, and red, mounted in red, pink, infant blue, and gold red stripes stimulating a conventional covering, and decorated with a black-and-white picture of an Indigenous pair with their equine and teepee skins and posts. Harmon is accumulated by galleries consisting of the Heard Gallery in Phoenix metro and is among minority acknowledged modern Lenape musicians today.

Skies Hopinka (b. 1984) belongs to the Pachanga band of Luiseño Indians in Southern The Golden State and the Ho-Chunk Country. A 2022 MacArthur Structure Give recipient and an assistant teacher at Harvard College, the musician is admired for his operate in language improvement and multimodal documentary. His etymological revitalization job started in university when he took Chinuk Wawa—- a language neighborhood to the Lower Columbia River Container where he was increased—- actually—- to please an international language need. His movie Anti-Objects, or Area Without Course or Border (2017) compares clips of Indigenous performing and nature, visuals movie stills, and sound from discussions with senior citizens. His objective was to upgrade narration and language transmission from the stagnant and moribund anthropological documents in college archives right into vibrant media obtainable to modern area participants.

Patrick Dean Hubbell (b. 1986), a Diné musician, attracts parallels in between deconstructed canvases and coverings, which are common in Aboriginal gifting societies. Your Determination Taught United States to Surge to Each New Day (2025) Hubbell’s payment to “The Canvas Can Do Miracles,” a present exhibit at Austin Contemporary (shown with January 11, 2026), includes draped canvases repainted with intense polymers. In one more job, Within the Darkness, destiny in the Evening Skies Concerned Redeem Their Stories and Their Tunes (2023 ), 5 common “Indigenous influenced” coverings hung from a cot bar are bespattered with white paint. Below, Hubbell parodies social appropriation by utilizing heritage brand names like Pendleton and Ralph Lauren as he proceeds his essential interaction with white concepts regarding Citizens.

Landscape paint comes to be actual in the jobs of Athena LaTocha (b. 1969), a Hunkpapa Lakota and Ojibwe musician based in Brooklyn. Formerly a smaller-scale painter, she currently produces significant items by laying resin-coated photo paper on the flooring and afterwards putting and diffusing swimming pools of ink, piles of dirt, and various other products, permitting them to penetrate the surface area prior to removing the detritus.Referencing the background of tribal lands, from Mexican mesas and Ozark bluffs to Louisiana marshes, LaTocha’s structures have actually lately concentrated on New york city City. LaTocha sees building and construction websites and burial grounds to accumulate products and dust as soon as touching the city’s initial individuals. By doing so she produces a monolith to the Lenape of New york city (currently of Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Canada).

Lehuauakea (b. 1996) is a mixed-Native Hawaiian multidisciplinary musician whose job uses standard products and layouts while gesturing to the intricacy of mixed-Indigenous identification. Birthed in Rose City, Oregon, in 1996 and self-identified as māhūwahine, an Indigenous Hawaiian third-gender identification, Lehuauakea created a concentrate on standard kapa-bark fabric paint while participating in an all-Native Hawaiian institution. She developed her creative technique at the Pacific Northwest University of Art in Oregon, where she created her trademark items etched with historic concepts. Lehuauakea’s E Hoʻāla Ka Lupe: To Stir Up the Kite ( 2022) honors standard kites, or lupe, and relevant folklore, while Mele o Nā Kaukani Wai (Tune of a Thousand Seas) ( 2018) indicate the demand to incorporate Aboriginal understanding right into Western environment scientific research.

Rachel Martin (b. 1954) is a Tlingít musician and signed up participant of the Tsaagweideí, Awesome Whale Clan, of the Yellow Cedar Home (X̱aai Struck ´) Eagle Moiety. She matured in The golden state and Montana and currently lives in New york city City. Functioning largely in sculpture and illustration, Martin is an inheritor of the Pacific Northwest line attracting practice, whose cosmological icons– like bears, fish, and frogs– she puts in feminist tableaux. Flexing the Policies ( 2024 ), in tinted pencil theoretically with a collaged mask, includes a bare-chested female curved over in reverse. Prepared (2023) provides the very same cheekiness, with a Tlingít mask functioning as the head of a lady in account, her intermediary legs captured in mid-sprint. The mask has a stuck-out tongue, Martin’s motion towards the number of the charlatan in Tlingít folklore.

Called the matriarch of Indigenous American ceramic, Maria Martinez (1887– 1980) changed Aboriginal porcelains from craft right into art though her black-on-black ceramic strategy. Dealing with her partner, Julian Martinez, and various other member of the family from her home in San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, she accomplished what couple of Indigenous musicians of her time might: prevalent acknowledgment in the art globe. Her trip started with archaeology; she researched old ceramic fragments at once when earthenware was being deserted for Spanish tin and English porcelain. Martinez transformed historical strategies, developing an unique design that art movie critics would certainly later on contrast to modernist masters like Edward Receptacle and Mark Rothko. Martinez’s creative success made her historical acknowledgment: she fulfilled 4 united state head of states, drew in the patronage of the Rockefeller household, and ended up being probably one of the most renowned Indigenous American musician in background. Her ageless black ceramic, with matte layouts repainted by Julian, remains to affect modern porcelains and stands as a testimony to Aboriginal development.

The Cree multidisciplinary musician Kent Monkman (b. 1965) is best understood for infusing his Cree gender-fluid modify vanity, Miss Principal Eagle Testickle, right into paints that reference the designs of Hudson River College landscapes, Edward Curtis’s photo pictures, and Eugene Delacroix’s rationalist figuration. Miss Principal’s existence in the significant paints, usually clothed suggestively in dizzy heels and streaming materials, overthrows early american concepts of sex and disrupts the stories ordered by standard Western tableaux. Monkman’s present retrospective at the Montreal Gallery of Art (shown with March 8, 2026) digs deep into reduced backgrounds of the USA’ and Canada’s colonial beginnings, supplying customers a projection with stories long covered.

Popular fourth-generation Diné (Navajo) weaver Louise Nez (b. 1942) was birthed in Sand Springs, Arizona. In the 1980s, after developing thousands of jobs making use of concepts created in the 19th-century commercialization of Navajo carpets, she started creating woven photos of life on the rez. Her best-known wall surface dangling, Booking Scene (1992 ), includes brilliantly tinted numbers crafting, rounding up, and passing by 19th-century wagon. Influenced by her grand son’s tinting publications, Nez has actually likewise consisted of dinosaurs in weavings like Dinosaur Pictorial Weavin g (day unknown) preserved by the Gochman Collection.

Self-taught beader Sandra Okuma (b. 1945) is a Luiseño and Shoshone-Bannock musician whose luxurious handmade bags are affected by her training as a painter and job as a visuals developer for the songs market. Coming from the La Jolla Indian Booking in The Golden State, she has actually been a component of the Santa Fe Indian Market because 1998. Her jobs, such as this handbag possessed by the National Gallery of the American Indian, brag unanticipated shade combinations– in this instance, tones of ruby, saffron, and skies blue. Sandra shares a cubicle at the Santa Fe Indian Market with her little girl Jamie Okuma, a clothes developer; both periodically collaborate on joint tasks. Both’s advanced layouts have actually gathered admiration in both the art and style globes.

The multimedia musician Virgil Ortiz (b. 1969), from Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico, initially operated in porcelains, which he started gaining from his mommy at age 6. Structure on a historic design specified by black mineral and veggie pigments and concepts attracted from the landscape and cosmology, Ortiz’s analyses are clearly contemporary. In the previous twenty years he has actually increased right into brand-new tools, from paint and glass-blowing to style and interior decoration. Ortiz produces with élan, presenting sex play, sci-fi, and twist right into his ceramic and glass vessels, breasts, and numbers. Master and Tics (2002) is a black, white, and red Cochiti clay set of three of Monos numbers: a two-headed horned being strolling leashed four-legged animals. Rise (2017 ), a black, white, and red clay vessel, reveals Donald Trump riding a black serpent, which commonly stands for fertility or an abyss link– though in this instance it more probable mirrors the reptile’s wider Aboriginal organization with the Dakota Gain Access To Pipe.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940– 2025), a registered participant of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Country, was a cutting-edge aesthetic musician, manager, and protestor. She functioned relentlessly to damage the “buckskin ceiling,” assisting lead the way for a brand-new Indigenous lead of Aboriginal musicians. Her huge body of work, created over half a century, incorporated terse political wit with poeticism and covered paint, collection, attracting, printmaking, and sculpture. Her jobs motion to the lands, societies, and approaches of Indigenous individuals, insisting sovereignty in her depiction of people’ past, existing, and future. A program she curated, “Aboriginal Identifications: Right Here, Now & & Always,” is presently shown at the Zimmerli Art Gallery in New Brunswick, New Jacket. With greater than 100 jobs by 97 musicians, it is the biggest modern Indigenous American art exhibit to day.

Diné multidisciplinary musician Eric-Paul Riege (b. 1994) honors standard Navajo settings of making, translating them with craft-store products and in partnership with member of the family. Riege’s job especially praises matriarchal weavers like his great-grandmother, that is included in his installment, ojo|-|ólǫ́ ( 2025 ), shown with December 7 at Brown College’s Bell Gallery. The installment likewise consists of a wall-mounted squash bloom pendant produced from grey artificial product, a put on hold and vacant upright impend warp, and numerous lengthy jewelry created from synthetic hair, natural leather, and plush material. In a three-hour efficiency, Riege paced the size of the installment, imitating the activities of an impend’s shuttle bus and whipping fringed and jingle-adorned things at the feet of a trickster-like number.

Sara Siestreem( b. 1976) is a Hanis Coos musician based in Oregon. The Pratt MFA grad’s jobs consist of porcelains, digital photography, weaving, paint, and installment. Sky Line ( 2024 )is a collection of standard Hanis Coos baskets cast in clay and covered in gold, stimulating the commodification of Indigenous society by contemporary interior decoration. Minion ( 2024) is made up of 4 ceramic black and white ritualistic caps underpinned by plunging scarlet grains, referencing systemic physical violence versus Aboriginal ladies and ladies. Un-ring Bells (2013) integrates pictures and depictions of oyster coverings Siestreem discovered along the neighborhood Coos and Millicoma Rivers’ coasts long after the termination of neighborhood people, the result of white negotiation and commercial angling. Siestreem’s job motions at both the existence and lack of Indigenous neighborhoods and their connections with the land in contemporary American life.

Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983) is a multimedia musician understood for her ceramic and steel sculptures, setups, and efficiency items. Birthed in 1983 in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, Simpson originates from a matriarchy of ceramicists. Though approved to Dartmouth, she selected to participate in the College of New Mexico to preserve her developmental connections to the land. She made MFAs from the Rhode Island College of Layout and the Institute of American Indian Arts and researched ceramic in Japan and South Korea. Her job introduces at the junction of red clay ceramic and metaphorical sculpture, pressing the borders of Pueblo art. An existing installment at the de Youthful Musuem in San Francisco includes 2 classic automobiles personalized by the musician.

Painter and carver Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935) is a resident of the Cherokee Country of Oklahoma with Cherokee/Anglo heritage. Included at the 2024 Venice Biennale, she is presently experiencing a substantial minute of acknowledgment. In her lengthy job WalkingStick has actually accepted a range of designs and styles, though her example, because coming across the feminist and American Indian activities of the 1970s, has actually constantly been her identification as an Indigenous American and biracial female. She has actually generated abstract paints like Stereotypical Photo (1975 ), which discovered commonness in between the forms of teepees and the internet hanging under New York City bridges; Pop Art-inflected nudes; and diptychs including icons on one side and landscapes on the various other. Most lately she has actually made landscape paints etched with Aboriginal concepts, recommending that the surface is being checked out from a pre-contact viewpoint. As she informed the New York City Times in 2023, the American landscape she is paint– from the Grand Canyon to Niagara Falls– was portrayed by 19th-century white musicians as vacant. Obviously,” she informed the New York City Times in 2023, “it was not vacant; it was booming … I consider [my paintings] as a tip that we are all surviving Indian Region.”

Contemporary multidisciplinary musician and manager Dyani White Hawk (b. 1976) is of Sicangu Lakota and white descent. Birthed in Madison, Wisconsin, she participated in the Institute of American Indian Arts and the College of Wisconsin– Madison and was the manager at the Native-owned All My Connections gallery in Minneapolis from 2010 to 2015 prior to transforming exclusively to workshop technique. White Hawk’s job uses Lakota customs like porcupine quillwork, beadwork, and rawhide paint to reviews of a white creative power structure that has actually traditionally subordinated Indigenous art. She likewise does setups, digital photography, and efficiencies that advertise the Lakota thoughtful and ethical concept mitákuye oyás’ iŋ: We are all relevant. She brought this principle to life in very early 2024 with the totemic rectangle-shaped sculpture Seeing (2024 ), making up 4 collaged panels of beadwork; encountering a difficult target date, White Hawk hired her household and area to end up the payment, which was revealed at the 2024 Depot Program in New York City City.

A Navajo painter from New Mexico, Emmi Whitehorse (b. 1957) produces split abstractions affected by her country training. Her developmental years based her technique in a conventional eco-friendly worldview. “If you got ill and something was incorrect, it indicated that psychically you were befalling of rhythm with nature,” she describes. “So you dealt with recovery by bordering on your own with appeal and nature; that relates to my paint.” Whitehorse’s reflective landscapes use an individual symbology of area and time, her slope cleans recommending both peacefulness and consistent modification. In a trademark job, Firelight II (2024 ), she links abstracted herb kinds, populated lines, gridded axes, and monitoring drone icons covered with infinity indications, developing a facility cartography that maps both physical and spiritual surface.