The artist and designer Nonamey makes cartoonish, cardboard renderings of everyday objects like electric guitars, soup cans and, in one case, a nearly four-foot-long pair of scissors. He’s furnished rooms with cardboard tables and chairs decorated with acrylic paint that he applied in a spare, graphic style akin to what you’d see in a Daniel Clowes comic. In 2018, while he was living in Los Angeles and operating as part of the artist collective Dosshaus, he and his collaborator at the time, David Connelly, created a sleazy motel scene using the same materials. Visiting the installation, which was called “Paper-Thin Hotel” and displayed at Corey Helford Gallery in L.A., was like stepping inside a still from an offbeat noir film: A cardboard briefcase filled with cardboard cash lay open atop a cardboard bed.
Nonamey, 33, began working with various forms of paper when he was a teenager growing up near Taos, New Mexico, because he could purchase it inexpensively or pick it up off the street. “I loved the freeness of it,” he said. “I could build really large structures while just paying for glue sticks.” His experience made him a uniquely skilled candidate for our ongoing Make T Something series, in which we challenge participants to create something in under an hour using some basic craft supplies, a copy of The New York Times and one additional item of their choosing. The artist chose to sculpt a birthday cake, and began by rolling pieces of newspaper into tubes. He then stood them upright, encased the lot of them with paper and cut a hole in the top sheet, into which he inserted a makeshift candle. Finally, he twisted strips of paper and glued them onto the structure to emulate the lumpy appearance of icing. Then, using a flower-shaped palette he’d brought with him from his studio in Portland, Oregon, where he’s lived since 2021, Nonamey gave the dessert a taffy pink gloss. He named the piece “Mino-giizhigad” (2025), a phrase in Ojibwe, his native language, that roughly translates to “It is a good day,” and can be used to commemorate a happy occasion.
Nonamey sees the act of making art out of paper, a humble material that’s easily discarded or recycled, as a metaphor for finding joy in moments of scarcity. He relates it to his memories of his family cooking bannock, a deep-fried flatbread, from ingredients supplied by the United States government through food-assistance programs like Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations. “It’s that taking what we’re given and turning it into something else — into ceremony, into food, into family, into tradition,” he says.
Two of Nonamey’s pieces will feature in “Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation” at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the first major exhibition of Native American artwork at the museum in over 30 years, and much like the material of which they’re composed, the ordinary things they represent contain deep personal and political meanings for the artist. One claims a symbol of an American institution — a U.S.P.S. postbox, here strewed with graffiti and stickers — as the artist’s own, and is a conscious withholding of the sort of imagery one might expect from an Indigenous artist. The other, “Dress for Nookomis” (2023), depicts a red dress, a symbol that honors Indigenous women who’ve gone missing or been murdered. It also reminds Nonamey of his grandmother. “All I have of her are photos, and the clothing that she wore in photos,” he says. “I tried to recreate some of these pieces with her in mind.”
Coco Romack is the assistant managing editor of T Magazine.
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