For much of the 20th century, the art world positioned Indigenous artists at its margins, filtered through anthropology, craft or identity politics.
Yes, there have been moments, for instance in the early 1970s and early 1990s, when the art world has started to see the work of Indigenous artists differently. But it has not been until the past decade or so that there has been a “more sustained expansion of the positioning and context for Indigenous art,” Laura Phipps, director of the Gochman Family Collection, a private lending collection of contemporary art by Indigenous artists, wrote in an email. And now Indigenous art is being embraced and supported by institutions and the larger art market.
Three artists showing at Frieze New York this week represent that market shift: Sara Flores, Suzanne Kite and Seba Calfuqueo.
Groundbreaking in their practices, they have challenged exclusionary categorizations while gaining international visibility through museum showings, biennials, public art commissions and institutional exhibitions around the world.
Together, they reflect a moment in which the commercial market is starting to catch up with their level of institutional recognition.
Propelled by curators, galleries and collectors, these artists are offering new ways of seeing the world and of understanding Indigenous art itself.
Sara Flores
For years, Sara Flores, a member of the Shipibo-Conibo nation in Peru, sold her painted textiles for about 100 solas (about $30) each in open-air craft markets in Pucallpa, a city in the Peruvian Amazon. Now her work is on view with White Cube at Frieze New York, and she is representing Peru at the Venice Biennale, becoming the first Indigenous artist to do so for the country.
At Frieze, her large-scale textile painting titled “Untitled (Maya Kené, 2021)” reflects a practice rooted in Kené, a Shipibo name for a design system, composed of endlessly repeating geometric patterns. This visual language is traditionally revealed to women and passed down through matrilineal lines. Flores works with her daughters and granddaughters to create many of the pieces.
“Kené is how we identify as Shipibo,” Flores said in an interview at her studio, a stilted wooden structure built on the water, and overlooking the lagoons near Pucallpa, in Amazonian Peru. Here, she paints using a sharpened umbrella spoke, tracing her intricate patterns freehand onto fabric.
Her work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
“This work is both art and craft,” she said. “People come from far away to see our work. The most important is that it opens a path for other Shipibo artists.”
The shift from craft markets to the global art circuit has been life-changing, helping to lift Flores and members of her family out of poverty. In addition, a quarter of the proceeds from her sales go to the Institute of Legal Defense, a law firm that represents the Shipibo and other Indigenous people in Peru, said Matteo Norzi, the co-curator of Flores’s Biennale presentation.
Flores’s rise to becoming an international artist was aided by Norzi, an Italian New Yorker who co-founded the Shipibo Conibo Center, a nonprofit in West Harlem, in 2016, and has championed her work ever since.
“Entering the space of contemporary art has proven that Indigenous ideas are contemporary,” Norzi said in an interview at Flores’s studio. “Historically there was a barrier like a form of apartheid: Indigenous people were placed in natural history museums, and white artists in the fine art museum. But now that’s changing.”
“There has been a definite, positive change in the last two years,” Norzi said in a follow-up interview in Venice ahead of the opening of the Peru national pavilion last week. “Today every blue-chip art collection has at least one Indigenous artist in it.”
Flores’s solo exhibition in Venice, titled “Sara Flores. From Other Worlds,” features monumental textile paintings and sculptures made from the netting used locally as bed canopies. She has also painted a flag in her signature style for the Shipibo people, as an affirmation of Indigenous self-determination.
“Sara’s practice is both prescient and profound,” Jay Jopling, founder of White Cube, wrote in an email. “Through its quiet, minimal insistence, her art speaks to the interconnectedness of everything and reminds us how humanity needs to remain respectful of our fragile place within the natural world order.”
Suzanne Kite
Suzanne Kite, an Oglala Lakota Nation artist, composer, scholar and researcher who lives and works in Catskill, N.Y., and directs the Wíhaŋyable S’a (pronounced wee-HAH-blay SAH) Center for Indigenous A.I., a research center at Bard College which Kite described in a phone interview as doing “interdisciplinary research that merges Indigenous knowledge with A.I. technology.”
“I am among the first Indigenous American artists to use machine learning in sculpture and performance,” she said.
At Frieze, Kite presents “Wíhaŋyablapi (of St. Louis)” (2026), a large installation coupled with a live performance that Kite developed with the nonprofit Counterpublic, which will take place on Wednesday and Thursday. The whole presentation is a preview of a larger public art project coming to St. Louis in the fall.
The work draws on Oglala Lakota women’s traditions of beading and porcupine quill work, two practices that are used to translate dreams, visions and cosmological knowledge into material form. Working from that tradition, Kite has constructed a map of St. Louis that highlighted the places where communities dream today: homes, gardens, parks and music venues.
She also makes sculpture in hide, beadwork and embroidery.
“I’m always trying to push those materials to do things that they’re not supposed to do,” she said. A new group of Kite’s sculptures is currently on view at MoMA PS1 in New York as part of the museum’s “Greater New York” exhibition.
Seba Calfuqueo
Seba Calfuqueo, a Chilean artist of Mapuche heritage whose work examines histories of resistance in Chile and Argentina, is presenting with W-galería of Buenos Aires.
A trans Mapuche artist who uses she/her pronouns, Calfuqueo describes her work as an effort to move beyond stereotypes that cast Indigenous people only as figures of the past or as keepers of tradition. In the booth, Calfuqueo presents “Culpas” (or “Guilt” in Spanish), a new installation of two glazed ceramic sculptures with pearlescent luster over black: one an open mouth expelling a long strand of hair that forms the word “culpas;” the other a hand receiving it.
“Hair is at the beginning of everything that I do,” Calfuqueo said in a phone interview from Puerto Saavedra, in Chile, near Mapuche territory. “It is an important part of my identity as an Indigenous and a queer person.”
Though Calfuqueo has presented video and performance art at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum, the fair marks a different chapter, since the presentation includes sculpture and objects.
“This allows me to show another dimension of my practice, which is more object-based, visual, and maybe more legible to collectors,” Calfuqueo said.
“It is important that the work does not simply represent the tradition of my people,” Calfuqueo said. “I am interested in challenging expectations of Indigenous aesthetics. For me, that is where new futures and new ways of understanding Indigenous identity can emerge.”
The post At Frieze New York and Beyond, Indigenous Artists Are in the Spotlight appeared first on New York Times.
