The American Indian Movement of that era helped catalyze (and politicize) a reawakening of Indigenous culture, but it’s only been very recently that its contemporary expressions have started to assert their presence more broadly. Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee artist now living in upstate New York, has been at the center of it. Last year, he was the United States’ official representative to the Venice Biennale, likely the world’s most important contemporary art event. “An Indigenous Present,” along with co-curator Jenelle Porter, is very much his doing.
The exhibition is a sliver of a much larger project — a gorgeous and weighty tome of the same name, published in 2023, that Gibson and Porter edited to include the work of dozens of Indigenous artists, most of them living and working today. The ICA invited Gibson to conceive an exhibition drawn from that project. The result is a pinpoint extraction of 15 of those artists, centered on the intersection of abstraction and Indigenous sensibilities over generations. In its presentation, pairings, and deeply thoughtful purpose, it’s easy to see how it could be the first of many; this is rich terrain, lush and gorgeous in form and idea, and it leaves you wanting more.
“An Indigenous Present” is notably, deliberately inconclusive, right down to its floor plan; a small entry gallery sits at a four-pronged intersection with no clear guidance of where next to go. This is a signal: that the exhibition intends to show, not tell, and to leave itself open to readings and experiences where it could be didactic, or even pedantic — strategies the show explicitly rejects.
That entryway sets a particular tone, with a vibrant abstract painting by George Morrison, from 1962, its patches of color swiped in rough, muscular gestures on the surface. It sits comfortably within the frame of midcentury Abstract Expressionism, the first bona fide American international art movement dominated by superstars like Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.
Morrison, who was Ojibwe, from Minnesota (he died in 2000), compels; Indigenous artists of his generation had to make a choice: Traditional Native craft, which had no regard as art in his day, or the surging, thoroughly Modern realm of abstract painting? Morrison made his choice, moving from Minnesota to New York in 1946 to find himself in the middle of a burgeoning American revolution, which he quickly joined. The selection of his works here from this era fit neatly with the movement’s dominant aesthetic.
But the American Indian Movement prompted a shift in him. He moved home in 1970 to teach at the University of Minnesota, and the land — critical to Indigenous culture — started to infiltrate his work, tethering it to a knowable world. That was anathema to the scene with which he had previously thrown in, and that schism helps define “An Indigenous Present” — of a culture forced to negotiate two worlds, and ultimately, create its own.
Turn left and you’ll find yourself with George Longfish’s “Take Two Aspirins and Call Me in the Morning, You Are on Target,” a huge 1984 painting exploding with color and form that hint but never confirm all kinds of semi-recognizable elements — a horizon, a seascape, a tornado of exuberant pink spirals, a green-furred creature limned in silhouette. Longfish is Seneca and Tuscarora, born in Ontario, Canada — another boundary Indigenous culture doesn’t recognize belongs to countries that declared themselves millennia too late. He notes in a nearby wall label that, early in his career in the 1960s, “I wasn’t even aware that there was Native American art.”
In other words, for Native artists of his generation, lineage would have to be made, not found, and “An Indigenous Present” is here to provide. Some names are familiar, famous even: the Salish and Kootenai artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, whose “Cree Prayer Series” from 1978 is a fury of earthy pastels, or the Cherokee artist Kay WakingStick; others are barely known, if at all, like Kimowan Metchewais, a Cree artist from Oxbow, Saskatchewan, whose material experiments — tissue, photo paper, watercolor, the wing of a moth — are some of the most remarkable things I’ve seen.
Many artists’ works appear room to room like echoes, drawing disparate generations and eras together. Mary Sully, a Dakota Sioux citizen born at the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota in 1896, underpins the project; her graphic semi-abstract drawings, rarely seen until recently, unfurl a little-known world of a cosmopolitan Native American artist of the early 20th century: Her father, a leader of the Sioux Episcopalian Church, would shuttle Sully and her sister between the reservation and big cities, living for a time in New York.
If Morrison and Longfish help to wither overworn cliches of Indigenous expression, Sully uproots them. Here, they help seed generational growth. The artist Caroline Monnet, whose “The Flow Between Hard Places,” 2019, an uneven concrete column that seems to shiver in front of you, shares space with all three. An Algonquin-Anishinaabe artist from Montreal, Monnet creates an abstract monument tethered to the real world: It celebrates an Anishinaabe chief’s quest to repatriate tribal lands seized by the Canadian government in 1850.
Video plays its role here: The Ho-Chunk artist Sky Hopinka’s “Mnemonics of Shape and Reason,” 2021, inverts and collapses a view of Southwestern red rock canyons eventually into a soft dissolve of indistinct bands of color; Audie Murray, who is Cree and Metis, presents “Bear Smudge,” 2025, with the artist performing a traditional smudging ceremony with burning sage and bear grease for the camera; it eventually disappears in a soft haze of color.
There’s a parallel here to Morrison’s paintings, I think, as they began to diverge from AbEx notions of purity — paint, canvas, emotion, the end — to deeper connections, personal connections, to place and experience.
They prompt a deeper question: What does an abstract vision conceal? In another gallery, a broad grid of Walkingstick’s small, dark paintings are inscribed with repeating geometric forms — oblique and haunting, and another nod to formal purity that she proceeds to muddy up.
WalkingStick, another senior Indigenous artist with roots in the American Indian Movement, made them in the mid-1970s; she called them “Chief Joseph Series,” after the Nez Perce hero who lead his people more than 1,000 miles north in an attempt to escape the brutal incursions of the American Army, clearing a path for westward expansion after the Civil War. They didn’t make it, and, in 1877, were captured just 40 miles from the Canadian border.
The echoes here are not specific; nearby, Monnet’s “When Will They See Us,” is like shadow encased and made tangible in the dark folds of coal-black fabric suspended within. These are reactive works: Both allude to monochrome work of artists like Ad Reinhardt, and other “relentless defenders of the purity of abstraction,” according to the Museum of Modern Art — and in 1960s New York, for WalkingStick, a peer — but reject it as a gesture that starts and ends with color and material.
These works carry weight, sometimes generations’ worth. For Monnet, we can read obscurity and emergence with a title that damns. It’s important to understand that “An Indigenous Present” is just as much about the future. “It is possible to rebuild what was destroyed,” Monnet told the CBC earlier this year. “And I think it’s up to my generation to do so.” An Indigenous future is now.
AN INDIGENOUS PRESENT
Through March 8. ICA Boston, 25 Harborshore Drive. 617-478-3100, www.icaboston.org
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.
