This site contains works of art that include nudity. Viewer discretion advised.

Larger Than Memory

A Digital Experience

Larger Than Memory: Contemporary Art From Indigenous North America presents works by contemporary artists working across the United States and Canada. Focusing on the two decades of 2000 to 2020, the exhibition highlights the significant contributions that Indigenous artists have made, and continue to make, by addressing critical dialogues taking place globally, engaging with challenging mediums and modes of production, and expressing a continuum of their respective cultural heritages while often entering into conversation with and revising the canon of art history.

The title of this exhibition is drawn, with permission, from Joy Harjo’s poem Grace, which contains the lines, ”I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.” This verse spoke to our intention for this exhibition, which is to present outstanding work by Indigenous artists while creating an opportunity for reckoning with the marginalization and misrepresentation of Indigenous people within the field of contemporary art.

Works in the exhibition address complex themes: the human impact on the environment, race, gender, equality, the importance of Indigenous sovereignty, and the impact and ramifications of colonization. Colonialism-the domination of one culture over another-had various manifestations in North America, including the forcible seizure of Indigenous lands, the involuntary relocation of Indigenous peoples, their forced assimilation into a dominant culture, ethnocide and even genocide.

With each work featured in the exhibition, we ask our viewers to make room for new ideas and ways of thinking about contemporary art from Indigenous North America.

Artists in this exhibition include: