Image: Teresa Baker, Knife River, 2024. Yarn, buckskin, artificial sinew and willow on AstroTurf. © Teresa Baker. Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, acquired through the generosity of the Acquisitions Circle. Courtesy the artist and Broadway Gallery, New York. Photo: Ruben Diaz
The Frye Art Museum in Seattle will host ‘An Indigenous Present’, a touring exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, from November 7, 2026, to February 14, 2027. According to the Frye, Seattle is the show’s only venue on the West Coast.
The exhibition gathers substantial groups of work by fifteen Indigenous artists whose lives span roughly a century, from Mary Sully, born in 1896 on the Standing Rock Reservation, to Audie Murray, born in 1993 in Saskatoon. What links them is abstraction: the show looks at how each artist uses non-figurative means to tell stories that are both individual and shared, to evoke real and imagined places, and to extend cultural and visual traditions. The museum presents the works as evidence that abstraction is not one style but an open language able to carry many histories at once.
The guest curators are the artist Jeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, and the independent curator Jenelle Porter. The project grows out of their 2023 book of the same title, which the Frye describes as a landmark publication. In Seattle, the presentation has been organized by Frye curator Georgia Erger with curatorial assistant Alexis L. Silva.
Alongside Sully and Murray, the artists are Teresa Baker, Raven Chacon, Sky Hopinka, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, George Longfish, Dakota Mace, Kimowan Metchewais, Caroline Monnet, George Morrison, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Anna Tsouhlarakis and Kay WalkingStick. Their affiliations include Diné, Cree and Métis, Ojibwe, Seneca and Tuscarora, Iñupiaq and Athabascan, and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation.
Works illustrated by the museum suggest the breadth of materials involved. Teresa Baker’s ‘Knife River’ (2024), now in the ICA Boston collection, combines yarn, buckskin, artificial sinew and willow on a ground of AstroTurf. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s ‘Cree Prayer Series #1’ (1978) is worked in acrylic and pastel on paper, while Kimowan Metchewais’s ‘Chief’s Blanket’ (2002), lent by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, uses ink and adhesive tape. George Morrison’s ‘Three Surrealist Forms, Automatic’ (1984) is drawn in colored pencil, ink and wash, and George Longfish’s canvas ‘Take Two Aspirins and Call Me in the Morning, You Are on Target’ (1984) comes from the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis.
Gibson will speak in the Frye’s Art History Lecture Series on November 12, and receptions for the museum’s autumn exhibitions are scheduled for November 6. Lead support comes from the Teiger Foundation.
