Image: Phoenix Art Museum
Phoenix Art Museum will present 'The Way We Came: A Century of Indigenous Art from The William P. Healey Collection' from August 26, 2026, to July 11, 2027, in Cummings Great Hall. The exhibition spans the early 20th century to the present and brings together works by nearly 60 Indigenous artists representing 27 tribal nations. According to the museum, the show examines how Indigenous artists have sustained, adapted, and reimagined cultural knowledge across a century.
The exhibition is organized by Phoenix Art Museum and curated by JoAnna Reyes, PhD, the museum’s adjunct curator for Art of the Americas, and Tony Abeyta (Navajo), identified by the museum as guest curator. The project draws on the William P. Healey Collection of Native American Art at Phoenix Art Museum, which the museum describes as a recent gift. In its exhibition materials, the museum also says the collection was developed over decades in close consultation with Abeyta.
Museum materials frame the exhibition around modernity in Native American art and the transmission of visual culture through familial lines of artists, artists’ collectives, and pedagogical lineages, including the complex legacies of Native boarding schools. The presentation also emphasizes storytelling and works rooted in ceremony, describing those works as evidence of continuity and resistance. The exhibition statement identifies 'survivance' as a key concept: a term coined by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor that combines survival and resistance to describe an active, creative presence that carries knowledge forward.
The exhibition also traces changing relationships to abstraction and modernism. Phoenix Art Museum cites Fritz Scholder and T. C. Cannon among artists associated with expressive figuration, and names Kay WalkingStick, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Emmi Whitehorse in relation to layered landscapes. Works by Quincy Tahoma, including 'The Navajo Country', and George Morrison’s Lake Superior landscapes are described as engaging land as both subject and sovereign presence. Contemporary voices including Cara Romero and Tony Abeyta extend those dialogues into the present.
Phoenix Art Museum’s exhibition page says the show features more than 80 artworks. Among the works shown in the museum’s release materials are Ernest Spybuck’s 'Shawnee Gathering', Blackbear Bosin’s 'Sing Back the Buffalo (Singer with Buffalo Skull)', and D.C. Allen and Del Curfman’s 'Vanishing Series (XVII)'. The museum also identifies 'Celebration from the Underworld' by Tony Abeyta as a work to look for in the galleries.
The museum’s announcement places 'The Way We Came' alongside other upcoming and current exhibitions, but the Indigenous art show is presented as a distinct installation within Phoenix Art Museum’s program. Exhibition details list its location as Cummings Great Hall and note that it is scheduled for the museum’s upcoming season, opening on August 26, 2026. The museum’s exhibition page and related materials do not provide additional public program dates for the project at this time.
