Image: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
The Whitney Museum of American Art will present 'Sonya Kelliher-Combs: TITIQ/MARK' beginning Feb. 6, 2027, in an exhibition that the museum says will be the artist’s first solo museum show in New York. The presentation, on view at the Whitney in New York, will bring together nearly two decades of Kelliher-Combs’s work on history, cultural continuity, self-determination, and land use.
Kelliher-Combs is an Iñupiaq and Koyukon artist based in Anchorage, Alaska. The Whitney describes her as working across paintings, sculptures, and installations shaped by generational knowledge, with 'TITIQ,' the Iñupiaq word translated as “MARK” in English, pointing both to the visible and invisible marks of colonialism and to the mark-making central to her practice. The exhibition is also identified by the museum as its first mid-career survey of an Indigenous artist, an institutional milestone that places her work within the Whitney’s broader effort to present a fuller picture of contemporary American art.
According to the museum’s exhibition materials, 'TITIQ/MARK' will foreground Kelliher-Combs’s use of repetition and seriality and include works from ongoing bodies of work such as 'Curls,' 'Remnants,' 'Idiot Strings,' and 'Secrets.' The show will highlight a wide range of materials and methods, including marine mammal gut, paint, hair, fabric, animal hide, thread, and the artist’s own innovations with acrylic polymer. The Whitney also notes that the exhibition will ground these experimental approaches in traditional methods of production such as gut processing and sewing.
A featured work on the exhibition page is 'Nuna, Tundra and Blue' (2026), described as an acrylic polymer, nylon thread, reindeer fur, porcupine quill, and paper work measuring 64 by 63 by 2 1/2 inches. The museum credits the work to the Collection of Daniel Sturman and Lily Chu and notes image credit to the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, with a photograph by C. Creagan. The page gives a preview of the material range that shapes the larger exhibition.
The Whitney and the Anchorage Museum are co-organizing the exhibition. It is co-curated by Jennie Goldstein, Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Curator of the Collection at the Whitney, and Julie Decker, Director/CEO of the Anchorage Museum, with Rose Pallone, Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney. The Whitney’s exhibition page lists major support from the Adam D. Weinberg Artists First Fund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the Whitney’s National Committee, along with significant support from the Kapadia Equity Fund, the Keith Haring Foundation Exhibition Fund, and Sueyun and Gene Locks.
Kelliher-Combs’s artist page at the Whitney identifies her as born in 1969 and notes one work in the museum’s collection, 'Polar Bear Curl' (2017). It also lists 'Sonya Kelliher-Combs: TITIQ/MARK' among her exhibitions, marking the Whitney show as a significant new institutional platform for the Anchorage-based artist as the museum prepares for the February opening.
