Anna Tsouhlarakis, YOU KNOW SHE BUYS HER SAGE AT URBAN OUTFITTERS, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Tilton Gallery, New York
Jeffrey Gibson on 10 Artists to Know this Native American Heritage Month
By Petala Ironcloud | November 10, 2025
Where are all the Native American artists? Visit any major American museum today, and you may notice some answers to that question. In 2025, we are in the middle of a Native American art renaissance, where institutions nationwide are clamoring to display—and occasionally acquire—contemporary Native artists. This is thanks in no small part to Jeffrey Gibson, a Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee painter and sculptor, whose seminal 2023 book An Indigenous Present features 60 contemporary Native artists. In a show of the same name, which opened last month at the ICA Boston, 15 of these artists are brought together. Co-curated with independent curator Jenelle Porter, the exhibition ties together broad themes recurring across contemporary Native American art: land, memory, refusal, and humor.
Gibson’s desire to document his fellow Indigenous artists started during graduate school, when he lacked a comprehensive resource on contemporary Native artists. Later, living and working in New York City, he was often the token Indigenous artist in a project or institution. Over the years, Indigenous artists have become increasingly sought-after across North America. For example, painter Kent Monkman currently has a retrospective, “History Is Painted by the Victors,” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Meanwhile, interdisciplinary artist Marie Watt is presenting the full range of her practice at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Portland, Oregon, from print works to monumental steel-and-wool blanket works that recall Mohawk “sky walkers.”
For Artsy, Gibson selected 10 Indigenous artists you should know this Native American Heritage Month.
Anna Tsouhlarakis
B. 1977, Lawrence, Kansas. Lives and works in Boulder, Colorado.
Known for: wry sculpture, installation, video, and photography
“Anna uses biting humor to remind audiences of the Indigenous histories of the land and the people who originate from those homelands,” said Gibson. Inspired by her father, who works in contemporary Native
jewelry design and construction, she began working in three dimensions early in life. Her 2019 billboard and banner series for The Native Guide Project presents affirmations like “IT’S GREAT HOW YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT NATIVE AMERICANS ARE STILL HERE.” Her works vary in size, appearing on billboards, bus shelter banners, and other outdoor public signs. These signs are sometimes interpreted as confrontational, but the artist instead intends them to be invitations for self-examination. The works ask viewers to recognize their complicity in the ongoing removal and displacement of Native peoples.
Most recently, Tsouhlarakis has been at work on a video project documenting and exploring over 400 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation and a particular uranium spill that occurred on the land next to her family’s. It is being created in community with younger artists as part of her broader practice of working with and uplifting emerging Native artists.
Her works, especially sculpture, employ contemporary materials—from tobacco tins and press-on nails to steer horns and artificial elk teeth—over traditional ones, which she finds confining. Often referencing external expectations of Native art, her work also lampoons America’s founding mythology and the settler relationship to land.