We Are Not Silent. Nor Forgotten.
My work lives in color loud, layered, unapologetic color. I create absurd and vibrant collages because our stories have never been small, quiet, or simple. As a Native American artist, my pieces are rooted in culture, ceremony, womanhood, and resistance. Each art piece is an act of remembrance. Each one is a refusal to disappear.
Here are three recent works that hold my heart.
Dedicated to my mother.
The Natives
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The Natives |
She Carries the Sky
This piece centers Indigenous womanhood as sacred, cosmic, and unbreakable. Layers of saturated purples, electric blues, and with a sapphic pink surround the central figure, not as decoration, but as energy. She is not a muse. She is not a myth. She is a living embodiment of ancestry.
In many of our traditions, women are life-givers, knowledge-keepers, protectors of ceremony. Yet historically, Native women have been silenced, erased, and violated. This collage pushes back. Her gaze is direct. Her posture is grounded. The sky does not sit above her, she stands firm on it.
This piece is about empowerment, but also about truth:
Indigenous women are still here. We are sacred. We are powerful.
I will not be silenced.
This piece moves a little bit away from neon and into the language of the desert sand, clay, dust, sun-bleached bone, deep rust. The palette is restrained but intense. It holds heat.
At the center stands a woman. She is grounded, rooted, immovable. Around her, male figures lean inward and their hands reaching, attempting control. They try to change her. To correct her. To shrink her. To rename her. To make her easier to hold.
But she does not bend.
The desert tones are intentional. The desert is often mistaken for emptiness, but it is alive, sacred, resilient. It survives extreme conditions. It adapts without losing itself. Like the land, she carries quiet strength is not fragile, not decorative, not waiting to be approved.
The men in the collage feel almost fragmented, distorted by their own attempts at dominance. Their presence is loud, but unstable. She remains whole.
This work speaks to the generational pressure placed on Indigenous women by colonization, by patriarchy, by systems that try to redefine us for their comfort. It is about the expectation that we should soften ourselves, lower our voices, shrink our knowledge.
She refuses.
The desert does not apologize for its heat.
The land does not ask permission to exist.
Neither does she.
The water flows and is free, just like her.
This piece is about survival without surrender.
It is about standing in your full identity when others try to carve you into something smaller.
It is about remembering that we are not clay in someone else’s hands.
United we stand
Silence has been forced upon Indigenous communities for generations. This piece rejects silence completely. Neon pinks, saturated purples, and impossible red clash and sing together. The composition feels loud on purpose.
Layered mountains, features, create a chorus rather than a single voice. No one figure dominates, because this is collective.
This art piece is my declaration: We are not relics. We are not history books. We are contemporary, evolving, expressive, and impossible to mute.
Color becomes voice.
Absurdity becomes resistance.
Art becomes survival.