One of the defining characteristics of the Frist Art Museum is that it doesn’t have a permanent art collection — instead, it organizes and hosts a rotating slate of temporary exhibitions. One of the strengths of that model is that it allows exhibitions to develop conversations over time. An Indigenous Present, on view through Sept. 27 in the museum’s upstairs gallery, is a prime example. Organized by curator Jenelle Porter and artist Jeffrey Gibson, the exhibition brings together contemporary Indigenous abstraction while deepening ideas introduced in earlier Frist exhibitions.
Gibson was the subject of the museum’s 2023 solo exhibition The Body Electric, which included works that reference Gibson’s Indigenous identity — he has Cherokee heritage and is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw. That exhibition drew on some of the themes of Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, which the Frist presented in 2019. That rich groundwork allows An Indigenous Present to strengthen and complicate ideas about what it means to make Indigenous art. Two strikingly different artists in the exhibition — Mary Sully and Kimowan Metchewais — are ideal entry points into the diversity of practices that fall under the Indigenous art umbrella.
Opening reception 6:30 p.m. June 25; through Sept. 27 at the Frist
Mary Sully’s triptychs are some of the first pieces you see in An Indigenous Present, and around 10 of the multipanel works-on-paper she called Personality Prints are installed at various points throughout the exhibition. That prevalence is for a good reason. Though Sully is now considered a foundational Indigenous artist — she was even the subject of a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2024 — her work was only recently viewable by the public. She was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota in 1896, and after her death in the mid-1960s, her drawings were kept unglamorously in a box under a family member’s bed until her great-nephew, the historian Philip Deloria, came across them in the early 2000s. Sully’s life story is full of even more fascinating details — for example, her great-grandfather was a prominent 19th-century artist who painted the iconic portrait of Andrew Jackson that was used on the $20 bill.
But the works in the Frist are so unusual and special that biographical knowledge isn’t necessary to understand their appeal. “Edison” — made at some point between the late 1920s and early 1940s — is topped with a colored-pencil drawing of a carefully crafted abstract shape that might reference a Dakota star quilt, but also a rhythmic pinwheel pattern in brilliant primary colors, along with the word “Edison” printed so straightforwardly that it makes you wonder whether Sully realized her works would be considered abstract at all. “Amelia Earhart” includes a circle that seems to frame the silhouettes of a crowd of cheering figures, and pin marks at the corners show that these lauded works were not always treated with a museum’s care.
"Luther (Striped Man)," by Kimowan Metchewais
Works by Cree photographer Kimowan Metchewais are similarly installed at various points throughout the exhibition. Metchewais died at age 47 in 2011 from a rare brain tumor, and left behind a portfolio of multimedia works that feel both earthy and fragile. “Ghost Dancer” from 1998 is made from photo paper, watercolor, paint and chalk, and shows a figure draped in a black-and-white-striped cloth that covers him completely, with outlines of stars drawn, scratched out, redrawn and erased again around him. A 2002 work called “Chief’s Blanket” uses a similar bold stripe pattern, and sections are held together with tape.
In an interview between the curators, Gibson explains the selection process involved in this show: “We chose artists who have pushed traditional forms of cultural abstraction into realms that don’t directly reference specific cultural traditions. They are experimenting with it, pushing it into places where it’s still tethered to where the reference originates from, but in a new format that can make it almost unrecognizable.”
An Indigenous Present is valuable because it showcases Indigenous artists, but it does so through examples — like Mary Sully and Kimowan Metchewais — that are untethered from any cultural tradition outside of their own art practices. It is a remarkably freeing framework that gives Indigenous artists space to be understood not as representatives of cultural identity, but as innovators expanding the possibilities of abstraction on their own terms.
