A breeze from the vast North American plains has blown across the rolling Yorkshire hills. The work of 38 Indigenous American artists has filled the galleries of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, transforming their underground space into a world of clay and earth, fabric and ceramics, painting and sculpture that talks of land, memory, oppression and freedom through art.
Everywhere, there’s a sense of ancestral identity, memory and tradition. It’s in the Navajo weavings of Tyrrell Tapaha and Melissa Cody, the patterned beadwork of Jeffrey Gibson, the dizzying geometricism of Dyani White Hawk’s towering column. They all use traditional aesthetics to explore new ideas: Gibson’s work is about how his queer identity meets his Indigenous culture, White Hawk pushes into pure abstraction, Cody mixes pixelated video game aesthetics into Navajo patterns, and on and on. Everyone here is taking the old ways and pushing them in new directions.
