‘Native Now’ exhibit highlight of Rockwell Museum’s 50th anniversary

The Rockwell Museum in Corning, N.Y., celebrates its 50th anniversary with a series of events, kicking off with “Native Now,” a major exhibition that assembles 25 years of contemporary Native American art from the Museum’s permanent collection.

Now on view, “Native Now” features powerful works by artists including Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Virgil Ortiz, Wendy Red Star, Sarah Sense, Hayden Haynes, and Edgar Heap of Birds, among others. The exhibition centers Indigenous perspectives while honoring the past, present, and future of Native creativity.

Spanning painting, photography, sculpture, and installation, the exhibition affirms the continued vitality of Native voices in American art today. Working in a wide range of styles, these artists tell visual stories that emphasize connections to land, culture, and community, centering Indigenous points-of-view of seeing the world.

The exhibition also highlights how Native art counters historic erasure and reasserts Indigenous creative voices through works that speak to broad audiences. The artworks explore relationships between communities, the land, and shared responsibilities. Through themes of landscape, modern life, and Indigenous Futurism, artists draw from their own histories to tell new and compelling stories.

“Native Now” is co-curated by independent curator Randee Spruce (Seneca Nation, Heron Clan) and Dr. Amanda Lett of The Rockwell Museum. The Museum stands on the ancestral land of the Seneca, one of the six Nations of the Hodínöhšö:ni:h (Iroquois) Confederacy, and acknowledges the legacies of displacement, migration, and settlement that shape the present.

For more information, including exhibition hours, click here.