Grace Rosario Perkins at the Whitney

On display now at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City is Grace Rosario Perkins’ “Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers,” the first solo museum presentation for the artist. Perkins is Akimel O’odham/Diné.

“Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers” describes petroglyphs that connect the artist’s family to her tribal homelands in the southwestern United States, including the vital, yet threatened, waters of the Gila River and Rio Grande. The influence of such longstanding technologies of visual storytelling is evident in Perkins’s symbol-rich art. Flowers, stars, the sun, and spider webs are given significant presence within the systems the artist creates to record her life. 

Perkins builds the surfaces of her densely layered paintings with acrylic and spray paint, found materials, personal belongings, and textual fragments through a process of addition and redaction. Guided by intuition, diaristic encounter, a do-it-yourself ethos, spirituality, and plant medicine, the artist references popular and material culture as they converge with more intimate reflections on grief, love, and hope. By working in abstraction, she resists reductive representations of Indigenous identity, instead offering an expansive vision rooted in both ancestral knowledge and the urgencies of now.

The exhibit runs at the Whitney until February 8. For more information on the exhibit, click here.