The Way We Came: A Century of Indigenous Art (The William P. Healey Collection at Phoenix Art Museum)

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

The Way We Came: A Century of Indigenous Art from the William P. Healey Collection examines modernity in Native American art and demonstrates how Indigenous artists have sustained, adapted, and reimagined cultural knowledge across a century. The exhibition considers how visual culture was transmitted through familial lines of artists, artists’ collectives, and pedagogical lineages, including the complex legacies of Native boarding schools. It also explores the power of storytelling, looking at how works rooted in ceremony demonstrate continuity and resistance, while tracing evolving relationships to abstraction and modernism, from the expressive figuration of Fritz Scholder and T. C. Cannon to the layered landscapes of Kay WalkingStick, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Emmi Whitehorse. Grounded in place, works such as Quincy Tahoma’s The Navajo Country and George Morrison’s Lake Superior landscapes engage land as both subject and sovereign presence, while contemporary voices including Cara Romero and Tony Abeyta extend these dialogues into the present.

Header: Tony Abeyta, Celebration from the Underworld, 1998-1999 (detail). Oil on canvas. William P. Healey Collection of Native American Art at Phoenix Art Museum, Gift of William P. Healey. Photo: Davin Lavikka

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Xeriscape, 1991. Mixed media and paper collage on paper. William P. Healey Collection of Native American Art at Phoenix Art Museum, Gift of William P. Healey. Photo: Davin Lavikka. Courtesy the estate of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.