George Longfish, I Will Never Be the Same When I Leave My Father’s Lodge, 1978-82. Courtesy The Fine Arts Collection, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California at Davis © George Longfish, Photo by Mel Taing

People often relegate Nativeness to November, Native American Heritage Month, but from September through December, we celebrate like it’s the high holidays. In early October, I visited the long-awaited show “An Indigenous Present,” co-organized by Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter at ICA Boston. The show features the work of 15 abstract Native artists—none from Massachusetts tribes, and there was a series of live performances during opening weekend that animated the galleries with sound, movement and ritual presence. Its title, borrowed from Gibson’s 2023 book, references Indigenous gift economies and the persistent gaps in Native art resources he experienced during his education.

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This show elevates abstraction not only as a style but as a mode of experience for Native people living intermundane lives—between Native America and the United States. Some expect a panegyric from a Lakota/Dakota writer engaging with Indigenous curation, but I can’t ignore the absence of a Wampanoag, Nipmuc or Massachusett artist in this contemporary vanguard—a standard for recognition extending beyond hollow Western land acknowledgments. The book clarifies abstraction as lived experience while revealing a structural gap: Massachusetts tribal artists working in traditional mediums like wampum rarely enter contemporary art networks centered on abstraction and innovation. Launching instead from AbEx artists Mary Sully and George Morrison, Gibson’s introduction questions the segregated position of Native contemporary artists and underscores humor as the project’s most electrifying throughline.

Cara Romero creates campy photography, James Luna molds sculptural lampoons and Wendy Red Star arranges sarcastic tableaus. Gibson’s curation untangles these artists from “fine art” rhetoric by bringing together diverse Native culture bearers—visual artists, poets, historians—who share space within Indigenous contexts but are rarely united in Western institutions. He juxtaposes Jamie Okuma’s cradleboard beside Philip J. Deloria’s essay, Layli Long Soldier’s poem next to Marie Watt’s tin-jingle embellished blanket, peeling back Western superimpositions to reveal a natural cohesion that transcends page and gallery. The exhibition translates this approach across nine rooms, with each of the fifteen artists represented multiple times—an expansive format demonstrating the breadth of contemporary Native abstraction. Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill’s work occupied two rooms, though the reasoning behind the placement was unclear, making it feel both prominent and enigmatic. In other areas, the show’s organization more clearly places artists in conversation with one another, working on shared themes and mediums, who could not meet in life due to generational and often structural divides.

The 2023 publication date may explain the absence of local artists. The gap also highlights the overrepresentation of Southwestern and Plains aesthetics in........

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