In the whispering heartland of Indianapolis, where rivers once ran with the dreams of a thousand peoples, five voices rise again—ancient and utterly new. They are the 2025 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellows: artists of sovereign spirit, each one drawn from the sacred geography of Turtle Island, their visions summoned like smoke from the fire of memory and kindled again in the forge of now.
These artists—Jean LaMarr, John Feodorov, Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich, Maria Hupfield, and Cannupa Hanska Luger—have not merely been selected. They have emerged, as if from some primordial current long flowing beneath our gaze. In them, the land remembers. In their hands, time becomes pliant, ceremonial, shaped into sculpture, painted with truth, beaded with silence, and animated by breath.
LaMarr, born of Northern Paiute and Achomawi blood, gathers the earth’s grievances in her printmaking and painting. Her work is protest, yes, but also prophecy—a vision that cleaves through illusion and insists on presence. She wields pigment like testimony, against the false narratives pressed upon Native women and poisoned land.
Feodorov, Navajo and surrealist, unravels the American condition like a trickster unraveling the night. His work is ceremonial satire, pulsing with absurdity and spirit. In his dream-images and satirical altars, we find ourselves both indicted and invited—to see, perhaps for the first time.
Gingrich carries the North. The chill wind of Koyukon Dené and Iñupiaq lands moves through her carved and painted sculptures, through film, verse, and bead. Her art is an incantation, a tether to the Arctic’s ancestral ghosts, speaking of the animals that walk in two worlds and the land that remembers when the ice sang.
From Wasauksing First Nation comes Hupfield, the dancer of breath and motion. Her performance and sculptural works exist not only in space but in ceremony. She is the storm that does not shout but remakes the earth. In silence, she gives voice to ancestors whose language lives in gesture, in fabric, in the resonant hollow between things.
And then there is Luger, born of many nations—Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota—who builds not merely art, but cosmology. He sculpts myth with the tools of the future, conjuring vast installations that echo like drumbeats in an abandoned cathedral. His work declares: We are still here. We have always been here. We are already ahead of you.
This is the thirteenth gathering of such visionaries, since the Eiteljorg Museum first sought to honor the pulse of Indigenous art in 1999. These five are each awarded $50,000 in unbound affirmation—not as reward, but as recognition. And their works will enter the museum’s collection, one of the continent’s most profound gatherings of contemporary Native expression.
The exhibition, Emerging Current, will open its doors on November 8, 2025. But it has already begun. It begins in the bones of the artists’ hands, in the breath of their stories, in the land itself. It continues in every visitor willing to be transformed.
Let this moment not be merely a celebration, but a call. For in each artist’s path, we glimpse a journey older than the nation, deeper than the museum, and more enduring than the name “contemporary” could ever convey.
