Gallery view “Exploding Native Inevitable” at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, September 2025, with Sarah Rowe’s “Post” at the center. Image by Gina Cavallo.

With an exhibition title that riffs on Andy Warhol’s 1966-1967 Exploding Plastic Inevitable—which featured a series of multimedia events that extended the exhibition beyond the gallery—Exploding Native Inevitable is, similarly, both multimedia and a reference to life beyond the gallery. Curated by artist Brad Kahlhamer and now-retired Director of the Bates College Museum of Art, Dan Mills, the exhibition’s latest tour stop extends the exploration of contemporary Native American art currently on display at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University.

In the main floor gallery of the museum, Exploding Native Inevitable is a vibrant, contemporary counterpart to the upper-level gallery’s Repainting the I: The Intermountain Intertribal Indian School Murals and the Eagle Village: Sheila Nadimi exhibitions that opened in January. This newly opened exhibition features the work of 12 Indigenous artists and two collaboratives and manages to drive home a theme of resilience in a different mode, but with the same clarity, as the upstairs shows.

Through paintings, sculpture, printmaking, weaving, and video, the artists in Exploding Native Inevitable share their personal experiences while re-telling stories and sharing insights into their communities’ experiences. Whether it’s a mash-up of a Catholic hymn with an ancient Wabanaki mourning song or an interactive space built for healing from the effects of COVID, the works in this exhibition ask us to stop and contemplate our roles in the traumas of the past and the present as well as the many ways in which storytellers pose questions and spark conversations about our shared (or not shared) experiences.

Mali Obomsawin and Lokotah Sanborn, “Wawasint8da,” 2022, video.

Abenaki First Nation artist Mali Obomsawin’s video “Wawasint8da” (2022), filmed by collaborator Lokotah Sanborn (Penobscot), is the perfect entry piece for this exhibition that handily melds old and new. Obomsawin is filmed inside a church both as singer of the hymn/mourning song mash-up mentioned above and as audience in various locations in the pews. Her singing is accentuated by her hand gestures and facial expressions in a way that reflects contemporary music performance. When she’s filmed in the pews, her expressions are contemplative and questioning, perhaps even sad. As the video progresses, the music moves from calm to chaos with a crescendo about half-way through that is marked by another film site in a Wigwam where Obomsawin interacts with snowshoes, furs and a cradleboard. Images swirl back and forth between the locations and the views of the artist. What we are left with is a whirlwind reminder of the multi-layered effects that the Christian church has had on Indigenous peoples.

Across from “Wawasint8da,” is another collaborative video piece. “Never Settle: Calling In” (2020) by New Red Order (artists Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil, Ojibway, and Jackson Polys, Tlingit) brings the topics of decolonization, collective liberation and Indigenous agency to us through the lens of a slick marketing approach that emphasizes the way in which our social expectation is that all things polished and shiny are positives and that we can make anything consumable if it’s presented with a commercial style. The video includes people as actors in a corporate motivational video as well as news footage from countries around the globe sharing the official national apologies to Indigenous peoples as if similarly motivational. “Never Settle: Calling In” places longstanding and historic issues of Indigenous justice in the mode most recognizable to consumers of both products and news. Its resonance is as powerful as Obomsawin’s and Sanborn’s reverberating notes echoing in the church.

Tlingit artist Alison Bremner’s corner of works is masterfully displayed against deep red walls. Two of her “conversations” with famous paintings (“Wat’sa with Pearl Earring” and “Mona Lisa Smile”) highlight the male gaze with a Northwest Coast interpretation. But it’s her play on a traditional Tlingit paddle form that provides the most direct reference to how we view each other. “Burt Reynolds” (2017) was created in response to her observance of contemporary male Northwest Coast artists’ increasingly anatomically correct depictions of women in contrast to traditional depictions of modesty. Bremner depicts the actor Burt Reynolds as his 1972 Cosmopolitan centerfold—on a bearskin rug—in the traditional curvilinear visual style of Northwest Coast art known as Formline. The placement of this piece on an open pedestal in front of “Wat’sa with Pearl Earring” and “Mona Lisa Smile,” as well as her incredible painting, “Infatuation,” give the viewer an impactful arrangement of works that question our obsession with the human forms we embody and how others view them.

Works by Alison Bremner including “Burt Reynolds,” 2017, in front of “Mona Lisa Smile” and “Wat’sa with Pearl Earring,” digital photographs, 2014. Image by Gina Cavallo.

Dominating the center of the gallery, Sarah Rowe (Lakota, Ponca) shares a project begun as she was coming out of the hospital after a particularly devastating bout with COVID. Her illness inspired the need for a space for creating that was both healing and accessible. “Post” is a house-form sculpture in the mode of Therman Statom, Rachel Whiteread and Do Ho Suh. The artist invites you to walk up the ramp and into the “building” to experience what she sees as a space of creativity and reflection. The painted walls are enlivened inside and outside by projections, architectural materials, and a gauzy scrim ceiling that allows interaction without containment. The façade includes an image of the Lakota trickster, Heyókha, included to “spread delight to everyone that enters into this imagined world-turned-real.” This reflects the playfulness that also serves to teach us which is found in many of the works in the exhibition.

Duane Slick, “Technicolor Coyote #2,” 2020, acrylic on linen.

Another trickster, Coyote, emerges on the wall to the left of Rowe’s “Post.” The inimitable Duane Slick, a longtime multimedia Indigenous artist of Meskwaki/Sauk and Fox Tribes of the Mississippi in Iowa, brings Coyote to us in four silkscreens and two acrylic paintings. The two-color silkscreens are in his style of marbled linear form with washes of ink and wide black markings. This Coyote is active and edgily playful with a wry smile and seemingly animated movement. “Technicolor Coyote #2,” takes the animation further with a dual image that feels like we’re seeing it on an old-tube TV that is having technical issues. His largest piece, “An Actuarial Space,” 2021, brings us back to black-and-white, but this time, with abstracted straight horizontal lines and other forms that reference shelves, as if in a storage room of a museum. On these shelves are coyote skulls and prairie grasses. The piece culminates the exhibition’s unnamed focus on resilience. The grasses grow in the dark; the coyote survives even as it is driven from its native habitat.

Diné/Tlingit artist Nizhonniya Austin invites viewers to “solve mistakes with instinct and motion” in her hands-on drawing activity, to the right of her three acrylic paintings. The paintings encompass an expressive, gestural approach to mark-making. Her loose brushstrokes imply organic forms in a much more intuitive way than other works in the exhibition. They invite you to step back to take them in. They are playful and thoughtful while also visually engaging. They are some of the strongest art-for-art’s-sake works in Exploding Native Inevitable.

Nizhonniya Austin, “Wine and Whiskey,” 2021, acrylic on canvas.

Taken individually, the works in the exhibition are personal reflections of lives being lived, brought to us through a variety of materials and techniques. As a whole, though, the mix of materials is secondary to the impact that the stories being told have on our understanding and appreciation of the contemporary experiences of these Indigenous artists.

Exploding Native Inevitable, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, through November 29.

Gina Cavallo

Gina Cavallo has been a curator, registrar, and executive director in museums for over 35 years. She spent many years as an art critic for publications in Phoenix. She began her career at the Phoenix Art Museum and the Heard Museum, was a founding curator at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, spent two terms managing exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and was the Executive Director at the Mission Inn Foundation & Museum in Riverside, California. Her current role is Director of Development for Taproot Theatre Company in Seattle where she also serves as the curator of the Kendall Center Exhibition Series. She moved to Orem in 2024 with her husband, a theatre faculty member at UVU.