On View:	May 24–November 30, 2025
Public Reception:	Saturday, May 31, 2025, 4:00–6:00 PM

Making in Between: Indigenous Americans – Exhibition Overview

This project is the third and final exhibition in AMOCA’s “Making in Between” series, which brings together works by artists who explore identity, culture, and community. 

In 2020, Making in Between: Contemporary Chinese American Ceramics featured works by six first- and second-generation artists who shared themes of cultural heritage, identity, language, politics, migration, and displacement. In 2023, Making in Between: Queer Clay shifted the lens to consider influences on identity, centering queerness as an unapologetic presence and featuring works by historical artists whose identities have remained largely unseen alongside contemporary makers.

Making in Between: Indigenous Americans exhibits works by Mercedes Dorame, Anita Fields, Courtney M. Leonard, and Cannupa Hanska Luger, artists who embrace their heritage and explore boundary-pushing themes of identity, culture, history, and community. MIB: IA introduces a breadth of unique narratives from these trailblazing artists and complicates viewers’ expectations of what constitutes contemporary Indigenous art. 

The exhibition is accompanied by catalog featuring full color images and new essays by Kendra Greendeer, Larissa Nez, and Isabella Robbins.

Exhibiting Artists

Mercedes Dorame is a multi-disciplinary artist who calls on her Tongva ancestry to engage the problematics of (in)visibility and ideas of cultural construction and ancestral connection to land and sky. Born in Los Angeles, California, she received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her undergraduate degree from UCLA. Dorame’s work is in the permanent collections of the Getty, the Hammer Museum, LACMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Triton Museum, among others. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from organizations such as Creative Capital, the Montblanc Art Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Loop Artist Residency, the James Phelan Award for California born visual artists, and from the Photography Department at the San Francisco Art Institute for her MFA Studies. Her sculptural installation Woosha’aaxre Yaangaro was the inaugural Rotunda Commission at the Getty; her work is also on view in the Borderlands exhibition at the Huntington Library.

Born in Oklahoma, artist Anita Fields creates works of clay and textile that reflect the worldview of her Native Osage culture. Her practice explores the complexities of cultural influences and the intersections of balance and chaos found within our lives. The early Osage notions of duality, such as earth and sky, male and female, are represented in her work. Heavily textured layers and distorted writing are elements found in both her clay and textile works. These reference the complex layers and distortion of truths found in the written history of indigenous cultures. Fields creates narratives that asks viewers to consider other ways of seeing and being in an effort to understand our shared existence. A 2017-2020 Kaiser Foundation Tulsa Artist Fellow, her work has been featured in American Craft, Ms Magazine, American Style, and First American Art. Her work can be found in several collections, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the National Museum of American Indian.

Courtney M. Leonard is a Shinnecock artist and filmmaker who has contributed to the Offshore Art movement. Leonard’s current work embodies the multiple definitions of “breach”, an exploration and documentation of historical ties to water, whale and material sustainability. In collaboration with national and international museums, cultural institutions, and indigenous communities in North America, New Zealand, Nova Scotia, and the United States Embassies, Leonard’s practice investigates narratives of cultural viability as a reflection of environmental record. Leonard’s work is in the permanent public collections of the United States Art In Embassies, the Crocker Art Museum, the Heard Museum, ASU’s Art Museum and Ceramic Research Center, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of the North, the Mystic Seaport Museum, and the Pomona Museum of Art.

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a New Mexico-based multidisciplinary artist creating monumental installations, sculpture and performance to communicate urgent stories of 21st Century Indigeneity. Incorporating ceramics, steel, fiber, repurposed materials, video, sound and performance, Luger activates speculative fiction, engages in land-based actions of repair and practices empathetic response through social collaboration. Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. Luger is a 2025 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellow and a 2025 Ourworlds Immersive Visual Arts Award recipient. Other honors include a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and fellowships from Monument Lab, SOROS Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, and more. His work is in numerous public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Detroit Institute of Arts, Nordamerika Native Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Luger is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York.

Exhibition Acknowledgments

This exhibition and accompanying full-color exhibition catalog will be funded, in part, by a grant from the Dew Foundation and by support from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture.