Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 is the inaugural exhibition born of Forge Project’s Exhibition Program and on invitation from the Hessel Museum of Art. The exhibition was curated by Forge Project Executive Director & Chief Curator Candice Hopkins, originating at the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (June 24–November 26, 2023) and touring to the MacKenzie Art Gallery (May 23–October 5, 2025) and to SITE SANTA FE and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (June 5–September 21, 2026).

Indian Theater is the first large-scale exhibition of its kind to center performance and theater as an origin point for the development of contemporary art by Native American, First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and Alaska Native artists, beginning with the role that Indigenous artists have played in the Self-Determination Era, sparked by the Occupation of Alcatraz by the Indians of All Tribes in 1969. Native artists then and now are at the vanguard of performance art practices and discourse. As part of Indian Theater, their work uses humour as a strategy for cultural critique and reflection, parses the inherent relationships between objecthood and agency, and frequently complicates representations of the Native body through signalling the body’s absence and presence via clothing, blanketing, and adornment.

In the exhibition, song, dance, and music are also posited as a basis for collectivity and resistance and a means to speak back to a time when Native traditional ceremony and public gatherings were illegal in both the United States and Canada. In addition to artworks, the exhibition includes important archival material documenting the emergence of the New Native Theater movement in Santa Fe in 1969 as well as materials directly related to the early Self-Determination Era. 

The presentation begins chronologically and cites the 1969 document, Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Progress, published by the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Featured is early documentation of IAIA theater performances, along with recently digitized footage of Spiderwoman Theater’s evocatively titled 1978–1980 play Cabaret: An Evening of Disgusting Songs and Pukey Images, available for viewing for the first time since its original debut. The longest running theater group in the United States, and founded by sisters Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel (Rappahannock and Kuna), Spiderwoman Theater emerged from the feminist movement of the 1970s and the disillusionment with the treatment of women in radical political movements of the time. Cabaret reflects the group’s contribution to the national dialogue on gender in its critique and satirization of how women are often made to swallow male platitudes about love and its challenges to homogenizing images of women.

The exhibition progresses with a survey of video, performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, and beadwork that at once pay homage to the legacy of innovative Native aesthetic traditions and this continuing tradition of experimentation and performativity. Jeffrey Gibson’s commission responds directly to the 1969 treatise, Indian Theatre, with a new performance titled DON’T MAKE ME OVER, an arced choreography that centers music and oration. White Carver, an installation by Nicholas Galanin, is activated by a non-Native carver engaged in carving a surprising object, one that might initially seem like a customary item in the vein of Northwest Coast Native American art. Galanin reconceives traditional carving practices, including the ways in which many Native carvers on the Northwest coast publicly perform their craft to a non- Native public, to confront the history of colonial fetishization of Indigenous cultures and objects.