The photographs of Cara Romero operate on the precipice between the risk of death and possibility of self-dissolution. A woman buried in sand stares resolutely at the viewer, or a figure floats in a body of water below an oil field. Her lens fuses Indigenous ancestral memory with the immediacy of pop culture. Her world-building, indebted to centuries-old oral tradition, doesn’t merely picture survival; it renders it mythic, futuristic, and, crucially, still unfinished.

Defying the erasure of California Indian peoples, Romero, an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, sees her work as “painting with the light of photography,” as she told ARTnews during a recent interview. “We don’t have a word in our language for photography. The figures [in my work] represent ideas and stories bigger than themselves––and at the heart of my work is shared storytelling, representation, and collaboration with loved ones, friends, and family appearing in a kind of repertory.”

Romero is having the greatest exposure of her career to date, having featured in more than 10 museum group exhibitions since last fall, including “Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time” at the Hudson River Museum (through August 31) and “Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene” at the Cantor Art Center (through August 3).

At Dartmouth’s Hood Museum in New Hampshire, she is the subject of her first institutional solo show, “Panûpünüwügai,” a Chemehuevi word that translates as both “source of light, like sun coming over the mountains” and “animating the inanimate, giving spirit, or living light.”

“The spirit of the light, or living light, references the painting of light with photography, bringing these stories to life and people together,” Romero said of the exhibition’s title. “These gifts photography has brought to my life.”

Romero’s wry, autochthonous lens cuts through the stereotypes of Native people, women in particular, placing them at the center of the American landscape. In TV Indians (2017), for example, a group of Indigenous people wearing historic garb are seen in a desert landscape, a mound of vintage televisions behind them. This pile of TVs refers to the ancestral adobe ruins scattered throughout the Southwest, and imbues them with a moribund quality, not onto the decidedly animate subjects, but instead upon the Hollywood caricatures, which flash on the screens behind them, that they are laying to rest.

In Romero’s images, an Indigenous futurist aesthetic emerges, as in 3 Sisters (2022), in which the titular figures are perched on a cloud against a purple celestial sky. Donning early-aughts rectangular sunglasses and Evoking it-girl goddesses, their bluish skin is tattooed from head to toe, in motifs specific to each sitter’s tribe (Anishanaabe, Pueblo, and Sioux, from left to right). They don early-aughts rectangular sunglasses, and wires carry life-giving energy from their bodies to the rest of the world. Romero’s 3 Sisters recalls depictions of nude women from across art history, while simultaneously upending the male and colonial gaze completely, reclaiming space—both literally and figuratively—for Native womanhood.

These Native women confront a world that seeks to dominate them, not as passive figures but as agents of deliberate refusal, according to curator Rebecca DiDimenico, who included Romero in a recent exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado. She added, “Her work disrupts not only how Native bodies are represented in the art world, but where they are allowed to exist at all––refusing the boundaries that would confine Indigenous subjects to ethnographic display or historical past.”

Moments of levity abound through Romero’s saturated colors and campy pop iconography. Her “Imagining Indigenous Futures” series features subjects adorned in stripes and traditional tattoos, suspended in space with corn, or haloed and enrobed in raven feathers. By contrast, Arla Lucia (2019) layers markers of Indigeneity—dentalia, bead and quillwork earrings, a heraldic necklace—onto a portrait of Wonder Woman, exalting Native feminine power through materials and myth. (The photograph features in both her Hood Museum survey and “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always,” curated by late artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at Rutgers’s Zimmerli Art Museum.)

Her interest in infusing pop culture into her images, Romero said, had been a motivation since childhood “because of our absence—and complicated presence—in media. We were never in Life Magazine, never in art books, never in the anthropological canon except as objects. But I also admired the photography of dominant American pop culture. Now, I’m creating a narrative by placing us in different decades, responding to that absence with a quirky presence.”

She added, “I blend time to say: we have our own lived experiences woven into the fabric of America. We’re not all historic or bygone. We’re still here, living tremendous lives.”

That insistent refrain of “We are still here” present across Romero’s oeuvre is best exemplified in works like Ha’ina’ia mai (2024), a black-and-white image in which a lei-draped Native Hawaiian woman rests on the seabed beneath the water’s surface, her hands extended in a submerged greeting, a gesture of welcome, survival, and futurity.

But Romero also turns her lens on issues of climate change, specifically from an Indigenous perspective, like in Evolvers (2019) where feather-crowned children sprint across hot sand in a desert sprinkled with wind turbines. In Weshoyot (2021), Weshoyot Alvitre, who is dressed in traditional Tongva garments, floats in a deluge, cleaving nets that try to catch her. Her apocalyptic compositions cut through the distant, desensitized haze of “climate porn” imagery that often accompanies these discussions, according to Eve Schillo, a photography curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At LACMA’s “Nature on Notice,” Romero’s Water Memory (2015) depicts two traditionally dressed Native figures in free-fall through water. Their descent is neither escape nor surrender, but an act of survivance in which memory of the past lives of the land are carried forth. The dammed rivers that submerged their homelands are remembered within the context of the climate crisis that now threatens all waters.

Entangled with the colonial gaze, Romero’s images don’t just disrupt the medium’s stereotypes but flip the structural frameworks that once sought to catalog, freeze, and erase Indigenous life altogether. In the 19th century, ethnographic photographers like Edward Curtis and Ansel Adams staged Native people in motley clothing borrowed from sundry other tribes, posing them in landscapes conspicuously cleared of settler presence to construct the fiction of a vanished race—all while obfuscating the violence that made such images possible.

“I call it the ‘one story narrative,’” Romero said of that 19th-century imagery. “There are thousands of different stories from our community, all totally valid.” This expansive vision feels particularly charged given Romero’s position as Chemehuevi, among California’s most systematically disappeared peoples and whose continued existence challenges the myth of a bygone people. Her pan-Indigenous casting becomes a kind of visual insurgency: Ohlone and Coast Miwok burial grounds, Native Hawaiian waters, Sioux beadwork traditions. It’s coalition building as aesthetic strategy, each collaboration a small act of resurrection against colonial archives that sought to fix Indigenous peoples in amber, forever in the past tense.

Romero continued, “When you can check internal biases about who Native people are—especially when it comes to photography harnessed by turn-of-the-century ethnographic photography—to be making contemporary work, it does a lot psychologically quite quickly. It says ‘Oh, these people are living,’ and ‘Oh, these people have a sense of humor,’ and ‘Oh, they have a shared sense of humanity that I can identify with.’ All those things are clever.”

Humor is a core strategy Romero employs across various bodies of work. She draws viewers in with jocular visuals and cheeky titles, only to deliver a resonant and psychological gut punch. In Sand and Stone (2020), for example, a woman with long jet-black hair lays buried in the Mojave Desert, illustrating the creation story of the locale’s Southern Paiute people. The Mojave, like many desert landscapes, has become a psychic playground for non-Natives in search of reinvention or forms of transcendence. (Burning Man is held on Northern Paiute land.) Romero’s work doesn’t imagine a new Eden; it recalls the one that’s always been there, one that has repeatedly been buried under sand, stone, and spectacle. In thinking of the migration of recent disaffected settlers seeking spiritual redemption on stolen lands, an understanding of the bond between people and land becomes especially poignant.

“What interests [non-Native] people about our cultures tends to be the culturally private,” Romero said. “Yet we, without a choice, understand Western culture completely.” Even amid the asymmetry, she feels that she must “give generously and willingly,” offering viewers not just critique but communion.

Nico Williams, a beadwork sculptor and member of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation in Tiohtià:ke (the area now known as Montreal), transforms glass beads into a sort of velvety substance. His work, which he calls “soft sculpture,” references everything from bingo cards and dice to caution tape and plastic fencing—all in a manner that embeds beauty in the banal.

By re-creating common objects, Williams comments in a way on materiality and its role in separating Native activists from sacred sites transgressed by pipelines. He also explores how materials foster connection, from “rez aunties” making an extra buck at bingo halls to different kinds of cultural preservation. Williams balances barbs aimed at socioeconomic forces with humor intrinsic to the act of beading gambling cards and IKEA bags for display in museums he couldn’t afford to visit as a child—with the hope of inciting what he called “booming Native laughter that shakes windows down the street.”

First exposed to beading by elders on his reserve (as reservations are known in Canada), Williams didn’t take up the practice until after departing at age 16. But like many contemporary Indigenous artists, he found it difficult to access his culture in urban environments, leading him to YouTube videos for self-education. Later, as an apprentice to Algonquin artist Nadia Myre, he traded help rebooting a car for training in beadwork. In 2021, during studies for his MFA at Concordia University in Montreal, Williams began approaching his craft from a more technical mindset after accepting an invitation to join the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork research team, and he has taught workshops at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he laughingly recalled mistaking for the Met and referred to as a “beading boot camp.” Of his work at MIT, he said, “I can’t do math—I just see.”

His experimental approach to beadwork is rooted in the principle of continuity. “We bead without knots,” he said. “The beads represent community—if you make a knot, that puts a knot in the community.” Early on, he explored his craft in small works like Starlite Variety (2021), a rendering of a shopping bag from a convenience store, and KD (2021), a yellow and blue beaded iteration of a Kraft Mac & Cheese box stitched into leather.

From these intimate consumerist effigies, Williams started making larger pieces mainly by accident after he intended to order 24 strands of orange beads but purchased 24 kilograms instead. That led to Barrier (2023), a large lattice of safety netting comprising orange bugle beads and three metal posts, and Biskaabiiyang | Returning to Ourselves (2023), a 73-foot-long hanging work fashioned like flaming caution tape. The pair of larger works evoke Inuit- and Métis-led “water protector” struggles in Canada around the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline and, for American viewers, the Oceti Sakowin–spearheaded Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016.

Such works earned Williams the $100,000 Sobey Art Award in 2024 and led to “Bingo,” a momentous solo show at Phi Foundation in Montreal (on view through September 14) containing more than 30 works grappling with land sovereignty, pecuniary difficulties, and trade in Indian Country. All the while, Williams continues to reckon with the dissonance between the stark reality of the reserve and the surreal privilege of consumer culture—an intersection he captures in his transformations of everyday objects. 

Read more profiles from the 2025 “New Talent” issue.

Tyrrell Tapaha lives in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, raising sheep for wool to dye, spin, and weave. But he likes to play with what is signified by notions of the typical Navajo weaver. His work stood out in “Young Elder,” a group show last year at James Fuentes gallery in New York, for its woven textual provocations bearing messages like fuck and kkkolonization. And when I spoke to the Diné artist in March, he was preparing a pointedly atypical figurative piece on a self-made floor loom in his kitchen. “[Traditional Navajo weavers] will lose it if you weave a triangle, let alone a man,” he said.
“My work gives me leeway to poke fun at Navajo textiles and traditional motifs.”

Transgressive yet still informed by tradition and the resource-rich agrarian Southwest, Tapaha hand-dyes and hand-spins Churro sheep wool to use in his work. Contrasting the nearly cubist silhouettes of historical pictorial weaving, his renderings of shimá sáni (grandmothers) and ovine themes are less abstract, constructed with emoji-level realism and detail. “Navajo designs were once pop,” Tapaha said, alluding to the Industrial Revolution’s standardizing impact on Navajo weaving styles. Demand for weavings across America in the late 1800s reduced the complex figures and symbols representing the mise-en-scène of Navajo life, going back hundreds of years, to simpler motifs produced at scale by companies like Pendleton.

On top of that, much pop Navajo weaving is kept in museum archives, uncredited and unincorporated into public perceptions of a rich tradition. Tapaha, for his part, flips the switch on dimly lit views of his textile progenitors. Proudly queer, he draws inspiration from such contemporary sources as the app Grindr: some of his pieces percussively juxtapose his heritage with exchanges of gay social dynamics, deploying pictorial figures and irreverent phraseology like butt stuff and all that for a boy? TruEeeE…

Tapaha’s colorful form-bending style also echoes that of Jean-Michel Basquiat, pairing figures and sociopolitical text with vibrant tones in a way that evokes the artistic output of an imagined downtown Manahatta. His path has also led to projects working with the textile collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History, both in New York, and those led to different kinds of involvement and consultation on the 2023 exhibitions “Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest” at the Bard Graduate Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and “Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles” at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe.

“There’s interest now in traditional methods, oral histories, and why we made things this way,” he said, while expressing a mix of optimism and, in classic Native realist tradition, skepticism about the glare of “ethnic spotlight.” With new opportunities far from home, Tapaha faces the prospect of staring down a sort of Indigenous Hydra: to stay or to leave the reservation. The former focuses on man and nature (namely Navajos and Churro sheep); the latter, an ontological turn from Diné materiality toward Western enlightenment’s supercilious man-versus-nature divide. Both present a crisis of conscience.

For now, Tapaha balances demand and production based in the Four Corners with escapades in New York for shows and archival work, uplifting thousands of anonymous weavings as his muses while putting his own spin on the unadulterated origin story of his artform.