Denver Art Museum presents I Follow Rivers: Indigenous Worlds in Latin America opening Fall 2026

Featuring over 100 works from more than 50 artists, I Follow Rivers explores the profound resilience and evolving cultural landscapes of Indigenous peoples and artists throughout Latin America. The featured artists navigate history, land, community and change, each charting their own course through the cultures they carry and innovate.

The show spans the early twentieth century to the present, including newly commissioned works. Visitors will witness complex and layered practices and imagery that resist fixed categories. While these artists navigate a world shaped by colonialism, they forge new paths for themselves, their communities and affirm that Indigenous knowledge and creativity are not static. These communities are vital, transformative and always in motion.

The region is a vast tapestry of overlapping, often asymmetrical histories spanning from ancestral knowledge and European colonization to the birth of republics and the bold experiments of modernism. The exhibition views Latin America beyond mere geographic borders but through the perspective of an enduring people sculpted by languages, culture and indigeneity.

Though shaped by centuries of colonial ambition and violence, these hundreds of nations thrive today in diverse contexts, from bustling urban centers to isolated territories. I Follow Rivers celebrates the shared resilience of these communities, highlighting how their traditions, artistic expressions and ways of life continue to adapt and defy erasure

“We are committed to hosting exhibitions that engage in conversations exploring history of global Indigeneity and highlighting how this expands and evolves today,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the Denver Art Museum. “I Follow Rivers turns the conversation to the region we know today as Latin America, illustrating how communities continue to redefine the ways in which they represent themselves through various mediums and styles. We are looking forward to share with our visitors this powerful display of self-representation.”

The exhibition brings together primarily works acquired by the Denver Art Museum, alongside a select group of loans that further complicate and enrich its narrative, demonstrating that these relationships cannot be understood through any single or definitive framework.

This is the largest exhibition in the U.S. to ever feature modern and contemporary Latin American artists who are Indigenous. This includes internationally established artists such as: Claudia Alarcón, Denilson Baniwa, Edgar Calel, Seba Calfuqueo, Martín Chambi, Rosa Elena Curruchich, Venuca Evanán, Claudia Martinez Garay, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Julia Isídrez, MAHKU (Huni Kuin Art Movement), António Pichilla, Abel Rodriguez and Kira Xonorika.

The featured artists identify as Indigenous including the Wapichana, originating from northern Brazil and southern Guyana, the Guaraní native to South America, the Ishír native to Brazil and Paraguay and the Yanomami, originating from northern Brazil and southern Venezuela. These nations are not monolithic, holding vast economic and geologic differences, including Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Paraguay.

The more than 50 artists in I Follow Rivers create across various mediums, including video, painting, sculpture, installation and sound, to confront fundamental questions. They challenge the definition of the “image,” debate the necessity of linking their practice to Indigenous identity and examine which traditions must be preserved, which should be abandoned and which should be transformed.

By pairing works from the early 20^th century alongside commissioned pieces created for the exhibition, I Follow Rivers underscores that the canonization of Indigenous art in Latin America is still in progress. That history will contain many more generations of visual artists with unique gazes and perspectives, who have stories to tell.

“This exhibition invites audiences to explore the wide range of artistic practices that emerge at the intersection of Indigeneity and the vast territory we now call Latin America,” said Raphael Fonseca, Curator-at-Large for Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art at the Denver Art Museum. “While contemporary geopolitics has given this region a common name, these lands have long been known by many different names that reflect the hundreds of Indigenous peoples who were born, lived and continue to live across them. Working across a variety of media and engaging in dialogues that challenge conventional distinctions between modern and contemporary art, the artists gathered here reveal the complexity and diversity of Indigenous experiences and visual cultures.

Like a river, these artists, their images and the very idea of belonging remain in constant transformation. This exhibition marks only the beginning of an ongoing process of institutional recognition and engagement with Indigenous artists from Latin America within a museum such as the DAM”.

To accompany the exhibition, the museum will release a first-of-its-kind companion guide this fall, authored by Raphael Fonseca. The book features an essay by Elvira Espejo Ayca, a distinguished Bolivian artist, poet and scholar. This is the DAM’s first publication dedicated to the museum’s contemporary Indigenous Latin American art collection.

I Follow Rivers: Indigenous Worlds in Latin America is organized by the Denver Art Museum. Generous support is provided by John and Sandy Fox, the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign, and the residents who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD).