Speaking With Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography

We ask you to contemplate the many different peoples and nations represented throughout these galleries. Each of these works, while representing an individual artist, object, culture, or expression, serves as a reminder of moments in time, stories, ceremonies, thoughts, visions, and the need to create and explore. Indigenous peoples knew no states or countries, but they fully knew their ancestral lands. They were and remain distinct from one another, each having their own sense of place and community. Today’s Indigenous artists still embrace the old, but they are not afraid to look at things in new and enlightening ways.

Indigenous Community Advisory Council

Denver Art Museum, 2023

• Felicia Alvarez (Shoshone)
• Ernest House Jr. (Ute Mountain Ute)
• Jan N. Jacobs (Osage)
• Rosie Bvgehoyoge Molina (Seminole Mvskoke Choctaw)
• Rick Waters (Kiowa and Cherokee)
• Montoya Whiteman (Cheyenne and Arapaho)
• Sid Whiting Jr. (Lakota)
• Steven Yazzie (Navajo and Laguna Pueblo)

That eye of the camera – how we see the world. There’s power in that.

It wasn’t only dwelling on the issues of the past, but trying to think about the future as well and what I will pass on to the next generation. Being an artist is my form of communication.

No one would be telling these stories at all if I didn’t make them happen

My photographs are really an attempt to subtly combat one-story narratives.

Art can be so powerful, it can change the world. It can influence, it can impact legislation, it can compact and change peoples lives or perspectives and even their realities.

It is not only about reclaiming space and creating an image…but also about imaging space in a way that asserts an inescapable presence.

The arts are…a platform for sharing information, it’s a platform for sharing stories, for being political.

The artists in Speaking with Light represent more than 50 nations. They take back control of how their cultures and lives are depicted and provide a framework for artistic sovereignty. Their works illustrate the power of story, rooted in community, to overcome centuries of settler-colonialism, land theft, state-sponsored programs of assimilation, and economic underdevelopment. The photographs in this exhibition reveal the ways that Indigenous people have adapted to great change without relinquishing their fundamentally sustainable cultural practices.

These artists acknowledge their responsibilities to honor and recognize their extended communities of the past, present, and future. Some works serve as reminders of continued presence while others invite fresh thinking and promote advocacy. There are no easy answers to our societal and global predicaments, but these photographs suggest pathways to healthier relationships among humankind and with the earth.

Since time immemorial, Indigenous Nations have lived in and narrated their place in relation to the lands now called North America. Long before the complicated and fraught history of emigration that led to the establishment of modern Canada, Mexico, and the United States, Indigenous peoples filled these lands, developing their own histories of conflict, alliances, trade, and other interactions.