Haines Gallery: 250 Years, Indigenous Futures

About Event Details About The Artists Gallery Plan Your Visit 250 Years, Indigenous Futures Presented By Haines Gallery As the U.S. marks its 250th anniversary, Haines Gallery presents 250 Years, Indigenous Futures, a group exhibition centering the work of leading Native American artists. While occasioned by this anniversary, 250 Years, Indigenous Futures does not commemorate it. ABOVE: Haines Gallery is in Building C (far right). TOP OF PAGE: Brad Kahlhamer, Pima Air + Space, 2025 (detail). Acrylic, ink, pencil on bedsheet, 69.25 x 53.5 inches, framed. Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery, San Francisco. Photo: Shaun Roberts EVENT DETAILS 250 Years, Indigenous Futures takes its title from the writings of Standing Rock Sioux historian Philip J. Deloria and his colleagues, who argue that Native peoples should be understood not primarily through the past, but through the lens of futurity. Indigenous knowledge, they write, is not peripheral to contemporary life but generative of new ways of understanding it. In this spirit, the exhibition considers Native presence and creativity as powerful forces shaping our collective future. The artists in the exhibition are: Victoria Grace Canby (Diné [Navaho]);Jordan Ann Craig (Northern Cheyenne); Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation / Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians); Brad Kahlhamer (Indigenous ancestry); Terran Last Gun (Piikani / Blackfoot); Jamie Okuma (Luiseño, Shoshone-Bannock, Wailaki, Okinawan, and La Jolla); Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke [Crow]); and Keith Secola (Northern Ute / Anishinaabe). Working across painting, drawing, sculpture, film, and photography, these artists engage contemporary culture, Nation-specific visual traditions, and personal histories in distinct and expansive ways. Rather than commemorating the 250th U.S. anniversary, the exhibition recognizes 1776 as only one moment within much longer histories of Indigenous presence, adaptation, and sovereignty. Creating space for artists to define their own terms of engagement, the exhibition aims to bring forward concerns central to their practices. The works on view draw inspiration from a vivid range of sources: boldly painted Piikani lodges; the precise geometry of Northern Cheyenne beadwork; the Indians of All Tribes' occupation of Alcatraz; cars adorned with blankets and regalia for the annual Crow Fair; blood-soaked horror films; and archival photographs whose subjects meet the visitor's gaze. The exhibition is informed by Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star's caution against a foe-based framing of Native art - one that risks tethering meaning to resistance alone and obscuring the specificity of Nations, histories, and individual practices. Here, each artist's work emerges from particular relationships to language, land, and material culture. No single framework can contain these worlds. About the Artists Victoria Grace Canby (Diné, b. 1978, Albuquerque, NM). Marin-based artist Victoria Grace Canby's new works on paper, created for the exhibition, depict the Three Sisters - corn, beans, and squash - as a living model of resilience, healing, and collective care that connects Indigenous Peoples throughout the Americas. Through fostering our connection to these plants' powers, Canby notes, we can overcome the impacts of colonization. Jordan Ann Craig (Northern Cheyenne, b. 1992, San Jose, CA). Jordan Ann Craig's paintings draw from references ranging from Northern Cheyenne beadwork and quillwork to the postwar abstraction of Agnes Martin, all of which she translates into exacting, poetic fields of color and form. In works such as Miss Your Musk (2024), Craig foregrounds Indigenous abstraction as a living and evolving practice - one capable of holding personal narrative, formal experimentation, and cultural continuity without being reduced to any single source or meaning. Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians; b. 1984, Ferndale, WA). Sky Hopinka's film Sunflower Siege Engine (2022) brings together distinct Indigenous sites and histories, connecting the Indians of All Tribes' occupation of nearby Alcatraz Island (1969-1971) with Illinois' Cahokia Mounds, one of the largest pre-contact urban centers in North America and a site from which ancestral remains continue to be repatriated. Brad Kahlhamer (Native American ancestry; b. 1956, Tucson, AZ). Painted in acrylic, ink, and pencil on a bedsheet, Pima Air + Space (2025) belongs to Kahlhamer's recent dream sheet paintings. Its title recalls Arizona's Pima Air & Space Museum, while birds, horses, masked figures, and a spectral presence drift through an aurora borealis of saturated color. Terran Last Gun, Saakwaynaamah'kaa (Last Gun) (Piikani / Blackfoot; b. 1989, Browning, MT on the Blackfeet Nation Reservation). Inspired by the bold geometric designs of Piikani painted lodges, Terran Last Gun has created a suite of works for the exhibition: precise compositions on vintage ledger paper that bring ancestral forms, colonial records, and the ongoing vitality of Indigenous abstraction into charged relation. Jamie Okuma (Luiseño, Shoshone-Bannock, Wailaki, Okinawan, and La Jolla; b. 1977, Glendale, CA). In Of Love and Sacrifice: Motherhood (2026), Jamie Okuma deploys her signature single-stitch beadwork to transform a brain-tanned deerskin handbag into a dazzling portrayal of two figures from Luca Guadagnino's horror film Suspiria (2018). Drawing bracing cinematic imagery into dialogue with exacting Payómkawichum (Luiseño) beadwork techniques, Okuma conjures the selfless and steadfast power of maternal love. Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke; b. 1981, Billings, MT). Wendy Red Star's works from The (HUD) series focus on the colorful facades of houses built through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on Montana's Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation, where the artist was raised. Though their hues were chosen not by residents but by a government agency, Red Star's images reveal signs of domestic beauty that exceed the mandates of bureaucracy. Keith Secola (Northern Ute / Anishinaabe; b. 1988, Randlett, UT on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation) Keith Secola screen-prints archival portraits of Native Americans onto the covers of vintage books, placing Indigenous presence in direct tension with exclusionary narratives of America's past. Secola's images depict subjects who often look directly back at the camera, meeting its gaze with a quiet intensity that transcends time and negates erasure. Wendy Red Star: Chiaxxúapilake (Fifty), (2025) (detail) Fabric with archival pigment photograph on board. 25.25 x 49.25 x 1.25 inches, framed. Courtesy of the artist & Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.Photo: Paul Salveson Keith Secola: Wounds Many, (2019). Screenprint on book collage48 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the artist & Haines Gallery, San Francisco.Photo: Shaun Roberts Brad Kahlhamer, Pima Air + Space, (2025). Acrylic, ink, pencil on bedsheet, 69.25 x 53.5 inches, framed. Courtesy of the artist & Haines Gallery. Photo: Shaun Roberts Wendy Red Star: Chiaxxúapilake (Fifty), (2025) (detail) Fabric with archival pigment photograph on board. 25.25 x 49.25 x 1.25 inches, framed. Courtesy of the artist & Roberts Projects. Photo: Paul Salveson Victoria Grace Canby: We Grow Our Own Medicine, Interdimensional & Intertribal Healing Plant Studies:Three Sisters - Corn (2026) Pencil & gouache on paper, 44 x 30 nches, framed. Courtesy of the artist & Haines Gallery. Photo: Shaun Roberts Jordan Ann Craig: Miss Your Musk (2024) Acrylic on canvas, 45 x 45 x 2.5 inches. Courtesy of the artist & Hales Gallery, London and New York © Jordan Ann Craig. Photo: JSP Art Photography Plan Your Visit Date Tuesday, September 15 to Saturday, November 7, 2026 Time Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.Opening Reception: Thursday, September 17, 2026, 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. during the Fall 2026 Fort Mason Art Walk. Location Building C, First Floor, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, 2 Marina Boulevard, San Francisco Cost FREE Haines Gallery:HainesGallery.com(415) 397-8114art@HainesGallery.com Facebook Instagram Vimeo Share Facebook X Mail Sign Up For Our E-News Sign up today for the latest news from Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture.