Humor in Contemporary Native American Art
By Chadd Scott on
Humor.
Dark humor.
So dark you could develop film in it.
Anyone looking for knee-slappers at “Reservation for Irony: Native Wit and Contemporary Realities,” an exhibition of Native American art at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Santa Fe (906 S. St. Francis Dr.), won’t find any.
Well, maybe David Bradley’s (b. 1954; Minnesota Chippewa) Land O’ Bucks Revisited (1990-92). Bradley’s send-up of the idealized Native woman on old Land O’Lakes butter packaging takes her commercialized features to absurd, buxom levels, turning the sweet, feathered, fetishized “Indian maiden” into a tawdry pin up girl. Bradley’s vivid, densely composed paintings critique the commodification of Native life.
David Bradley artworks in 'Reservation for Irony Native Wit and Contemporary Realities' exhibition.
Kent Monkman’s (b. 1965; Fisher River Cree Nation) always good for a laugh too, particularly for art history nerds. Monkman has been poking Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) and that generation’s sublime, unpopulated vision of Western landscape painting for over a decade. In Santa Fe, Monkman’s flamboyant, gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, subverts 19th century landscape tropes, reasserting Indigenous presence with biting theatrical flair in The Annunciation (2025), a painting on a grandiose scale befitting Bierstadt. Next to it, the Long Ranger, Tonto, and two other men share an intimate moment illuminated by the headlights of four Ford pick-up trucks in Monkman’s The Ford Erections (2014).
Diego Romero (b. 1964; Cochiti Pueblo) captures another private interlude in his pottery bowl Der Esel Wagon (2007). Not safe for work. Romero combines ceramic traditions with comic-book satire.
Cara Romero (b. 1977; Chemehuevi) debuts the latest edition from her iconic “First American Girl” doll box photography series Fawn (2025). Cara and Diego Romero are husband and wife. Cara Romero’s picture stages Vegas-based artist, activist, community leader, and former burlesque dancer Fawn Douglas (Las Vegas Paiute Tribe) in a mashup Las Vegas casino/Paiute-themed box.
“We wonder how many of you are knowledgeable about the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, or how their homelands in Las Vegas, Nevada are some of the most sacred cultural landscapes to Nüwü or Southern Paiute people,” Romero writes for the exhibition text. She collaborated with Douglas on the design and painting of her “doll box.” “The young city of Las Vegas (est. 1905) rests upon ancient sacred groundwater, adjacent to Nüva Kaiv (Mt. Charleston) and Red Rocks–places of creation and mythos.”
Everything Douglas is pictured with has significance.
“Spend time with the objects that surround Fawn and be fascinated by the thick context of all that they communicate together,” Romero writes. “You will find an olla basket, winnowing baskets, and basket hats fashioned by traditional maker Everett Pikyavit (Moapa Paiute). Fawn’s uncle Lamar ‘Este’ Anderson made the gourd rattle, and Leah Mata Fragua (Northern Chumash) created the birch bark skirt and abalone shell necklaces. Fawn contributed the white shell pieces and the contemporary metal basket–fashioned out of found construction materials from her renovated art studio.”
David Bradley, Kent Monkman, Diego and Cara Romero, four giants of contemporary Indigenous art. Monkman had a solo show at the Denver Art Museum wrap up August 17. Cara Romero is among the most in-demand American artists working today, Native or not.
Kent Monkman, 'The Annunciation' detail (2025).
To them, add Nicholas Galanin (b. 1979; Tlingit/Unangax̂), Tony Abeyta (b. 1965; Navajo), Bob Haozous (b. 1943; Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache), Kathleen Wall (b. 1973; Jemez Pueblo), George Alexander (b. 1990; Muscogee-Creek), and DC Allen, (b. 1993; Crow), only a few of the prominent contemporary artists with work on view in the show; give exhibition curator James Trotta-Bono a standing ovation for putting this caliber of artwork into such a small space for such a short time. The exhibition can be seen just through August 30, 2025, staged in conjunction with Santa Fe Indian Market, and will not travel. Shame.
Trotta-Bono, owner of the by-appointment-only Trotta-Bono Contemporary gallery in Venice, CA, sourced most artworks on view from private collections and artist’s studios. That means the public is not likely to see many of these artworks ever again. Trotta-Bono leaned on personal relationships to pull the stunning presentation together.
Joining the living artists are standout pieces from past masters of contemporary Native art: Fritz Scholder (1937-2005; Luiseño), T.C. Cannon (1946-1978; Kiowa/Caddo), Harry Fonseca (1946-2006; Nisenan Maidu), Rick Bartow (1946-2016; Wiyot). Together, the combination proves devastating, opening a conversation about how humor—a vital tool in Indigenous storytelling, teaching, resilience, and art—can serve as an act of resistance and remembering and survivance. Comedy as a strategy of resistance, cutting through when language falters.
Perhaps sarcasm more than humor. Acerbic.
Satire, absurdity, irony.
Funny because it’s true. Tragic because it’s true.
An artistic roast of colonization; not the good-natured kind where the roaster and the roasted will go share drinks after the Comedy Central taping.
Speaking of drinks, Tony Abeyta pours one out in remembrance of the Native lives lost to “GD” – Garden de luxe. This swill was the worst of the worst booze sold in Gallup, NM where Abeyta grew up. He remembers well its impact on the community.
“A cheap Tokay wine produced by Joe G. Maloof & Gallup Sales Co., notoriously bottled from the dredges of low-end California wineries and shipped in on tanker trains,” Abeyta shares in exhibition wall text. “Along with its counterpart, Roma, it was potent, inexpensive, and consumed largely by street drinkers, those unwelcome in bars.”
See the popsicles Abeyta has painted across the canvas? They reference the slang for Natives who’d drunk themselves to death in wintertime on “GD,” then frozen: popsicles.
Tony Abeyta, 'Top Shelf-Garden de Luxe' (2025), 50x60 inches, oil on canvas.
Hardly a laughing matter.
Trotta-Bono challenged Abeyta to come up with a new piece for the exhibition and this one was delivered from his Santa Fe studio still wet barely in time for the August 9 opening. Top Shelf/Garden de Luxe (2025) has never been seen before.
Wall’s White Bread Sandwich is also new to 2025, a searing look at the colonial adoption racket, another tentacle of genocide whereby the American and Canadian governments used all manner of contrived excuses – poverty, hunger, safety – to take Native babies and children from their Native families and communities and place them in white homes. Stolen children. The “Sixties Scoop.” The Indian Adoption Program.
The children were kidnapped – there’s no more appropriate word for it – in broad daylight, by the government, under the guise of what’s best for the children. Of course.
De-Indigenizing Native kids is never best for them. Taking them from their home communities. From their cousins and aunties and uncles. Sending them to foreign families in the suburbs. Robbing them of their Native heritage. Their Native families. Their Native spirituality.
This happened.
Kathleen Wall, 'White Bread Sandwich,' mixed media installation (2025).
The practice continues to this day, white, often Christian families targeting Indigenous children for adoption and then shopping for right-wing judges to allow them to keep the kids despite the objections of extended family members and/or tribal representatives who want to see the Native kids go to Native homes. That’s the way the Indian Child Welfare Act is supposed to work, Native families given preference when Native kids are being adopted.
For those who don’t follow American history real close, the best intentions of the government as it relates to Native people seldom works out for the best for Natives.
That was a joke.
Not nearly as witty as Wall’s rapier sharp installation, the subject of which she has personal experience with.
Artworks by Wall, Abeyta, Monkman, Cara Romero, Allen, Alexander and others are fresh creations for 2025, another magic act Trotta-Bono has pulled off, putting these 5-star artworks by 5-star artists on view publicly before any big museum or gallery. That’s no joke.
Admission to “Reservation for Irony” is free with viewing hours Tuesday through Sunday, 12:00–5:00pm.
