Cannupa Hanska Luger and Shelley Niro Lead Indigenous Survivance Shows

Seven ongoing exhibitions of Native art and history across Manhattan, the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, and the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook mark Indigenous Peoples' Day in New York this October. The featured artists, representing Indigenous populations across Turtle Island, embody what the roundup's compilers call survivance: tracing and rejecting narratives of dispossession, satirizing stereotypes, and reinventing traditional art forms.

The programs run from the last week of October through next spring, so visitors without the long weekend can still catch them.

What is on view at Garth Greenan Gallery?

Cannupa Hanska Luger's solo show "American Traditional" inaugurates Garth Greenan Gallery's new space at 10 Greene Street in SoHo and runs through Oct. 24. Luger, who is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota, trades his typically colorful verve for uniform matte-black works made from ironstone clay, sumi ink, and direct flame.

The titular work presents a striated sculpture of a skinned bison with a bifurcated skull, set on a colonial-fashion dining table. That distortion, encoded in tautly wrapped yarn, runs through Luger's wall hangings and pedestals of other animal skulls and carcasses — embellished with railroad spikes, Pulaski axes, and vintage "American Traditional" furniture associated with westward settler expansion.

Per the artist, the work emphasizes the "bizarre and horrific history of colonialism," and its motifs of mutilation and mutation speak to the manipulation of collective memory in the retelling and neglect of certain perspectives.

What does Shelley Niro show at Hales Gallery?

Shelley Niro presents "In Her Lifetime," her second solo show with Hales Gallery at 547 West 20th Street in Chelsea, through Oct. 31. Niro, an artist and filmmaker of the Turtle Clan of the Kanyen'kehá:ka (Mohawk) Nation, shows a tight selection of mixed-media photographic works spanning decades of her career.

The exhibition takes its name from Niro's 1992 black-and-white picture sequence of her sister with overlaid text. The show emphasizes her use of humor and accessible references in personal reflections on identity, nationhood, collective memory, and stereotypes through an Indigenous perspective.

For this exhibition, Niro also reinterprets a variety of her iconic photos from the early 1990s, embellishing them with hand-painted elements and decorative patterns. In the context of Indigenous womanhood, these additions lend a certain cheeky assertiveness to her family portrayals.

Why does survivance frame these shows?

The seven exhibitions, in solo and group formats, bring underrepresented histories out from the margins, according to the roundup. Some venues close for Indigenous Peoples' Day itself, but the shows' long run into spring gives audiences an extended window to engage with work that refuses narratives of Indigenous irrelevance.