Living Lines: Contemporary Native Voices

George Alexander – Sweet Ride, 2026, Acrylic on canvas (36 x 36 inches)
George Alexander – Sweet Ride, 2026, Acrylic on canvas (36 x 36 inches)

Casterline|Goodman Gallery is proud to present Living Lines: Contemporary Native Voices, a landmark group exhibition opening July 20, 2026, at 611 East Cooper Avenue in Aspen, Colorado. Featuring works by Cara Romero, Linda Lomahaftewa, Tony Abeyta, George Alexander, Jaque Fragua, and other leading Indigenous artists, the exhibition explores how contemporary Native artists navigate questions of identity, land, sovereignty, cultural continuity, and self-representation in the twenty-first century. Through photography, painting, and mixed media, Living Lines challenges outdated perceptions of Indigenous art and affirms Native voices as vital contributors to contemporary American art and cultural discourse.

 

Bringing together artists working across photography, painting, and mized media, Living Lines highlights the breadth and vitality of contemporary Indigenous artistic pratice while challenging outdated assumptions about Native American art.

 

 

 

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  • LIVING LINES

  • The title Living Lines carries meaning on multiple levels. Living affirms that Native cultures are not relics of the past but dynamic, evolving forces that continue to shape contemporary life and artistic practice. In doing so, it challenges the persistent misconception that Indigenous art belongs solely to history.

     

    Lines speaks both visually and conceptually. It refers to the formal languages found throughout the exhibition—whether in Cara Romero’s meticulously composed photography, Tony Abeyta’s gestural painterly marks, George Alexander’s structural forms, or Jaque Fragua’s bold, graphic interventions. At the same time, it evokes lines of lineage: ancestry, storytelling, memory, and the  transmission of knowledge across generations.

     

    Together, Living Lines points to traditions that are continually carried forward, re-imagined, and renewed. Paired with the subtitle Contemporary Native Voices, the exhibition underscores the diversity of perspectives represented by each artist while acknowledging their place within broader Indigenous histories and cultural continuities. Through photography, painting, and mixed media, the artists in Living Lines engage questions of identity, land, sovereignty, memory, and representation. The exhibition invites collectors, scholars, and the broader public to encounter Native American art on its own terms as a vibrant and essential part of contemporary cultural discourse.

  • Bringing together artists working across photogrpahy, painting, and mixxed media, Living Lines highlights the breadth and vitality of contemporary Indigenous...
    Bringing together artists working across photogrpahy, painting, and mixxed media, Living Lines highlights the breadth and vitality of contemporary Indigenous...
    Bringing together artists working across photogrpahy, painting, and mixxed media, Living Lines highlights the breadth and vitality of contemporary Indigenous...

    Bringing together artists working across photogrpahy, painting, and mixxed media, Living Lines highlights the breadth and vitality of contemporary Indigenous artistic practice while challenging outdated assumptions about Native American art.

  • THE ARTISTS

  • CARA ROMERO Born in Inglewood, California, Cara Romero is an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe and one of...

    CARA ROMERO

    Born in Inglewood, California, Cara Romero is an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe and one of the most celebrated Indigenous photographers working today. Raised between the Chemehuevi Valley Indian Reservation and Houston, Texas, she studied cultural anthropology at the University of Houston before pursuing photography at the Institute of American Indian Arts and Oklahoma State University. Her cinematic, large-scale photographs dismantle the colonial and ethnographic gaze that dominated Native American photography for over a century, placing Indigenous women at the center as agents of sovereignty, joy, and self-determination. Her work is held in the Smithsonian Institution, the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, and other major international collections. In 2025–26, her first solo museum retrospective, Pan.pünüwügai (Living Light), traveled from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth to the Phoenix Art Museum — the same year she was recognized as the single most exhibited living artist in the United States.

  • LINDA LOMAHAFTEWA Hopi and Choctaw painter and printmaker Linda Lomahaftewa is a foundational figure in the modern Native American art...

    LINDA LOMAHAFTEWA

    Hopi and Choctaw painter and printmaker Linda Lomahaftewa is a foundational figure in the modern Native American art movement. Among the first class of students at the Institute of American Indian Arts in 1962, she went on to earn her BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute alongside fellow luminaries T.C. Cannon and Kevin Red Star. Her luminous abstract paintings — drawing from Hopi ceremony, kachina forms, and the vast color fields of the Southwestern landscape — weave ancestral knowledge into a thoroughly contemporary visual language, and have earned her a place in the permanent collections of the Heard Museum, the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, the Smithsonian Institution, and the U.S. Department of the Interior, among many others. Lomahaftewa taught at the IAIA for more than forty years, shaping generations of Native artists including Tony Abeyta, and her work has been the subject of major recent exhibitions including a retrospective at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and a prominent exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

  • TONY ABEYTA One of the most celebrated Diné (Navajo) painters of his generation, Tony Abeyta was born in Gallup, New...

    TONY ABEYTA

    One of the most celebrated Diné (Navajo) painters of his generation, Tony Abeyta was born in Gallup, New Mexico, into a distinguished family of artists — the son of painter Narciso Platero Abeyta and weaver and ceramist Sylvia Shipley. Educated at the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and New York University, with post-graduate work in Florence and Southern France on a Ford Foundation scholarship, Abeyta brings a global perspective that deepens rather than distances his relationship to home. His richly layered mixed-media canvases — textured with sand, encaustic wax, gold leaf, oil, and collage — evoke the vast color fields and design traditions of the Diné landscape and are held in numerous museum and institutional collections across the country.

  • GEORGE ALEXANDER George Alexander is a contemporary Indigenous artist whose work explores the intersections of identity, humanity, spirituality, and cultural...

    GEORGE ALEXANDER

    George Alexander is a contemporary Indigenous artist whose work explores the intersections of identity, humanity, spirituality, and cultural connection. Drawing from his personal experiences and Native heritage, Alexander creates paintings that serve as visual meditations on self-discovery and the shared narratives that unite people across cultures and generations.

     

    Through richly layered imagery and symbolic narratives, Alexander invites viewers to examine their own relationships to identity, culture, and humanity. His work challenges divisions and celebrates common ground, offering a contemporary Indigenous perspective that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.

  • JAQUE FRAGUA Jaque Fragua is a contemporary artist known for his bold, politically engaged work that addresses Indigenous identity, sovereignty,...

    JAQUE FRAGUA

    Jaque Fragua is a contemporary artist known for his bold, politically engaged work that addresses Indigenous identity, sovereignty, and cultural resilience. Working across painting, mural, and installation, Fragua blends influences from street art, graphic design, and popular culture with imagery rooted in his Jemez Pueblo heritage.

     

    Fragua’s practice confronts ongoing histories of colonization and erasure while asserting a powerful contemporary Indigenous presence. His work often incorporates striking color, text, and iconography to challenge dominant narratives and provoke dialogue around representation, land, and resistance.