HANOVER, NH.- The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth opened its landmark exhibition Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light), the first major solo museum exhibition of artist Cara Romero’s photographs. Including over 60 large-scale photographs, this exhibition showcases Romero’s iconic images—spanning two decades—alongside new work on a scale never seen before. The exhibition is curated by Hood Museum Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Indigenous Art Dr. Jami Powell and will be on view at the Hood Museum from January 18 through August 10, 2025.

Romero explains, “The title of the exhibition, Panûpünüwügai, means living light in the Chemehuevi language. The way that we’ve put the words together, Panûpü-nüwügai, is a translation of the spirit of light. So, it has multiple meanings. It’s not just about the subject matter that’s in the show, it’s also about the spirituality of how light plays with the subjects, how the light is alive, and how the subject matter is also living. It speaks to the nature of photography being a painting with light.”

Powell adds, “Cara Romero is a fine art photographer and an exceptional storyteller. Her images are complex and generous, inviting people to ask questions they might otherwise be afraid to pose. I am excited for the opportunity to share this exhibition with audiences across the nation, and particularly at the Phoenix Art Museum, which is just a few hours from the Chemehuevi Reservation. The opportunity to have a venue so close to where Cara grew up and in a city with a large Native population is something we’ve hoped for since the earliest stages of this project.”

Powell has organized the exhibition into themes based on throughlines found in Romero’s photographic series: California Desert & Mythos, (Re)Imagining Americana, Rematriation: Empowering Indigenous Women, Environmental Racism, and Ancestral Futures.

In this exhibition, Romero’s storytelling will transcend the two-dimensional realm with the inclusion of two installations that invite visitors to interact with her process. In (Re)Imagining Americana, an installation inspired by Romero’s TV Indians, museum visitors can sit within a set of vintage televisions playing looped images and videos featuring behind-the-scenes content. Framing the background of the installation is a new monumental landscape image featuring the California desert. Visitors will be encouraged to take their own photos in this interactive space.

In Ancestral Futures, visitors will be immersed in a futuristic space surrounded by cobs of Indigenous corn suspended from the ceiling. Here, visitors will explore concepts of Indigenous futurisms and learn about the importance of ancestral foodways that can inform healthier futures.

The checklist also features multiple new and never-before-seen works, including four photographs that Romero created while in residency with the Hood Museum in June 2024. At this time, she collaborated with four Kānaka Maoli Dartmouth students to create four new works, two for her First American Dollseries and two new underwater photographs. Romero has released one of these works ahead of the exhibition, a stunning black-and-white photograph titled Ha'ina 'ia mai. Romero and Teani DeFries ’24, the subject in the photograph, collaborated to create an image that evoked joy but also sparked conversations about water as a lifeforce for humans and the impacts of pollution upon it. Ha'ina 'ia mai(2024) will be on view in Panûpünüwügai (Living Light), as will the three other photographs Romero created while in Hanover.

Cara Romero is a renowned photographer whose visual storytelling brilliantly challenges dominant narratives of Indigenous decline and erasure. Her work disrupts preconceived notions about what it means to be a Native American and shows the diversity within Indigenous nations and communities. Romero speaks powerfully about her photographs and the stories they tell, which visitors will be able to experience through an audio tour produced by the Hood Museum and Lantern Audio. Audiences will also hear from six of Cara’s collaborators. In addition to exploring the meanings and intentions of selected photographs, the audio tour also provides a glimpse behind the scenes into the process of their creation.

Romero says, “In a photographic practice that blends documentary and commercial aesthetics, I love to create stories that draw from intertribal knowledge to expose the fissures and fusions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and futurity.”

The Hood Museum has long been dedicated to building a strong collection of contemporary Indigenous and Native American artwork, and increasingly so over the past 15 years. The Hood Museum started collecting Romero’s work in 2017 with the purchase of TV Indians (2017). Since beginning her tenure at the museum in 2018, Powell has acquired six additional photographs by Romero for the museum’s collection—The Zenith (2022), Water Memory (2015), Oil Bloom (2015), Kaa (2017), 3 Sisters (2022), and 17 Mile Road (2019)—all of which will be featured in Panûpünüwügai (Living Light). Over the past four years, Romero’s photographs have been used for teaching purposes in over 45 Dartmouth courses and featured in three Hood Museum exhibitions.

Cara Romero, b. 1977, Inglewood, CA (American / Chemehuevi), is an artist known for dramatic fine art photography that examines Indigenous life in contemporary contexts. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero was raised between contrasting settings: the rural Chemehuevi reservation in Mojave Desert, California, and the urban sprawl of Houston, Texas. Informed by her identity, Romero’s visceral approach to representing Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and lived experiences results in a blending of fine art and editorial styles. Maintaining a studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Romero regularly participates in Native American art fairs and panel discussions and was featured on PBS’s Craft in America in 2019. Her award-winning work is included in numerous public and private collections, domestically and internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Amon Carter Museum, Peabody Essex Museum, and Forge Project Collections, among others. Romero travels between Santa Fe and the Chemehuevi Valley Indian Reservation, where she maintains close ties to her tribal community and ancestral homelands.