SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, Haines Gallery presents 250 Years, Indigenous Futures, a group exhibition centering the work of leading Native American artists Victoria Grace Canby, Jordan Ann Craig, Sky Hopinka, Brad Kahlhamer, Terran Last Gun, Jamie Okuma, Wendy Red Star, and Keith Secola. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and film, these artists engage contemporary culture, Nation-specific visual traditions, and personal histories in distinct and expansive ways.

While occasioned by this anniversary, 250 Years, Indigenous Futures does not commemorate it. Rather, 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.

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.

Victoria Grace Canby
(Diné, b. 1978, Albuquerque, New Mexico)

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, California)

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, Washington)

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, Arizona)

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/Blackfeet; b. 1989, Browning, Montana on the Blackfeet 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, and Okinawan; b. 1977, Glendale, California)

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, Montana)

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, Utah 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.

On Ohlone Land, Within Sight of Alcatraz

Founded in 1987 on the belief that contemporary art can transform culture, Haines Gallery has long served as a West Coast platform for artists from around the globe. In 2022, the gallery moved to San Francisco’s historic Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, a site shaped by layered histories of Indigenous presence, colonial expansion, military occupation, and cultural reclamation.

Long before it became a military outpost, the Fort Mason shoreline was part of the homeland of the Ramaytush Ohlone people. In 1776—the same year the Declaration of Independence was signed—Spanish colonists established the Presidio of San Francisco nearby; two decades later, they constructed the Batería de Yerba Buena on the site that is now Fort Mason. In this region, 1776 does not simply signify the founding of the United States. It also marks the beginning of Spanish occupation in San Francisco, which had devastating consequences for Native Californians as colonial authorities sought to suppress Indigenous autonomy, culture, language, and relationships to ancestral land.

Claimed by the U.S. Army as Point San Jose and renamed Fort Mason in 1882, these Ohlone coastal lands became both a strategic harbor-defense site and, later, a major logistics and embarkation hub for U.S. military operations in the Pacific. The site’s layered history reflects broader patterns of Indigenous displacement, militarization, and imposed sovereignty.

Just beyond Fort Mason’s piers lies Alcatraz Island, another place of profound significance within Native American history. In 1895, federal authorities imprisoned 19 Hopi men there for opposing the forced education and assimilation of Indigenous children. Nearly a century later, from 1969 to 1971, Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz Island, asserting treaty rights and Indigenous sovereignty while drawing international attention to ongoing histories of dispossession.

Today, Haines Gallery’s location—on Ohlone land, within sight of Alcatraz—underscores the importance of an exhibition centering Indigenous voices in this anniversary year. Rather than treating 1776 as a singular point of origin, this site reminds us of deeper histories that precede the United States, and of Indigenous creative sovereignty as a living force shaping the present and future.