Red Skin Dreams: Twenty Years of Curating Indigenous Art at the Venice Biennale

Honorable Mention for the 2026 Solon T. Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology

In Red Skin Dreams curator and scholar Nancy Marie Mithlo (Fort Sill Chiricahua Warm Springs Apache Tribe) recounts the challenges of exhibiting Indigenous art at the famed Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest and most-recognized international arts exhibition. Mithlo’s experience of organizing nine independently sponsored exhibitions in Italy from 1997 through 2017 reveals marginalization and breakthroughs in an ever-shifting global art market.

Mithlo’s curated exhibitions highlighted contemporary American Indian and Indigenous artists on a global scale while also calling into question the dichotomies of margin and center, insider and outsider. Her scholarship asserts that Indigenous peoples are active participants in the contemporary arts world, despite mainstream assumptions to the contrary.

This is a story about how Indigenous peoples―both collectively and individually―claim a place in a transnational world that often forgets their presence. It is a story not only about arrival but belonging.

Nancy Marie Mithlo is a professor of gender studies and American Indian studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and curator in residence at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In addition to the Venice Biennale, she has curated exhibitions at the National Museum of the American Indian, Occidental College’s Weingart Gallery, and the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum. She is the author of Knowing Native Arts (Nebraska, 2020) and editor of Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism and For a Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw, among numerous other publications. Visit Mithlo’s website at nancymariemithlo.com.