To Take Shape and Meaning: Form and Design in Contemporary American Indian Art

This exhibition catalogue from the North Carolina Museum of Art features 3-D works by seventy-five contemporary Indigenous artists from throughout the United States and Canada, including eight from North Carolina. Sections on place of being, rootedness, genealogy, encoded commentary, and revival and evolution highlight how American Indian artists push their art forms in ways that retain meaning and continue to evolve culture.

Distributed on behalf of the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Nancy Strickland Fields (Lumbee), guest curator and lead author, is a member of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina and has over twenty years of experience focused in museum education, curatorial work, and administration. She has worked at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico; National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC; and American Indian Cultural Center and Museum, Oklahoma City. She is currently the director and curator of the Museum of the Southeast American Indian at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Fields is the first Lumbee graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), where she earned a bachelor’s degree in museum studies. She earned her master’s degree in history from UNC Wilmington and is currently a doctoral student in the public history program at North Carolina State University. Fields’s area of research focuses on Southeastern Native peoples and the American colonial experience.

Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo), essay contributor, is a mixed-media artist whose artwork is also featured in To Take Shape and Meaning. She has a BFA from the IAIA and an MFA in ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has enjoyed solo exhibitions at the ICA Boston, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, SCAD Museum of Art, Benton Museum of Art, and Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. Simpson’s work is held in numerous museum collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MCA Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Portland Art Museum, SFMOMA, and North Carolina Museum of Art. She is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Simpson received her MFA in creative nonfiction from the IAIA in 2018. She lives and works on her ancestral homelands in New Mexico.

Stephen Fadden (Mohawk), essay contributor, is a traditional storyteller and director of programming at the Poeh Cultural Center and Museum at Pojoaque Pueblo. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Cornell University. Fadden is a former instructor at Santa Fe Community College, where he taught small group communication, anthropology, and art history, and at the IAIA in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he offered oral history classes.