Agua Caliente museum opens rare exhibition of 20th-century Native painting
"A Beauty That Endures," curated by Tony Abeyta, brings more than 50 paintings from the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art to Palm Springs through May 2027.
PALM SPRINGS: A new exhibition opened Saturday, October 3, at the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, bringing a rare survey of 20th-century Indigenous art to downtown Palm Springs. "A Beauty That Endures: Native Painting, Ritual, and Resilience in the 20th Century," curated by Tony Abeyta (Dine/Navajo), features more than 50 paintings by artists from more than a dozen tribal nations across the United States.
Much of the work has never been on public display. The paintings come from the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma, and the exhibition spans the first half of the 20th century, a formative period in Native American art history.
The artists in the show include Acee Blue Eagle, Frank Day, Allan Houser, Jack Hokeah, Oscar Howe, Shije Herrera, Stephen Mopope, Tonita Pena, Pop Charlee, Alfonso Roybal, Ernest Spybuck, Quincy Tahoma, Princess Bonita Wa Wa Calachaw Nunez, Dick West and Valjean Hessing.
More than 50 paintings, much of it never shown publicly, trace a formative half-century of Native American art.
Ritual and resilience
The exhibition takes its measure of an era shaped by federal assimilation policies, boarding schools, Christian missions, relocation, and military service during World War II. Against that history, the show traces how Indigenous artists transformed inherited artistic traditions into a new visual language, negotiating modern life while remaining rooted in the ceremonial, philosophical and aesthetic traditions of their communities.
The paintings reveal sophisticated systems of knowledge grounded in ceremony, oral tradition, ecological relationships and community memory.Agua Caliente Cultural Museum officials, in the exhibition announcement
Several pieces depict rituals, including a wolf dance, the Southern Cheyenne Sun Dance and the Great-Medicine Lodge Ceremony, along with other significant cultural symbols. Because of that, photography and video are not permitted inside the exhibition.
Visiting
The exhibition is on view in the museum's 2,200-square-foot Changing Gallery through Sunday, May 30, 2027. The museum is at 140 N. Indian Canyon Drive in downtown Palm Springs.
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