“This exhibit shows the history of American Indian art, fine art, in the United States and where it’s been in the last half-century, especially with Howe, Morrison and DesJarlait,” Child explains.

“Dreaming Our Futures” acts as an important marker in time, too: Fifty years ago, Morrison, DesJarlait and Howe participated in an exhibition of contemporary Indian painting in Washington, D.C.

Child says that “Dreaming Our Futures” also shows how contemporary artists “have been very influenced by those foundational figures.”

These include artists like Thunder and Dakota artist Holly Young, of Bismarck, N.D. Young uses the mediums of beadwork, quillwork, and ledger art, an art form that originated in cave and hide painting that has evolved to also use parchment and actual historical “ledger” documents as a canvas. 

“A lot of what I draw is kind of based off of real life,” Young says. “I enjoy the look of the old things, but I’m also living in today’s world as a contemporary artist.”

The ledger art of Yellow, a Minneapolis-based Lakota artist who died in August, hangs right next to Young’s.

“He was also somebody that I looked up to as a ledger artist. His work was very emotional,” Young says. “I always wanted to meet him, and I’ve been in the Minnesota area over the years, but we never crossed paths.”

Flanking the other side of her paintings is a large spray-painted canvas by TopBear. In 2022, Young and TopBear painted a mural together in Young’s hometown of Fort Yates, S.D.

“I really gravitate towards Thomasina’s work,” Young says. “She does a lot of nature-inspired work: Flowers, the prairie and the plant helpers, as I call them, like insects and bugs, things that I really enjoy myself.”

In another room, three paintings by St. Paul figurative painter and muralist Steven Premo, of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, hang facing three surrealist and spiritual paintings by fellow Ojibwe artist Joe Geshick, who died in 2009.

Premo is the husband of Child, and was a good friend of Geshick, she says. Premo inherited Geshick’s easel, which Child says will be on display with a list of artists who have died in recent years. Another Minnesota Native author, Louise Erdrich, will be speaking about Geshick’s art at the gallery on Feb. 4.

“Each of these individuals takes their place in a lineage of Indigenous painters that stretches back centuries,” Oransky, the gallery director and curator writes in his essay, “A Vast Field of Feathers,” for the exhibition catalog. He also points to the Jeffers Petroglyphs, the 7,000-year-old sacred rock carvings Native people made in southwestern Minnesota.

“The exhibition of paintings, like all the exhibitions that came before it and will come after it, beautifully and forcefully demonstrates that the need for drawn and painted images is a universal need,” Oransky writes.

At the end of a gallery tour, Child pauses again, pondering the timing of the exhibition. The pandemic set back its original opening date years.

“We need to show American Indian art every year and all the time,” Child says. ”But thinking as I do, as a historian, I’ve been thinking about the anniversary of American Indian citizenship in the United States 100 years ago.”

President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act on June 2, 1924. Morrison, Howe and DesJarlait were all born years before they were legal citizens of the U.S.

They were working in a different era, Child says. “And that’s why I particularly wanted to include these figures like Oscar Howe, Patrick Desjarlait and George Morrison in the exhibit.” 

There will be “Dreaming Our Futures: Art and American Indian Citizenship, 1924 – 2024” panel discussions Feb. 2 at the Regis Center for Art.

“Dreaming Our Futures” runs through March 16. The opening reception is Feb. 3 at the Regis Center for Art. Speakers include Child, Erdrich, Wilson, Minnesota Museum of Art executive director Kate Beane and Harvard professor Christopher Pexa.

On Feb. 15, Patricia Marroquin Norby, the inaugural associate curator of Native American art at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, will read her catalog essay “Painting Medicine: George Morrison’s Big Water Magic.”

On March 14, artist Fern Cloud will present “The Spirit of My People: Traditional Dakota Hide Painting.”