Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art

Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art examines the mid-century American art movement known as the Indian Space Painters and the relationship between those non-Native painters, the Indigenous visual and material culture that inspired them, and the artists from the modern Native art movement who expanded upon such creative explorations through their own visual heritage.

Investigating these relationships for the first time, Space Makers reconfigures the history of American art and reveals its foundations in Indigenous space – aesthetically, geographically, and socio-politically. The free, focus exhibition features loans from the Charles and Valerie Diker collection, one of the nation’s preeminent collections of the underrecognized Indian Space Painting movement, and is guest curated by Christopher T. Green, PhD, Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College.