Current Exhibitions at the Heard Museum | Heard Museum
ADVANCING AMERICAN INDIAN ART

Current Exhibitions at the Heard Museum

Known for its award-winning exhibits, the Heard Museum uses its collections and first-person voice to tell the stories of American Indian cultures while at the same time celebrates the diverse achievements of today’s artists. Experience the Heard’s many exhibition galleries that include both ongoing shows and changing exhibits featuring an array of artists and art forms.

Substance of Stars

Now Open

The Heard Museum presents a new, permanent exhibition entitled Substance of Stars, on view now. The project is the culmination of a three-year collaboration with four Indigenous communities, thanks to a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., which fosters the study of world religions. The exhibition examines the collection of the Heard Museum from Indigenous perspectives, across a wide variety of media and time periods. It incorporates Indigenous languages, sky knowledge, and spiritual values, and includes elements of the origin stories that form Native identities.
 

In the Service Of: American Indian Veteran Artists and Tributes

Now Open

In the Service Of: American Indian Veteran Artists and Tributes explores the art and tribute art created by and for American Indian veterans. Through the artwork on display, the exhibition reflects the myriad reasons—land, family and cultural responsibility—why American Indian men and women enlist in the U.S. military and serve at a higher percentage than other ethnic groups.


Changing Exhibitions

He‘e Nalu | The Art and Legacy of Hawaiian Surfing

Through July 16, 2023

He‘e Nalu: The Art and Legacy of Hawaiian Surfing explores the Indigenous origins of surfing through the presentation and interpretation of historic material made by notable cultural practitioners as well as new contemporary artwork and site-specific installations created by leading Indigenous Hawaiian artists. The stories and histories of surfing will be shared through a Kānaka ...

Substance of Stars

The Heard Museum is thrilled to announce its new Exhibition, Substance of Stars, now open.

In the Service Of: American Indian Veteran Artists and Tributes

In the Service Of: American Indian Veteran Artists and Tributes explores the art and tribute art created by and for American Indian veterans. Through the artwork on display, the exhibition reflects the myriad reasons—land, family and cultural responsibility—why American Indian men and women enlist in the U.S. military and serve at a higher percentage than ...

Between The Lines

Between The Lines: Art from the No Horse ledger book

Through March 23, 2023

Between the Lines: Art From the No Horse Ledger Book presents a selection of 28 drawings from a Cheyenne/Arapaho ledger book created between the late 1870s and 1882. Painting has long been utilized as a tool by Indigenous peoples in passing down knowledge and sharing cultural stories. As settler Americans expanded into the Great Plains, ...


Signature Exhibitions

HOME: Native People in the Southwest

Learn about the Native peoples of the Southwest and hear them tell their stories in their own words. In addition to cultural objects, the exhibit showcases the traditions of Native peoples of the past and present and examines their definition of home. Don't miss the Navajo hogan, the Pueblo horno or the 400 katsina dolls on display!

Entrance to exhibition Away from Home showing a dark wood board wall with a large TV showing animated school yearbook photos of American Indian boarding school students and a US map and wall photo of a person standing in front of a traditional teepee in the background

Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories

Audio tours of this exhibition are available in English and Spanish at heard.org/mobile-app. Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories is the updated installation of the long-running Boarding School exhibition at the Heard Museum. Over the past two decades, interest in American Indian boarding schools and scholarship about the subject has increased. It is a story that must continue to be shared and one that ...

The American Indian Veterans National Memorial at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona

American Indian Veterans National Memorial

Service and sacrifice spanning more than three centuries are honored in the first and only known national memorial to American Indian veterans of many conflicts. The Memorial, located outside the Collector’s Room of the Heard Museum Shop, consists of several sizable sculptures by acclaimed Native artists Chiricahua Apache sculptor Allan Houser (1914-1994) and Michael Naranjo ...


Ongoing Exhibitions

Grand Procession exhibition showing handmade and intricately beaded soft sculpture figures in traditional American Indian regalia/dress

Grand Procession: Contemporary Plains Indian Dolls from the Charles and Valerie Diker Collection

Grand Procession celebrates an exceptional collection of dolls, also known as soft sculptures, created by Jamie Okuma (Luiseño and Shoshone-Bannock), Rhonda Holy Bear (Cheyenne River Sioux and Lakota) and three generations of Growing Thunder family members; Joyce Growing Thunder, Juanita Growing Thunder Fogarty and Jessa Rae Growing Thunder (Assiniboine and Sioux). The dolls provide a ...

Black and white watery landscape with a young Navajo man standing in profile on the far right wearing a white shirt and traditional Navajo hair bun.

physical/digital: representations of the body from the permanent collection

physical/digital: representations of the body from the permanent collection is a digital exhibition taking place in a virtual environment. During this time of remoteness, social distancing and isolation, our corporeal relationship to the world, and to one another, is much altered. This exhibition seeks to look at the ways in which artists from the 20th ...

Its Your Turn children's activity space with wooden tables with iPads and hands on coloring activities, and books to read

It’s Your Turn Activity Gallery

It’s Your Turn: Activity Gallery is back! Our interactive space for kids and families offers the chance to draw on an iPad, do coloring activities, explore books about art, and build your own poem on our magnet board!

Sculpture garden with bronze and stone sculptures by American Indian artists ranged throughout a brick paved walled exterior space with one wall painted a bright red. Other walls are painted stucco white and various desert trees and foliage is arranged throughout.

The Third Dimension: Sculptural Stories in Stone and Bronze

Some of the most exciting and moving American Indian fine art of the 20th and 21st centuries has been created by sculptors. The Heard Museum is fortunate recently to have been given works by leading American Indian sculptors such as Allan Houser and John Hoover Gifts also include sculpture by the next generation of accomplished ...


Traveling Exhibitions

Detail of video for the Boarding School exhibition entrance showing school yearbook photos across many decades

NEH On the Road | Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories

This exhibition was adapted from the permanent exhibition Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories and is touring from September 2020 through April 2025. The exhibition will feature several freestanding units focused on thematic areas; a collection of objects, artifacts, photographs, and paper ephemera; audio/video features; interactive elements; semi-immersive environment settings; and wall-mounted banners ...

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