Current Archives | Heard Museum
ADVANCING AMERICAN INDIAN ART

Early Days: Indigenous Art from the McMichael

Early Days is the first survey of Indigenous art from Canada of this scope to be presented internationally. Organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in collaboration with current Indigenous stakeholders—scholars, traditional knowledge keepers, and living artists—the exhibition includes both historical and contemporary art from coast-to-coast-to-coast. Showcasing the diversity and vitality of Indigenous art in Canada, Early Days features objects ranging from 18th-century ceremonial regalia to the work of the vanguard artists of the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s—such as Norval Morrisseau, Carl Beam and Alex Janvier— and leading contemporary Indigenous artists like Kent Monkman, Meryl McMaster and Rebecca Belmore. As the only museum in Canada devoted exclusively to Canadian art, the McMichael’s collection offers a definitive account of Indigenous art in Canada today, and the powerful tensions and continuities that exist between the present and the past. Early Days explores our relationship to the land, to our ancestors, and to each other.


Changing Exhibitions

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 ...

Early Days: Indigenous Art from the McMichael

Through January 2, 2024

Early Days is the first survey of Indigenous art from Canada of this scope to be presented internationally. Organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in collaboration with current Indigenous stakeholders—scholars, traditional knowledge keepers, and living artists—the exhibition includes both historical and contemporary art from coast-to-coast-to-coast. Showcasing the diversity and vitality of Indigenous art in ...

Arriving Forever into the Present World

Through March 3, 2024

Arriving Forever into the Present World will feature works from the Heard Museum’s permanent collection – including textiles, pottery, and basketry – representing living artistic traditions within Southwestern Indigenous cultures. Arriving Forever will frustrate prevailing conversation’s around what makes a work of art “contemporary.” Arriving Forever Gallery Guide

Indeterminate Beauty

Through April 22, 2024

Indeterminate Beauty presents a brief yet bold selection of works by influential Kiowa/Caddo artist T.C. Cannon.

The North Star Changes: Works by Brenda Mallory

Through February 5, 2024

The exhibition, The North Star Changes: Works by Brenda Mallory, features sculptures that the artist has made using reclaimed and found objects, some taking the form of large-scale installations. Mallory describes her process as bricolage—something constructed or created from a diverse range of available things. Mallory notes, “The idea that an object has more than ...

Substance of Stars

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 ...


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 ...

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 ...

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 ...


Grand Gallery Exhibitions

Early Days: Indigenous Art from the McMichael

Through January 2, 2024

Early Days is the first survey of Indigenous art from Canada of this scope to be presented internationally. Organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in collaboration with current Indigenous stakeholders—scholars, traditional knowledge keepers, and living artists—the exhibition includes both historical and contemporary art from coast-to-coast-to-coast. Showcasing the diversity and vitality of Indigenous art in ...


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 ...