Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time

Indigenous understandings of time are cyclical and relational in contrast to Western perceptions of time, which are often linear and commodified. The intersection of memory and time in contemporary Native artistic practices reveals how temporality shapes perceptions of self, culture, and reality, as well as how the past is continually remembered and reimagined. “Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time” highlights some of the most influential Native artists working over the last sixty years. It explores the nuanced layering of past, present, and future in works by twenty-two artists of Native American, Alaska Native, First Nations, and Métis heritage, who carry forward the artistic lineages of their ancestors while simultaneously sparking new visions for the future.

The exhibition title is borrowed from the poem "Smoke in Our Hair” by Ofelia Zepeda (Tohono O’odham). She writes: “Smoke, like memories, permeates our hair,/ our clothing, our layers of skin./ The smoke travels deep/ to the seat of memory./ We walk away from the fire;/ no matter how far we walk,/ we carry this scent with us.” Using the scented smoke of burning wood as a metaphor, Zepeda reminds us that Native memory is both fluid and indelible.

The exhibition is organized in three main sections—wood, fire, and smoke—and each gallery space references and reveals different elements of cycles. Through diverse mediums, the artists manipulate materials and spaces, giving form to the intangible. Tapping into personal memory, ancestral artistic practices, history, and Indigenous Futurism, their works center intentionality, design, and materiality. They offer critical reflections on working, between those who came before them and those who will come after. Spanning multiple generations, these artists call us to consider connections as well as disconnections between tradition and innovation and to reorient our notions of time, memory, and the future.