The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is presenting "Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers," an exhibition of nine recent paintings and a large-scale sculpture by the Akimel O’odham/Diné artist (b. 1986, Santa Fe). The show runs from October 18, 2025, to February 8, 2026, and is organized by senior curator Adrienne Edwards and curatorial assistant Rose Pallone. Perkins’s densely layered works incorporate acrylic, spray paint, found materials, and textual fragments, drawing on petroglyphs, ancestral storytelling, and personal experience to explore themes of grief, love, and hope while resisting reductive representations of Indigenous identity.
This exhibition matters because it brings a contemporary Indigenous artist’s abstract, symbol-rich practice to a major American museum, challenging narrow stereotypes and centering ancestral knowledge within a fine-art context. The show’s support from foundations and collectors underscores growing institutional commitment to diverse voices, and Perkins’s use of abstraction offers a nuanced counterpoint to more literal depictions of Native life, expanding the conversation around Indigenous art in the mainstream art world.