15 Native American Women Artists to Know
By: Petala Ironcloud
Native American artists, especially women, have only recently gained a spotlight within the mainstream art world. For centuries, Native art was siloed on reservations, at trading posts, and in Indian markets, with no dedicated Indigenous commercial galleries either in urban Indian centers like New York City, San Francisco, Tulsa, or Phoenix or in other areas with significant Native populations. But lately they are finding their way into major galleries and institutions from Miami to New York to Venice.
For Women’s History Month, we delve into art from 15 Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian women. While not an exhaustive list, these artists represent a broad spectrum of artistic innovation spanning multiple generations and mediums, from foundational pottery to contemporary Ravenstail weaving. Shattering conventional ideas about fine art while honoring historical techniques and cultural knowledge, they underscore the vitality of Indigenous women’s contributions to contemporary art and the ongoing need to ensure that their voices and visions are centered in mainstream art discourse.
Read more of our Women’s History Month coverage here.
Rachel Martin
Rachel Martin is a Tlingít artist and enrolled member of the Tsaagweideí, Killer Whale Clan, of the Yellow Cedar House (X̱aai Hit´) Eagle Moiety. She grew up in California and Montana and now resides in New York City. Working primarily in sculpture and drawing, Martin is an inheritor of the Pacific Northwest line drawing tradition, whose cosmological symbols—like bears, fish, and frogs—she melds with contemporary cultural references and places in cheeky and feminist tableaux.
Bending the Rules (2024), in colored pencil on paper with a collaged mask, features a bare-chested woman turned upside down, facing the viewer with lips slightly apart. Been Ready (2023) offers the same whimsicality, with a Tlingít mask cutout serving as the head of a woman in profile, her cutout legs in mid-sprint. The mask has a stuck-out tongue, Martin’s gesture toward the trickster archetype in Tlingít mythology. Martin received a Forge Project fellowship in upstate New York in 2023 and, in 2024, had solo exhibitions at the Hannah Traore Gallery in New York City and the Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami.
Sara Siestreem
A Pratt MFA graduate, Sara Siestreem’s practice includes ceramics, photography, weaving, painting, and installation art. Skyline (2024) is a series of Hanis Coos baskets nontraditionally cast in clay and topped in gold, evoking the commodification of Native culture. transtemporal clam basket (2022) is a 3D print of a handwoven basket. Minion (2024) is composed of four ceramic black and white ceremonial caps underpinned by cascading scarlet beads, referencing systemic violence against Indigenous women and girls. Un-ring Bells (2013) incorporates photographs and representations of oyster shells the artist found along the local Coos and Millicoma Rivers’ shores long after the extinction of local tribes, the effect of white settlement and industrial fishing.
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