Renowned Fellowship featuring contemporary Native art exhibit opens in November 2025

For Immediate Release
Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024

INDIANAPOLIS – Five Native American or First Nations artists have been selected for the prestigious 2025 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship. Innovative paintings, prints, installations, sculptures and assemblages by the artists will be on view at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art beginning in November 2025. Each Fellowship artist will receive $50,000, and the museum will purchase more than $100,000 of their artworks to add to its collection of contemporary Native art, considered one of the best such collections anywhere.

Every other year since 1999, the Eiteljorg Fellowship has helped bring Native contemporary art to the forefront, casting a spotlight on the works of leading Native artists from across the U.S. and Canada. The five artists for 2025 were selected recently by a panel of art experts who reviewed their applications. These are the 2025 Eiteljorg Fellows:

• Invited artist Jean LaMarr (Northern Paiute / Achomawi [Pit River]) of Susanville Indian Rancheria, California, has worked in printmaking, painting, assemblages, murals and installations. LaMarr’s art challenges stereotypes and misrepresentations of Native women and peoples, exposes environmental racism in her homelands and features elements of her cultural traditions. She currently operates the Native American Graphic Workshop, which she founded in 1994.

• John Feodorov (Navajo [Diné]) of Seattle, Washington, explores surrealism in his paintings, drawings, 3-D artworks and video performances. An associate professor at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University, Feodorov creates art that questions assumptions about identity, spirituality and place within the context of colonization and late capitalism.

• Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich (Koyukon Dené / Iñupiaq) of Anchorage/Cohoe, Alaska, draws inspiration from her heritage in creating carved, painted and beaded sculptures and mask forms. Her art also includes photography, film, installation, poems and design, honoring her arctic and subarctic ancestral homelands.

• Maria Hupfield (Wasauksing First Nation [Anishinaabe]) of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, practices in the disciplines of performance art, sculpture and installation. Hupfield is on the faculty of the University of Toronto in Mississauga, Ontario, where she is assistant professor in Indigenous performance and media art and is a Canadian Research Chair in transdisciplinary Indigenous arts.

• Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan / Hidatsa / Arikara / Lakota) of Glorieta, New Mexico, blends science fiction with personal experience to invent monumental installations, sculptures and performances that communicate urgent stories of 21st-century Indigenous peoples. Luger’s bold visual storytelling includes a variety of mediums and materials and presents new ways of seeing people’s collective humanity, while putting an Indigenous world view at the forefront.

“The Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship is an example of how museums can amplify and celebrate the voices of contemporary artists. The 2025 class of Fellows is an exceptional group of artists, whose work we are honored to share with the world,” Eiteljorg President and CEO Kathryn Haigh said. “The 2025 Fellowship exhibition provides an opportunity to experience the bold, cutting-edge contemporary Native art that the Eiteljorg is known for.”

The Eiteljorg’s exhibition of the 2025 Fellows’ works opens Nov. 20, 2025, at the museum and continues through February 2026. The public will have opportunities to meet the artists, and the museum will publish a catalog of their works. The impressive group of artists in the 2025 class join the ranks of Eiteljorg Fellows from previous classes who have made a lasting impact in the field. Learn about 25 years of the Eiteljorg Fellowship at: contemporaryartfellowship.eiteljorg.org.

“The 2025 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellows possess much character and talent, representing decades of dedication, activism and teaching,” said Dorene Red Cloud (Oglala Lakota), curator of Native American art and curator of the Fellowship. “They embody their communities whom they serve through making their voices and experiences heard, thereby challenging many status quo perceptions of Native / Indigenous peoples. We heartily welcome them to the Eiteljorg Fellowship family.”

Past generous support for the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship has come from Lilly Endowment Inc., the Efroymson Family Fund – a fund of the Central Indiana Community Foundation – and others. An anonymous donor recently gifted $1 million to the museum to create an endowment fund to help sustain the Fellowship over coming years. This year, the museum will present a combined quarter of a million dollars in awards to the artists; each artist receives an unrestricted $50,000 award.

Since the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship’s inception in 1999, the museum has added works by 60 contemporary Native artists to its permanent collection. Moreover, the Eiteljorg Museum co-produced a 2017 documentary film with WFYI about the Eiteljorg Fellows, titled Native Art Now!, that aired on PBS TV affiliates around the nation, and the museum also published a scholarly art catalogue of the same title in 2017.

About the Eiteljorg
For 35 years, the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art has been an integral part of the cultural fabric of Indianapolis and scenic White River State Park. The Eiteljorg Museum explores the intersection of the arts, histories and cultures of the past and present by sharing the diverse stories of the American West and the Indigenous Peoples of North America. Located on the Central Canal at 500 West Washington St., the Eiteljorg is a 501c3 nonprofit organization.

Image Credits
Attached are headshots of the five artists.

Media Contacts
Bryan Corbin
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