At the Frist
Not a Review, but a Request to Pay Attention: An Indigenous Present at the FRIST Museum of Art
I was invited to the media preview for An Indigenous Present at the Frist Art Museum to hear cocurators Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter talk about how and why they put this exhibition together. Before walking into the galleries, I already had a relationship with the project.
An Indigenous Present existed first as a publication, one I bought from The Bookshop here in Nashville. Initially, I bought it because it included work by Jeffrey Gibson, whose The Body Electric exhibition at the Frist in 2023 remains one of the most jaw-dropping examples I’ve seen of a contemporary artist completely in command of their hands, heart, and mind while making. I also knew the book would help address a huge blind spot in my own understanding of contemporary Indigenous art, and that it was exactly the kind of resource I wanted my students at Tennessee State University to have access to.
Then I turned a page and saw what I still believe is one of the greatest American artworks ever made: Rose B. Simpson’s Maria. Simpson’s customized 1985 El Camino is an ode to legendary San Ildefonso Pueblo potter Maria Martinez, transforming the iconic shape of her vessels into the body of a car. Many Nashvillians will remember seeing it at the Frist during Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists in 2019–20. It stopped me in my tracks then, and seeing it reproduced in An Indigenous Present reminded me that truly great works don’t stay in the museum. They keep working on you.
This isn’t a review of An Indigenous Present. I haven’t yet spent enough time with the exhibition to write one.
Instead, this is an urging—maybe even a begging—for you to go spend time with it.
Listening to Gibson and Porter discuss the exhibition before it opened changed how I thought about what I was about to see. It became clear that An Indigenous Present isn’t simply the title of a book or an exhibition. For them, it’s a living document, rooted in this exact moment while expanding our understanding of both the past and the future. The exhibition isn’t only about abstraction. It is itself an abstraction—a distillation of an idea. What does “Indigenous Present” mean right now? This exhibition doesn’t answer that question so much as invite fifteen artists to keep asking it.
And that invitation feels deeply generous.
Why wouldn’t Gibson and Porter be in love with these works? After hearing them speak, that was the overwhelming impression I left with—not academic distance but genuine affection for what these artists have made and what those works make possible.
Take Sonya Kelliher-Combs’s Salmon Curl (2023). The installation consists of more than one hundred individual forms made from acrylic polymer, reindeer and caribou hair, quill, acid-free Mylar, and steel pins. The accompanying wall text describes what the artist calls “hybrid materiality,” referencing cold-drying sockeye salmon and Iñupiaq parka sleeve patterns.
But another layer emerged during Gibson’s conversation.
He spoke about a generation of Indigenous artists who are unapologetically ambitious, and about how he refuses to let curators frame his work—or the work of other Indigenous artists—as “marginalized.” That refusal matters.
Standing before Salmon Curl, I wasn’t thinking about influence or response. I was thinking about peers. Eva Hesse. Ruth Asawa. Lee Bontecou. Artists who transformed material into language. Kelliher-Combs belongs comfortably in that conversation—not because her work resembles theirs, but because it is equally invested in what materials themselves can think and do.
That realization quietly shifts the center of gravity.
The exhibition begins to feel less like a missing puzzle piece finally added to American art history and more like the piece that has been sitting in the middle all along, helping everything else make sense.
Then there’s Raven Chacon’s Compass, a visual score for “…overly amplified, electric guitar….” It’s the first work visitors encounter entering the exhibition, and I couldn’t help smiling. In Music City, where Jimi Hendrix once played and where Kenny Vaughan, Grace Bowers, Audley Freed, Ping Rose, and countless other extraordinary guitarists continue pushing the instrument into new territory, Compass feels like an open invitation. Bring your amplifier. Maybe not into the gallery—but perhaps onto the Frist’s back patio—and see where Chacon’s composition leads you.
Again, I don’t experience this work as something existing on the margins of American culture. I think of it alongside La Monte Young’s open scores, Mary Halvorson’s unforgettable performance of one of those scores at Big Ears, or Jason Moran’s piano paintings. Chacon isn’t asking for admission into the avant-garde. He’s already there.
That’s what kept surfacing throughout the morning.
Again and again, Gibson returned to the idea that Indigenous artists shouldn’t be discussed as peripheral to contemporary art. This exhibition quietly insists that they never were.
I’ve only mentioned two works, but that’s because this exhibition deserves your own discoveries. It’s the kind of show that catches your imagination around the waist and refuses to let go. You’ll find yourself thinking about particular pieces weeks later. You’ll want to return because one visit won’t be enough.
The title isn’t asking us to look backward.
It’s asking us to pay attention to the present.
And right now, the present looks extraordinary.
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mikewindy=Mikey Mitchell
Arts and Social Practice professor at Tennessee State University, an HBCU in Nashville, TN.
I am a social practice artist with a painter’s eye and a sculptor’s hand, blending folk and conceptual traditions. My work uses color and humor as resistance to the negative ramifications of living in an increasingly complicated world. My signature, mikewindy, is a love note to my wife Windy, my first name and hers, lowercase and conjoined.
