Their walls replete with Black Art, West Coast collectors have been chasing Indigenous artists. Coming off recent shows, Hector Dionicio Mendoza (at Luis De Jesus), Dyani White Hawk (at Various Small Fires), Jackie Amézquita (at Charlie James), Carmen Argote (at Commonwealth and Council), Raven Halfmoon (at the Hammer) and Jeffrey Gibson at the Broad) are among those who have been shifting the western gaze to precolonial worlds across the Americas that are animated less by race than by tradition, animal kinship and interaction with living materials.
Credit Several Eternities in a Day, the Hammer Museum’s eye-opening spring show, for introducing the concept of Brownness – a fluid identity that exceeds Latinidad by eschewing ethnographic jargon to designate not something you see but something you sense. The elemental immersion expressed in film-maker Ana Mendieta’s “earth-body” sculptures, for example, although she left Cuba as a child, was that of a sentient universe shaped by “eternities” of images, smells, atmosphere and cosmological knowledge. All the works here, although fashioned by a diaspora of art-makers engaging disparate mediums and differing aesthetics, spring from ancestral memory and a profound connection to nature as expressed in a visual language informed of animal kinship, earth, water and sky. Rivers flow to oceans, trees breathe, mountains shelter, fields nourish, and all that inhabit them live, feel and have inalienable rights.
So outside our experience is this vocabulary of Brownness that even the catalogue – albeit illuminating about inspiration and process – cannot fully communicate its spirituality, sensuality and fierce force. That the exhibition is laid out in three “acts” – large-scale installations formed of mineral and organic materials, painting and works on paper, and ceramics – is more an organisational device than the demarcation of artistic intention.
Although most of the artists here are known to the art world, having exhibited at such as the Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of Art, this presentation is as visceral and fresh as if erupted from a long-dormant volcano.
Enter past a surrealist oil on canvas by the foundational Mesoamerican muralist Carlos Mérida and tunnel through the formidable landmass, Oyonïk paruwi Juyu' (Invocation over the mountains) 2024, built by the Guatemalan Kaqchikel artist Edgar Calel of rock, earth, rose petals, and – signalling the food it will grow, in the Mayan belief that “everything in the world is inside us” – a flourish of rosemary.
Emerge to witchy constructions by the self-styled mestizo Guadalupe Maravilla, which draw on his traumatic childhood in El Salvador for animistic evocations of ribs, lungs and disease-riddled limbs assembled with such unlikely objects as plastic toys, lampshades, sponges and lampshades picked up on his wanderings.
Time, transformation and change inform Argote’s outsized embodiments created by dragging her fingers through paper layered with avocados that will drip over time to “get closer to the skin, closer to the hand” and reveal ancestral psychological patterns through “private performance”.
Segue to the magical “mothers of plants” – healing figurative “spirits” wrought by Chilean artist Patricia Dominguez-Claro from bug-resistant tamshi vines, palm fibre, balsa wood and medicinal dyes.
More challenging, in that it is admirable just as a painting, is San Ysidro artist Esteban Cabeza de Baca’s tangled, indigo-infused “cosmic” abstraction, California via Colorado River via Rio Grande (2025), a sprawling commingling of acrylic with earth carved with mystical symbols.
Channelling the prehistoric metamorphosis of clay into pottery, Argentinian Tucumano sculptor Gabriel Chaile’s functional ovens loom like ancient gods announcing a feast. Standing guard alongside them, a charming grouping of anthropomorphic totems that Pueblo artist Rose B Simpson has infused with the senses – “eyes, nose, mouth, ears” – to heal, and “give consciousness to the inanimate”.
Give time to the film by Ho-Chunk Nation painter Sky Hopinka that layers archival materials, memories and landscapes to reclaim ancient narratives and debunk western portrayals of Indigenous histories best summarised by a quote lifted from the catalogue: “How can they exist in the contemporary moment without being seen as … akin to eating your vegetables?”
Exiting the Brown universe under a small but powerful zoomorphic ceramic by Oaxaca’s famed magical-surrealist artist Francisco Toledo, and across a sonic meditation floated above sand by Diné Pulitzer Prize composer Raven Chacon, you will understand art, not as an object (though it can manifest as such), not as a construct (though it can be constructed), nor as a displayable collectible, but as a life force experienced within you. You will retain less what you saw than what you felt, connected to the natural world by an everted sensation that opens you to both thinking about a river and being thought by a river. Your senses will long resonate with stones that speak, branches that animate, earth that breathes, clay that activates, water that resonates, and art shaped by craft that draws on climate, dreams, and memory.