Phoenix Art Museum expands Native art holdings with 185-work gift
Phoenix Art Museum has received 185 works of modern and contemporary Native American art from collector William P. Healey, a gift that marks the largest addition of Native American art in the institution’s history. The collection, assembled over the past decade with guidance from Diné artist Tony Abeyta, will form the core of The Way We Came: A Century of Indigenous Art, which opens August 26.
Abeyta and JoAnna Reyes, the museum’s adjunct and non-Native curator of the Americas, will co-curate the exhibition. Among the artists represented are Jaune-Quick-to-See Smith (Confederated Salish and Kootenai), Fritz Scholder (Luiseño), Allan Houser (Apache), T. C. Cannon (Kiowa, Caddo), Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee), and Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo). Abeyta’s own work is also included in the gift.
The acquisition significantly changes the museum’s American art collection, which grows from roughly 25 Native works to more than 200. Yet the scale of the gift has also sharpened questions about representation. Of the 99 artists in the collection, only one, Michael Chiago, reflects Tribes in the Phoenix area. The Akimel O’odham, on whose ancestral homelands Phoenix sits, appear to have no representation in the gift.
That absence has become part of the conversation around the exhibition. Laurie Steelink, an Akimel O’odham artist based in Los Angeles, has described the gap as a disconnect between community stewardship and institutional collecting. Steelink, who was featured in the museum’s 2022 exhibition Desert Rider, has also spoken about her own long process of reconnecting with her nation after being adopted before the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act.
The exhibition is framed through the concept of “survivance,” a term coined by scholar Gerald Vizenor to describe an active presence that resists colonial narratives of erasure and victimhood. Joseph Pierce, a Cherokee Nation scholar at Stony Brook University and a recent Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art, said the framework is especially apt for work made in the early 2000s and for an acquisition that reflects the last 50 years rather than the present moment.
The gift arrives amid a broader wave of major Indigenous art acquisitions at U.S. museums, including recent large donations to Art Bridges Foundation, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and New York Historical. It also underscores a persistent institutional challenge: how to collect Indigenous art in ways that extend beyond ownership and into sustained relationships with living artists and local communities.
