Cara Romero’s First Major Solo Museum Show Opening At Hood Museum Of Art
When Cara Romero (b. 1977) found herself unable to adequately communicate in words her indigenous experience in America, she turned to another language: photography.
Cara Romero, '3 Sisters,' 2022, archival pigment print. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth: Purchased through the Acquisition and Preservation of Native American Art Fund; 2022.47.2. © Cara Romero
When Cara Romero (b. 1977) found herself unable to adequately communicate in words her indigenous experience in America, she turned to another language: photography.
Romero split her childhood between the sprawling metropolis of Houston and the remote Chemehuevi reservation in Mojave Desert, CA. As an undergraduate anthropology student at the University of Houston, she couldn’t fully express what she saw, felt, and experienced on the reservation.
During her junior year, she stumbled into a black and white film class.
“While I struggled writing about contemporary Native issues, I fell in love with (photography) for its power of storytelling,” Romero told Forbes.com. “I loved the mad science of it. It made my heart sing, and I never wanted to quit. There was always what I call a healthy compulsion. I wanted to get better. I wanted to do it in my spare time. I never imagined in million years that it would take me so far.”
All the way to her first major solo museum exhibition at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. “Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)” will be on view from January 18 through August 10, 2025, at the Ivy League school in Hanover, NH.
“The word is a Chemehuevi word: Panûpünüwügai. Panûpü is light, more like illumination, not a direct light source, but like when the sun comes up. Nüwügai in our language (means) something has a spirit, or something is a living entity,” Romero explains of the show’s title. “For me, ‘living light’ was about something bigger than just the technical aspects of photography. It's not just the capture of light and time, it's also about everything that happens in the shoots and bringing people together and making memories and telling stories from within indigenous community, all of the spirit of the people and place and culture that are being illuminated within the medium in the way that I work.”
Featuring over 50 photographs, the exhibition presents Romero's existing and new work spanning two decades on a scale never seen before. In addition, immersive installations will recreate the sets of two of her most iconic photographs, TV Indians (2017) and The Zenith (2022), inviting viewers to experience Romero's innovative and multidisciplinary photographic process firsthand.
TV Indians first brought Romero into the Hood’s collection. The museum’s then director purchased it at the Southwestern Association for Indian Art’s Indian Market in Santa Fe. The annual event is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious presentation of Indigenous art in the world. Tens of thousands of individual collectors as well as the nation’s top museums buy direct from the artists.
Astonishingly, Romero maintains a booth at the event each year. Walk right up and say “hello.” She can also often be found at her Santa Fe gallery. One of the most important contemporary artists in America, right there.
Since TV Indians, the museum has purchased six more Romero photographs, using them in over 45 Dartmouth courses and three other Hood Museum exhibitions. For this presentation, multiple new and never-before-seen works will debut, including photographs created through a collaboration between the artist and Dartmouth students.
Why photography for Romero?
“Some of it is a little bit unknowable,” she admits. “I was always an artist. I love to draw, I love to craft, make regalia, I sew, I basket weave. Art has always been a best friend, and I was never encouraged to do it as a life path. I think that that's true for many young people.”
Contemporary, Vibrant, And Diverse
Cara Romero, 'TV Indians,' 2017, archival inkjet print. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth: Purchased through the Sondra and Charles Gilman Jr. Foundation Fund; 2017.46. © Cara Romero
Romero’s photography challenges dominant narratives regarding the decline of Indigenous people. She further disrupts stereotypes about what it means to be a Native American. Her images are typically celebratory, taken in color, and depict Native American’s outside of traditional regalia, forcing non-Native viewers to see and acknowledge Native people as contemporary and vibrant, in opposition to the sepia-toned, stoic, posed Native portraits customary to previous centuries.
“The humanness of our communities, not just our diversity, but giving people our human story of resilience and beauty and really countering preconceived notions or internal biases that we’re historic or bygone,” Romero said.
Talk to a contemporary Native American artist at Santa Fe Indian Market or anywhere else about their work and chances are it won’t take long before they emphasize as an important part of their purpose for creating, making clear to non-Natives that Native people remain. That Native people thrive in many instances. That Native people are contemporary.
Consciously and unconsciously, American museums have mostly worked against that recognition for the past 100-plus years. Native art and cultural objects were often presented in ethnographic or natural history museums, not art museums. Certainly not contemporary art museums. The work that did exist in art museums was typically relegated to dusty, dimly lit, out of the way, basement level gallery spaces, reinforcing stereotypes that the artwork was inferior, of the past, out of the mainstream.
Not only contemporary, but vibrant and diverse as well. Native art and Native people.
Native America includes nearly 600 federally recognized tribes and more than 60 state recognized tribes from south Florida to Alaska and everywhere in between. The vast majority of Native people in America do not live on reservations. They are neighbors and community members with backgrounds as variable as the rest of the country’s residents.
“It's beneficial that people understand that we have thousands of stories and that we're not a monolithic culture, that we're not a monolithic people. I call that the ‘one story narrative’ of what people think Native Americans are,” Romero said. “The more (museum) shows and the more representation and the more stories we have to tell opens people's minds to the fascinating diversity and lived experiences that we have, which adds a richness to the United States, a foundation that we all could benefit from getting back to and uplifting.”
A foundation, a way of life including practices of living collaboratively, not selfishly. De-emphasizing material possessions, reemphasizing community. Living in balance with nature. In harmony with the land. Seventh generation thinking.
“An incredible sense of humor, shared struggles, a love of life and community and culture and family are all the things that I see in my own backyard,” Romero said.
Contemporary Native American Art Goes Mainstream
Cara Romero, 'Water Memory,' 2015, archival pigment print on Canson Legacy Platine Photo Paper. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth: Purchased with a gift from the Douglas Wise ’59 Memorial Arts Fund; 2020.38.1. Cara Romero. All Rights Reserved.
In the past handful of years, a remarkable change has taken place within American art museums related to their recognition of Native American artwork. Historically ignored, contemporary Native artists are now among the most in demand.
An Artnet survey of December 2024 special exhibitions at museums coast-to-coast found three Native artists among the six most visible: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940; citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), Virgil Ortiz (b. 1969; Cochiti Pueblo), and Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983; Santa Clara Pueblo). Artnet’s first such survey in September of 2024 had a Native artist at the top of the list: Marie Watt (b. 1967; Seneca).
The nation’s most prestigious art museums, from The Met and The Whitney in New York, to the Art Institute of Chicago, the MFA in Boston, the Denver Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., almost all of them currently feature or have prominently featured Native American artists in group shows or solo exhibitions in the past couple years.
Bear in mind, Smith became the first Native American artist to have a painting acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2020. 2020! As in five years ago 2020.
The National Gallery of Art for the United States of America did not deign to acquire an example of Native American painting until 2020. The museum was established in 1937.
“(Native artists) were segregated to historic Native collections and when you talk about representation, if people don't think that Native people are real, there's a dehumanization that happens,” Romero said. “With the absence that has happened in media, academia, museums, art institutions, there's simultaneously this great presence. We have been making some of the most amazing art–off the radar of art institutions–for the last many hundreds of years. We have our own art movements that have been formed throughout history. So, while we've arrived on the scene, we've arrived having been making some of the best art in the world for decades.”
In 2024, a Native American, Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972; member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent), became the first solo Indigenous artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, the most prestigious exhibition of contemporary art in the world. The year prior, Smith became the first Native American artist to have a retrospective at The Whitney, the nation’s premiere museum devoted solely to American art.
Romero firmly resides among the elite cadre of Native artists including Smith, Ortiz, Simpson, Watt, Gibson, Wendy Red Star (b. 1981; Apsáalooke), Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935; Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma), Preston Singletary (b. 1963; Tlingit), Cannupa Hanksa Luger (b. 1979; Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota), Sky Hopinka (b. 1984; Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit-Unangax̂) and others who are now landing the biggest shows and biggest honors.
What changed? Was it Standing Rock? George Floyd? A new generation of curators less beholden to the colonial, patriarchal art canon? All of that.
The Hood proudly stands as an outlier, no Johnny-come-lately to contemporary Native art.
“Twenty years ago, there were not very many American and global collections with an emphasis on a continuum of collecting what is sometimes identified as contemporary Native art, but that's not true of the Hood. They have a history, a continuum of not treating Native people as historic and bygone, but staying with our communities and our artistic practices of the time throughout the decades,” Romero said. “That makes it a really, really powerful collection and a really, really powerful impact to our arts being taught at an Ivy League level. Now the flood gates are open and we're wealthy in artistic practice and content, and so I don't see that those gates are going to close.”
Contemporary Native American art isn’t going back.
“Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)” will travel the nation, including to the Phoenix Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville in 2026, among other national and international venues to be announced, following its run at the Hood.
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