FIVE NATIVE ARTISTS CHOSEN FOR EITELJORG CONTEMPORARY ART FELLOWSHIP

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 in Indianapolis beginning in November 2025. Each Fellowship artist will receive $50,000, and the museum will purchase a total $100,000 of their collective 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 – the 13^th round of the Fellowship overall – 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, 3-D artworks, drawings 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) of Toronto, 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." 

Since the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship's inception in 1999, the museum has added more than 200 works by 60 contemporary Native artists to its permanent collection.

Emerging Current opens November 8, 2025, at the museum and continues through February 22, 2026.

*Cover image: John Feodorov (Navajo [Diné], born 1960). My Life as a Suburban Ind'n, 2023, detail. Acrylic, collage, and plastic grass on unstretched canvas, 67 x 65 inches. Museum Purchase from the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship. Image courtesy of the artist.