Of the 99 artists represented in the Healey collection gift, only one reflects the Tribes in the Phoenix area: Michael Chiago, who hails from the Tohono O\u2019odham and Pima-Maricopa nations. The Akimel O\u2019odham, on whose ancestral homelands Phoenix resides, appears to have no representation in the collection.<\/p>\n
Laurie Steelink, an Akimel O\u2019odham artist based in Los Angeles, was previously featured in the 2022 exhibition Desert Rider<\/a> at the Phoenix Art Museum and considers herself, at 65, still in the process of reconnecting with her nation. Steelink was adopted before the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act<\/a> protecting Native youth from government adoption programmes operating under the \u201ckill the Indian to save the child\u201d mission, designed initially for 19th-century Indian boarding schools. The shortage of local Tribal artists in the gifted collection reflects \u201ca gap between community stewardship and institutional collecting\u201d, Steelink says.<\/p>\n Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Xeriscape, 1991 William P. Healey Collection of Native American Art at Phoenix Art Museum, Gift of William P. Healey. Photo: Davin Lavikka. Courtesy of the Estate of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.<\/p>\n Reyes and Abeyta\u2019s exhibition of works from Healey\u2019s gift is framed in relation to the concept of \u201csurvivance\u201d as defined by the scholar Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe): an active sense of presence and ongoing resistance that defies colonial narratives of Indigenous erasure and victimhood. The exhibition is being managed without permanent Native curatorial staff.<\/p>\n \u201cSurvivance does actually feel like it can encompass some of it,\u201d says Joseph Pierce (Cherokee Nation), an associate professor at Stony Brook University and recent Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, whose 2025 book Speculative Relations is about approaching art and culture through a framework of reciprocity and care rather than as objects of study. \u201cSurvivance makes sense if you\u2019re thinking about works from the early 2000s. This isn\u2019t an acquisition about right now, it\u2019s an acquisition about the last 50 years.\u201d<\/p>\n This acquisition by the Phoenix Art Museum is the third large gift of modern and contemporary Native American art to a major US museum in the past year, following the Art Bridges Foundation and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art last July<\/a> and the New York Historical last February<\/a>. The gift expands the Phoenix Art Museum\u2019s American art collection\u2013\u2013comprised of around 600 objects\u2013\u2013from approximately 25 Native works to more than 200.<\/p>\n Awa Tsireh (Alfonso Roybal), Untitled, around 1930s. William P. Healey Collection of Native American Art at Phoenix Art Museum, Gift of William P. Healey. Photo: Davin Lavikka<\/p>\n The majority of the artists represented in all three gifted collections are deceased, meaning the receiving institutions acquire cultural capital of Indigenous artistic production without the ongoing financial and relational investment that living artists require\u2013\u2013no studio visits, no commissions and no community engagement.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/596202b59e021e9f7275085f613d2249237dd6c3-2000x2073.jpg\"\/)
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