I can feel it through my thin sweater – the rich light passing through the hills, full of promises, confirming the arrival of spring. That morning, in the ancestral home of Wabanaki Federation, a local Penobscot woman told me that “Sìkʷan” means “it is spring.” As Maytime Sun illuminates the land, another kind of lighting unfolds inside the Hood Art Museum: the radiation of Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero, an evocative work whose lenses exud their own lives on indigenous existence. Given Romero’s origin as a Californian native artist, it’s a vital light, a group underrated in the contemporary art landscape, but still largely targeting the Southwest and Plains Native traditions, saying nothing, saying nothing, saying nothing is a profound discredit to the local population of California.
Romero’s biggest solo show to date “Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)” until August 9, the class has pop culture camps, bright colors and intentionally overdue monumental tableaux, which are conceived, and these components keep the native memory, humanity and humor clear in no way.
consider Television Indians (2011), four traditionally dressed figures stand next to the Moorish TV hills, their screens flashing with stereotyped indigenous peoples, a sharp contrast between the manifestation of existence and media distortion. Here, Romero’s theme sits here en bancas if deliberating on their own false statements, their collective existence forms a court that judges the images that define them.
See also: Artist Edie Fake imagines affirming the future of gender at Chicago’s MCA
In the United States, natives are the tension inherent in national mythology, redefining the gaze of non-local observers, whether consciously or not. Romero’s contemporary visual design is an act of self-mastery, echoing the concept of sensory sovereignty by Chemehuevi scholar Joshua B. Glenn: “Art and sensory forms can both act as barriers to hungry listening, and provide structures shared for the natives to get them in.” The confrontation with the deeply rooted American myth extends to Romero’s The first American doll Portrait series. Features of the same name Amber Morning Star (2022) and other natives, these life-size dolls, decorated in their selected outfits, provide more accurate local representation, and are played vigorously at the American Girl Doll Company.
But maybe it is KAA (2017) or Three sisters (2022) Get your attention – Emphasize how Romero redefines the way audience and camera interpolate. Here, her models include her daughter, close family and friends, including women and young men, reflecting the vibrant and diverse community she is trying to represent. But they are not romanticized or deoxygenated; they do not generalize a Pocahontas type or Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Instead, like children, they are the heart of the body outside Romero’s body, which is the pain and beauty of her work.
In a country where many technological innovations were born in the world, from AI to genetic engineering, Google Image searches for “Native Americans” still produce expectations: black and white photos staged inaccurate, inaccurately dressed characters, unwilling to disappear, anonymous landscapes. The disappearing race myth still exists. What is intelligence without nuance, or what is trauma, I dare say?
This tension between visibility and absence also plagues the history of Dartmouth College, home to the museum where Cara Romero’s program now lives. Samson Occom, Secretary Mohegan, raised funds for the funds that would become Dartmouth and never set foot on campus. Ironically, the school seems to solve this with Occam’s razor: for most of its history, there is nothing to welcome at all. Until 1970, President John Kemeny tried to turn this absence into presence, launching the Native American program at Dartmouth and redefining the removal of OCCOM as creating debt.
Romero’s subjectivity challenges the familiar tension in the now-criticized DEI framework: the difference between equality and equity. With the treatment of everyone equally, it is fair to realize that individuals need tailored tools to succeed. exist Amedee (2025), an amazing character The first American doll The series is a Hawaiian local Hawaiian woman stuffed into an ocher lei and a green hula skirt. These are the equipment she chose, not the props imposed by the outside world, but the cultural symbols worn with pride. She exudes power-directly staring, her pose authority-announces the visual vocabulary displayed by ethnography and reverses colonial gaze.
Same 2 (2024) Promote audience rejection. A nude image with green braids and vertical neon stripes (black and white under neon lights) looks like it’s away from eye contact. Her painted body turns both into armor and hallucination, a visual static that repels projection. The effect is alienated, even the spectrum, evoking the blue alien heroine The fifth elementits opera performance distracted the audience and was slaughtered silently. Here we are also questioned what wonders conceal the mirror and what forces are in the removal of the behavior.
Decoupling outer space from the dominance of Silicon Valley futurism, where the private capital claims to be the claim of stars, peak (2022) offers retro astronaut drifting in the zero gravity field of heirloom corn. Suspended beyond linear time, the native figures lying on their backs stare, passing by the audience, arms slightly raised, wearing camping blue spacesuits and old-fashioned helmets. Their posture is open but agnostic, and I remembered a quiet refusal to conquer. This scene replaces extraction or domination, using memory, sustenance and survival as seeds.
The relief of “panûpünüwügai” allows it to dance on everything that light touches. Next year, it will move to the Phoenix Art Museum near the Chemehuevi Indian Reservation.
