{"id":16239,"date":"2025-06-26T12:12:17","date_gmt":"2025-06-26T12:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/16239\/"},"modified":"2025-06-26T12:12:17","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T12:12:17","slug":"cara-romeros-indigenous-futurist-lens-resists-erasure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/16239\/","title":{"rendered":"Cara Romero\u2019s Indigenous Futurist Lens Resists Erasure"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe photographs of Cara Romero<\/a> operate on the precipice between the risk of death and possibility of self-dissolution. A woman buried in sand stares resolutely at the viewer, or a figure floats in a body of water below an oil field. Her lens fuses Indigenous ancestral memory with the immediacy of pop culture. Her world-building, indebted to centuries-old oral tradition, doesn\u2019t merely picture survival; it renders it mythic, futuristic, and, crucially, still unfinished.<\/p>\n

\n\tDefying the erasure of California Indian peoples, Romero, an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, sees her work as \u201cpainting with the light of photography,\u201d as she told ARTnews during a recent interview. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a word in our language for photography. The figures [in my work] represent ideas and stories bigger than themselves\u2013\u2013and at the heart of my work is shared storytelling, representation, and collaboration with loved ones, friends, and family appearing in a kind of repertory.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\n\tRomero is having the greatest exposure of her career to date, having featured in more than 10 museum group exhibitions since last fall, including \u201cSmoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time\u201d\u00a0at the Hudson River Museum (through August 31) and \u201cSecond Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene\u201d at the Cantor Art Center (through August 3).<\/p>\n

\n\tAt Dartmouth\u2019s Hood Museum in New Hampshire, she is the subject of her first institutional solo show, \u201cPan\u00fbp\u00fcn\u00fcw\u00fcgai,\u201d a Chemehuevi word that translates as both \u201csource of light, like sun coming over the mountains\u201d and \u201canimating the inanimate, giving spirit, or living light.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe spirit of the light, or living light, references the painting of light with photography, bringing these stories to life and people together,\u201d Romero said of the exhibition\u2019s title. \u201cThese gifts photography has brought to my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tCara Romero, TV Indians (Sepia), 2017.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9Cara Romero\/Courtesy the artist\/Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth<\/p>\n

\n\tRomero\u2019s wry, autochthonous lens cuts through the stereotypes of Native people, women in particular, placing them at the center of the American landscape. In TV Indians (2017), for example, a group of Indigenous people wearing historic garb are seen in a desert landscape, a mound of vintage televisions behind them. This pile of TVs refers to the Bay Area Shellmounds, sacred burial sites of the Ohlone and Coast Miwok peoples on land prized by developers, and imbues them with a moribund quality, not onto the decidedly animate subjects, but instead upon the Hollywood caricatures, which flash on the screens behind them, that they are laying to rest.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Romero\u2019s images, an Indigenous futurist aesthetic emerges, as in 3 Sisters (2022), in which the titular figures are perched on a cloud against a purple celestial sky. Donning early-aughts rectangular sunglasses and Evoking it-girl goddesses, their bluish skin is tattooed from head to toe, in motifs specific to each sitter\u2019s tribe (Anishanaabe, Pueblo, and Sioux, from left to right). They don early-aughts rectangular sunglasses, and wires carry life-giving energy from their bodies to the rest of the world. Romero\u2019s 3 Sisters recalls depictions of nude women from across art history, while simultaneously upending the male and colonial gaze completely, reclaiming space\u2014both literally and figuratively\u2014for Native womanhood.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tCara Romero, 3 Sisters, 2022.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9Cara Romero\/Courtesy the artist\/Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth<\/p>\n

\n\tThese Native women confront a world that seeks to dominate them, not as passive figures but as agents of deliberate refusal, according to curator Rebecca DiDimenico, who included Romero in a recent exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado. She added, \u201cHer work disrupts not only how Native bodies are represented in the art world, but where they are allowed to exist at all\u2013\u2013refusing the boundaries that would confine Indigenous subjects to ethnographic display or historical past.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMoments of levity abound through Romero\u2019s saturated colors and campy pop iconography. Her \u201cImagining Indigenous Futures\u201d series features subjects adorned in stripes and traditional tattoos, suspended in space with corn, or haloed and enrobed in raven feathers. By contrast, Arla Lucia (2019) layers markers of Indigeneity\u2014dentalia, bead and quillwork earrings, a heraldic necklace\u2014onto a portrait of Wonder Woman, exalting Native feminine power through materials and myth. (The photograph features in both her Hood Museum survey and \u201cIndigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always<\/a>,\u201d curated by late artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at Rutgers\u2019s Zimmerli Art Museum.)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"View<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tInstallation view of \u201cCara Romero: Pan\u00fbp\u00fcn\u00fcw\u00fcgai (Living Light),\u201d 2025, at the Hood Museum of Art<\/a>, Dartmouth, showing Arla Lucia (2019), at left.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Rob Strong\/Courtesy Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth<\/p>\n

\n\tHer interest in infusing pop culture into her images, Romero said, had been a motivation since childhood \u201cbecause of our absence\u2014and complicated presence\u2014in media. We were never in Life Magazine, never in art books, never in the anthropological canon except as objects. But I also admired the photography of dominant American pop culture. Now, I\u2019m creating a narrative by placing us in different decades, responding to that absence with a quirky presence.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe added, \u201cI blend time to say: we have our own lived experiences woven into the fabric of America. We\u2019re not all historic or bygone. We\u2019re still here, living tremendous lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tCara Romero, Ha\u2019ina \u2018ia mai, 2024.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9Cara Romero\/Courtesy the artist<\/p>\n

\n\tThat insistent refrain of \u201cWe are still here\u201d present across Romero\u2019s oeuvre is best exemplified in works like Ha\u2019ina\u2019ia mai (2024), a black-and-white image in which a lei-draped Native Hawaiian woman rests on the seabed beneath the water\u2019s surface, her hands extended in a submerged greeting, a gesture of welcome, survival, and futurity.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Romero also turns her lens on issues of climate change, specifically from an Indigenous perspective, like in Evolvers (2019) where feather-crowned children sprint across hot sand in a desert sprinkled with wind turbines. In Weshoyot (2021), Weshoyot Alvitre, who is dressed in traditional Tongva garments, floats in a deluge, cleaving nets that try to catch her. Her apocalyptic compositions cut through the distant, desensitized haze of \u201cclimate porn\u201d imagery that often accompanies these discussions, according to Eve Schillo, a photography curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At LACMA\u2019s \u201cNature on Notice,\u201d Romero\u2019s Water Memory (2015) depicts two traditionally dressed Native figures in free-fall through water. Their descent is neither escape nor surrender, but an act of survivance in which memory of the past lives of the land are carried forth. The dammed rivers that submerged their homelands are remembered within the context of the climate crisis that now threatens all waters.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDigital courtesy Museum Associat<\/p>\n

\n\tEntangled with the colonial gaze, Romero\u2019s images don\u2019t just disrupt the medium\u2019s stereotypes but flip the structural frameworks that once sought to catalog, freeze, and erase Indigenous life altogether. In the 19th century, ethnographic photographers like Edward Curtis and Ansel Adams staged Native people in motley clothing borrowed from sundry other tribes, posing them in landscapes conspicuously cleared of settler presence to construct the fiction of a vanished race\u2014all while obfuscating the violence that made such images possible.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI call it the \u2018one story narrative,\u2019\u201d Romero said of that 19th-century imagery. \u201cThere are thousands of different stories from our community, all totally valid.\u201d This expansive vision feels particularly charged given Romero\u2019s position as Chemehuevi, among California\u2019s most systematically disappeared peoples and whose continued existence challenges the myth of a bygone people. Her pan-Indigenous casting becomes a kind of visual insurgency: Ohlone and Coast Miwok burial grounds, Native Hawaiian waters, Sioux beadwork traditions. It\u2019s coalition building as aesthetic strategy, each collaboration a small act of resurrection against colonial archives that sought to fix Indigenous peoples in amber, forever in the past tense.<\/p>\n

\n\tRomero continued, \u201cWhen you can check internal biases about who Native people are\u2014especially when it comes to photography harnessed by turn-of-the-century ethnographic photography\u2014to be making contemporary work, it does a lot psychologically quite quickly. It says \u2018Oh, these people are living,\u2019 and \u2018Oh, these people have a sense of humor,\u2019 and \u2018Oh, they have a shared sense of humanity that I can identify with.\u2019 All those things are clever.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tCara Romero, Sand & Stone, 2020. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tForge Project Collection, traditional lands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck<\/p>\n

\n\tHumor is a core strategy Romero employs across various bodies of work. She draws viewers in with jocular visuals and cheeky titles, only to deliver a resonant and psychological gut punch. In Sand and Stone (2020), for example, a woman with long jet-black hair lays buried in the Mojave Desert, illustrating the creation story of the locale\u2019s Southern Paiute people. The Mojave, like many desert landscapes, has become a psychic playground for non-Natives in search of reinvention or forms of transcendence. (Burning Man is held on Northern Paiute land.) Romero\u2019s work doesn\u2019t imagine a new Eden; it recalls the one that\u2019s always been there, one that has repeatedly been buried under sand, stone, and spectacle. In thinking of the migration of recent disaffected settlers seeking spiritual redemption on stolen lands, an understanding of the bond between people and land becomes especially poignant.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat interests [non-Native] people about our cultures tends to be the culturally private,\u201d Romero said. \u201cYet we, without a choice, understand Western culture completely.\u201d Even amid the asymmetry, she feels that she must \u201cgive generously and willingly,\u201d offering viewers not just critique but communion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The photographs of Cara Romero operate on the precipice between the risk of death and possibility of self-dissolution.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":16240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,16141,16142,1033,171,16143,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-16239","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-cara-romero","11":"tag-contributor","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-hood-museum-of-art","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114749606893538716","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}