Walla Walla, Walawalałáma, sometimes Walúulapam, are a Sahaptin Indigenous people of the Northwest Plateau. The duplication in their name expresses the diminutive form. The name Walla Walla is translated several ways but most often as "many waters".
Marie Watt is a contemporary artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. Enrolled in the Seneca Nation of Indians, Watt has created work primarily with textile arts and community collaboration centered on diverse Native American themes.
The Tamástslikt Cultural Institute is a museum and research institute located on the Umatilla Indian Reservation near Pendleton in eastern Oregon. It is the only Native American museum along the Oregon Trail. The institute is dedicated to the culture of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla tribes of Native Americans. The main permanent exhibition of the museum provides a history of the culture of three tribes, and of the reservation itself. The museum also has a second hall for temporary exhibitions of specific types of Native American art, craftwork, history, and folklore related to the tribes.
The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art is an art museum in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. The Eiteljorg houses an extensive collection of visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas as well as Western American paintings and sculptures collected by businessman and philanthropist Harrison Eiteljorg (1903–1997). The museum houses one of the finest collections of Native contemporary art in the world.
Emmi Whitehorse is a Native American painter and printmaker. She was born in Crownpoint, New Mexico and is a member of the Navajo Nation. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Alvin Eli Amason is a Sugpiaq Alaskan painter and sculptor. He was raised in Kodiak and is of Alutiiq ancestry. He received his Master of Fine Arts from Arizona State University and taught for several years at Navajo Community College. For seventeen years, he taught at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and was the head of the Alaska Native Art studies program there. After retiring, he was asked to join the Department of Art at the University of Alaska, Anchorage and develop an Alaska Native Art curriculum.
William Victor Higgins was an American painter and teacher, born in Shelbyville, Indiana. At the age of fifteen, he moved to Chicago, where he studied at the Art Institute in Chicago and at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. In Paris he was a pupil of Robert Henri, René Menard and Lucien Simon, and when he was in Munich he studied with Hans von Hayek. He was an associate of the National Academy of Design. Higgins moved to Taos, New Mexico in 1913 and joined the Taos Society of Artists in 1917. In 1923 he was on the founding board of the Harwood Foundation with Elizabeth (Lucy) Harwood and Bert Phillips.
John Mix Stanley was an artist-explorer, an American painter of landscapes, and Native American portraits and tribal life. Born in the Finger Lakes region of New York, he started painting signs and portraits as a young man. In 1842 he traveled to the American West to paint Native American life. In 1846 he exhibited a gallery of 85 of his paintings in Cincinnati and Louisville. During the Mexican–American War, he joined Colonel Stephen Watts Kearney's expedition to California and painted accounts of the campaign, as well as aspects of the Oregon Territory.
Kay WalkingStick is a Native American landscape artist and a member of the Cherokee Nation. Her later landscape paintings, executed in oil paint on wood panels often include patterns based on Southwest American Indian rugs, pottery, and other artworks.
Corwin "Corky" Clairmont is a printmaker and conceptual and installation artist from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation. Known for his high concept and politically charged works, Clairmont seeks to explore situations that affect Indian Country historically and in contemporary times.
I don't put work out that gives solutions but provokes questions. - Corky Clairmont
Lorenzo Clayton is a contemporary Navajo sculptor, printmaker, conceptual and installation artist. His artwork is notable for exploring the concepts of spirituality through abstraction.
Joe Feddersen is a Colville sculptor, painter, photographer and mixed-media artist. He is known for creating artworks strong in geometric patterns reflective of what is seen in the environment, landscape and his Native American heritage.
Jeffrey A. Gibson is an American Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee painter and sculptor. He has lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York; Hudson, New York; and Germantown, New York.
Neil Meitzler (1930–2009) was an American painter, well known in the Pacific Northwest for his landscapes and scenes of nature, rendered in a distinctive, modern style. He is often associated with the 'Northwest School' art movement.
Kesler Edward "Kes" Woodward is an American artist, art historian and curator. Known for his colorful paintings of northern landscapes, he was awarded the first Alaska Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts in 2004. Woodward has also written extensively on the Art of the circumpolar North and has curated exhibitions which have toured Alaska, California, Oregon, Washington, and Georgia.
Wendy Red Star is an Apsáalooke contemporary multimedia artist born in Billings, Montana, in the United States. Her humorous approach and use of Native American images from traditional media draw the viewer into her work, while also confronting romanticized representations. She juxtaposes popular depictions of Native Americans with authentic cultural and gender identities. Her work has been described as "funny, brash, and surreal". Red Star was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2024.
Amanda Viola Snyder, née Tester, was a contemporary American artist from Portland, Oregon. She produced hundreds of drawings, paintings and woodcuts, and held 32 solo exhibitions.
James Pringle Cook is an American painter based in Tucson, Arizona, known nationally for expressive, monumental landscapes and urban scenes that employ vigorous brushwork and thick, impasto surfaces and move between realism and passages of abstraction. He has explored a wide range of geographies across the United States and subjects from craggy mountains and seascapes to industrial accidents to the figure. Curators and critics, however, generally agree that his work is as much about pure painting as it is about his convincing recapitulations of the world and a sense of place. Museum Director Robert Yassin described Cook as "a painter who is in love with painting [whose] bravura use of paint is akin to the abstract expressionists; unlike them, however, he provides viewers with a recognizable reality, ordered by his own personal vision and controlled by his technical mastery." Discussing his urban works, Margaret Regan wrote, "Cook is so skilled a painter he can turn almost anything into a thing of beauty […] His bravura handling of the paint is what matters: his pure layers of color, slabbed in thick gobs onto his linen canvases with a palette knife, glistening like butter."
Helen O'Toole is an Irish-born painter based in the United States, who is known for abstract paintings suggestive of landscape. She has exhibited throughout Ireland and the United States, in Singapore, and at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Portland Art Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, Tacoma Art Museum, and Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Her work has been featured in the journals Artforum, Arts Magazine, New Art Examiner, and Zyzzyva, as well as the Chicago Tribune,The Irish Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and National Public Radio. Art writers frequently discuss the interplay in her work between abstraction, the evocation of otherworldly light, land and space, and a commitment to investigating meaning through a painting process akin to the processes of cultivation and excavation. Artforum critic James Yood wrote, "echoing the often inchoate quality of nature, her paint surges toward mystery and hints at a kind of chiaroscuro of the spirit"; curator Bonnie Laing-Malcomson suggests her "richly colored monumental paintings evoke the moody landscape of her rural Irish homeland, summoning the force of J. M. W. Turner and Mark Rothko." She has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, a Contemporary Northwest Art Award, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award (2013), among other awards. O'Toole lives in Seattle, Washington and is Professor of Art and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Program at the University of Washington.
Brenda Mallory is a Native American visual/sculpture/mixed media/installation artist and a member of the Cherokee Nation. Her artwork ranges from small decorations to large sculptures and utilizes a variety of materials such as handmade papers, cloth, wax, and recycled objects.
