Featuring the perspectives of Native and Indigenous women artists at Angels Gate Art Center Gallery in San Pedro, CA on view October 9, 2025 - January 24, 2026
https://angelsgateart.org/exhibitions/sustainers-of-life/

Curation
Cecelia Caro & Laurie Steelink

Works by
Weshoyot Alvitre, Emily Clarke, Katie Dorame, Eve-Lauryn Little Shell LaFountain, Cara Romero, Corey Stein, and Linda Vallejo

The artists in Sustainers of Life create works that honor Native and Indigenous women as multidimensional beings and sustainers of cultural knowledge and community healing. Personal narratives are woven within broader historical contexts, uplifting individual stories of resilience and survival alongside the realities of colonialism's impact, motherhood, and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis. Sustainers of Life creates space for both mourning losses and celebrating the ongoing resilience of those who nurture and protect life.

Press:
Curate LA - 12 Indigenous Spaces, Exhibitions, and Collectives in Los Angeles to Know Right Now
LA Taco - All-Indigenous Art Exhibit in San Pedro Celebrates Native Women as Knowledge-Keepers

Becoming an Ancestor: Birthing, 2025

Photography, writing

While pregnant with her first child in 2023, the artist was preparing an exhibition about her connection to women in the American pioneer era. She began relating to Sacagawea, who led Lewis and Clark across the west while carrying her infant son. Sacagawea served as translator and cultural guide, though she was also a child bride stolen from her own people. After her son's birth, the artist realized how difficult that journey must have been. The central image, Self Portrait After Sacagawea, was taken in her ninth month of pregnancy days after her uncle's death. It was censored and deemed too risqué for its original intended exhibition. Conveying grief and anxiety, the work radiates strength summoned from ancestral blood. The artist honors Sacagawea's memory through the depiction of ledger book art—a Native practice of recording stories that preserve Indigenous perspectives during times of immense cultural change. LaFountain’s work reflects the immense and sacred ancestral histories mothers carry within their bodies.

LaFountain’s self-portrait is surrounded by her photo essay for Brink Literary Magazine entitled Laugh Like a Thunderbird, the artist’s birthing story. The artist shares her experience becoming a “portal that cracked her open.” Depicting her raw state, LaFountain is shadowed in deep grief and anxiety, having just learned she would need to be cut open to survive the birth of her child, yet she also radiates powerful strength summoned from all the ancestors in her blood, propelling LaFountain forward into her future as a mother.

Laugh Like a Thunderbird published in Brink Literary Magazine, Issue 9 Spring 2025



Becoming an Ancestor: Dying, 2025

Photography, writing

The grief present in LaFountain’s last month of pregnancy at the loss of her uncle Presley was compounded by the loss of his younger brother, her father Bruce, just eighteen months later. This grief was paired with the overwhelming joy of watching her first child, who grew inside her body, grow into his own person. The juxtaposition of birth and death, joy and grief, is a cyclical story of human existence. Becoming a mother, LaFountain became a direct ancestor on this new person's family tree—carrying responsibility to teach the ways of the world to generations that follow. In Ojibwe culture, the northern lights are our ancestors dancing with us in the sky. This photo essay reflects on the most recently passed ancestor, what it means to become an ancestor, and the northern lights visiting to provide comfort when it's needed most.