Sustainers of Life
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 is a transgenerational exploration of what it means to become an ancestor. As I became a mother I lost my uncle and my own father. I was becoming an ancestor to a future direct lineage that will come after me, while these two powerful men in my life, both also artists who taught me how to be an artist, left this realm and took on their new roles as ancestors of the past. Birth and death, joy and grief. We carry all of the DNA of many lineages within our bodies while creating new bodies, literally bridging generations through time and space. Mothers are the carriers of the people. This very intimate and personal work is also an investigation into becoming a portal through generations.
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 is a transgenerational exploration of what it means to become an ancestor. As I became a mother I lost my uncle and my own father. I was becoming an ancestor to a future direct lineage that will come after me, while these two powerful men in my life, both also artists who taught me how to be an artist, left this realm and took on their new roles as ancestors of the past. Birth and death, joy and grief. We carry all of the DNA of many lineages within our bodies while creating new bodies, literally bridging generations through time and space. Mothers are the carriers of the people. This very intimate and personal work is also an investigation into becoming a portal through generations.
Becoming an Ancestor: Birthing
Laugh Like a Thunderbird photo essay and Self Portrait After Sacagewea, 2025
While I was pregnant with my first child I was working on an exhibition about my connection to women in the American pioneer era. The show, Threads and Trails: Contemplations of Our Herstories, was installed at the Great Plains Art Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska at the end of 2023. As I was preparing my work for that show I started reading about, thinking about, and ultimately relating to the ultimate pioneer woman, Sacagawea. It was she who led Lewis and Clark across the west, and began the whole movement. It was the presence of her and her infant son that signaled to the Indigenous peoples they met along the way that this was not a war party, but instead the first tourists. She was their translator and their cultural guide. She was also a child bride stolen from her own people. Her story became even more stunning to me after my son was born and I realized deeply in my body how hard that journey must have been for her. I installed the show when my son was 4 months old, the same age Sacagawea's son was when they set off on the expedition. This body of work was born out of my connection to this incredible historical ancestral mother. The prototype for this work almost made it into that exhibition, but the image, a self portrait of me in the beginning of my ninth month of pregnancy just days after the death of my uncle, was deemed too risque or indecent to share with all audiences at the museum. I was told that school groups and certain other viewers would not be invited into the gallery space if the work was in the show. I did not want my work to prohibit anyone from being able to experience the rest of the exhibition, so I decided not to include it. It didn't feel ready yet anyway, and it was clearly not the right venue for such intimate work.
The photo that was censored out of the previous show is now in this exhibition, Sustainers of Life at Angels Gate Cultural Center. The self portrait is surrounded by a photo essay I wrote for Brink Literary Magazine entitled Laugh Like a Thunderbird. It is my birthing story, imperfect, raw, real. Becoming a portal cracked me open. The pregnant woman in the portrait is shadowed in deep grief, anxiety at having just learned that she would likely have to be cut open to survive having her baby, and yet also a powerful strength summoned from all the ancestors in her blood propelling her forward into her future as a mother.
Ledger book art evolved from a long history of Native peoples drawing their stories, first on rocks, then on hides, and eventually into ledger books that were meant to keep track of inventories by Indian Agents in the mid-19th century. These powerful first hand historical records have preserved Indigenous perspectives on a time of immense cultural change. Contemporary Native American artists use ledger book paper as a nod to our ancestors who kept records, many draw in the iconic pictographic styles developed by the original ledger book artists. My way to honor and contribute to this art form is to incorporate this paper into my photographic work. I've done multiple series of photographs on ledger book paper, one about the west's own creation of a self image of the Wild West, and a series of cyanotypes using California Native plants and Mission model building kits.
Self Portrait After Sacagawea is in honor of the memory of Sacagawea as a mother, a pioneer, and an ancestral hero. I am Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and our lineage is similar to that of Sacagawea's child in the mixing of Indigenous and French blood and culture. She led a party of men who would take most of the credit for "opening" the west to American pioneers. It's a complicated weight to bear on her memory, being part of the beginnings of the gentrification of the west. She couldn't have known what would come from that expedition, but she was the ultimate pioneer. It was during her era too that ledger book art was just beginning, so it was fitting to overlay ledger paper on this self portrait. This is a record of the histories that mothers carry within their bodies.
Becoming an Ancestor: Dying
Becoming an Ancestor (Dancing Northern Lights), photo essay and self portrait, 2025
The grief that was present in my last month of pregnancy at the loss of my uncle Presley was compounded with the loss of his younger brother, my father Bruce, just 18 months later. Grief paired with the overwhelming joy of watching a small human that grew inside my body grow into his own person. This pairing of birth and death, joy and grief, is the cyclical story of being a human. When I became a mother I became a direct ancestor on this new person’s family tree. We have a responsibility to the generations that come after us to teach them the ways of the world. We look to our ancestors when we are lost. We learn and pass down their stories, we carry them in every cell in our bodies, combining countless people from all over the world in our veins.
In Ojibwe culture, the northern lights are our ancestors dancing with us in the sky. This photo essay is a reflection 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 the most.