Dreaming Our Futures: Ojibwe and Ochéthi Sakówi? Artists and Knowledge Keepers

A beautiful collection of the art and life stories of regional Native painters

Dreaming Our Futures features twenty-eight Native painters, primarily Dakota and Ojibwe, who live in the Midwest or have family or tribal connections here. The artists represent a range of generations, professional experience, and genres--including traditional, historical, contemporary, and conceptual themes. The volume presents full-color reproductions of art by each painter, along with bilingual artist statements, biographies, and essays on the representation of Indigenous people in historical context; storytelling and the creative process; and scholarship on several specific artists.

The renowned Grand Portage Ojibwe artist George Morrison declared, ＂I have never tried to prove that I was Indian through my art. Yet, there may remain deeply hidden some remote suggestion of the rock whence I was hewn, the preoccupation of the textural surface, the mystery of the structural and organic element, the enigma of the horizon, or the color of the wind.＂ The variety of images painted by this gathering of artists demonstrates that the strong heritage and powerful traditions of Indigenous painting remain vital and dynamic today.

Dreaming Our Futures accompanies an exhibition at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery in 2024, produced in association with the George Morrison Center for Indigenous Arts at the University of Minnesota.

Artists: Frank Big Bear, David Bradley, Awanigiizhik Bruce, Andrea Carlson, Avis Charley, Fern Cloud, Michelle DeFoe, Jim Denomie, Patrick DesJarlait, Sam English, Carl Gawboy, Joe Geshick, Sylvia Houle, Oscar Howe, George Morrison, Steven Premo, Rabbett Before Horses Strickland, Cole Redhorse Taylor, Roy Thomas, Jonathan Thunder, Thomasina Topbear, Moira Villiard, Kathleen Wall, Star WallowingBull, Dyani White Hawk, Bobby Dues Wilson, Wanbli Mayasleca/Francis J. Yellow, Leah H. Yellowbird, Holly Young.

Contributors: Patricia Marroquin Norby, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Christopher Pexa, U of Minnesota; Mona Susan Power; Diane Wilson.

Brenda J. Child (Red Lake Ojibwe) is Northrop Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota and was recently named a Guggenheim Fellow. She is author of Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community and My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation, winner of the American Indian Book Award.

Howard Oransky is director of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His previous exhibition catalogs include A Tender Spirit, A Vital Form: Arlene Burke Morgan & Clarence Morgan; A Picture Gallery of the Soul; and Covered in Time and History: The Films of Ana Mendieta. He is cofounder of Form + Content Gallery in Minneapolis.