Circles, spokes, zigzags, rivers brings together nine recent paintings and a large-scale sculpture by Grace Rosario Perkins (b. 1986; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Akimel O’odham/Diné). The title of the exhibition describes petroglyphs that connect the artist’s family to her tribal homelands in the southwestern United States, including the vital, yet threatened, waters of the Gila River and Rio Grande. The influence of such longstanding technologies of visual storytelling is evident in Perkins’s symbol-rich art. Flowers, stars, the sun, and spider webs are given significant presence within the systems the artist creates to record her life.

Perkins builds the surfaces of her densely layered paintings with acrylic and spray paint, found materials, personal belongings, and textual fragments through a process of addition and redaction. Guided by intuition, diaristic encounter, a do-it-yourself ethos, spirituality, and plant medicine, the artist references popular and material culture as they converge with more intimate reflections on grief, love, and hope. By working in abstraction, she resists reductive representations of Indigenous identity, instead offering an expansive vision rooted in both ancestral knowledge and the urgencies of now.

Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, spokes, zigzags, rivers is organized by Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs, with Rose Pallone, Curatorial Assistant.