Shapeshifting Lineages
Shapeshifting Lineages: Contemporary Native Transformations in Video
Date: November 20th 2025 to January 15th 2026
Artists: Sky Hopinka, Erica Lord, Skawennati, Anna Tsouhlarakis, Kathleen Wall
Curated by: Chanee Choi / Consultant: Lara Evans
Presented by: The New Media Caucus Header/Footer Gallery
This online exhibition brings together five contemporary Native artists who use video to explore the transformation of body, land, and digital identity. Inspired by Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art (Peabody Essex Museum, 2012), As the Shapeshifting catalogue reminds us, Native art is always actively developing, always becoming. In this context, video becomes a dynamic medium for that continual process of becoming.
To frame these works, I created five interconnected 3D environments that resonate with each artist’s identity and practice. Visitors enter the exhibition as avatars and freely navigate these virtual spaces on the website, experiencing each video piece as if moving among a series of immersive, themed theaters.
Through acts of digital shapeshifting, these artists assert that change itself is sovereignty. Their videos reveal Native art beyond static identity, toward living motion—an ongoing re-creation of self, land, and story within the expanded field of the screen.
Following George Longfish and Joan Randall’s idea of land base as the fabric of place, history, culture, and spirituality, the works ground transformation within Indigenous relationships to land and kinship. Margaret Dubin describes this as a hybrid simultaneity, where old and new coexist, collapsing Western hierarchies of art and artifact.
Each artist enacts what Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie called, claiming the camera for our own, turning a tool of surveillance into self-representation. In doing so, they answer James Luna’s conviction that Native art speaks for Indian people first yet remains open to all who listen.