Candice Hopkins (citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation), is a curator and executive director and chief curator at Forge, an organization and cultural space dedicated to Indigenous storytelling. This ethos continues in Hopkins’ other curatorial projects, like Indian Theater: Native Art, Performance and Self-Determination, which runs at SITE Santa Fe through September 7.

Indian Theater: Native Art, Performance and Self Determination Comes Home to SITE Santa Fe

After traveling to Canada and the northeastern United States, the exhibit will have a homecoming at SITE. “Indian Theater is about Santa Fe,” says Hopkins. “People are going to be able to witness a history that their community has been at the heart of shaping.”

The idea for the show began in 2014, when Hopkins was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art and saw a document called Indian Theater. Written by the founding president of Institute of American Indian Art, Lloyd Kiva New, and students, it represented a flashpoint in Indigenous performance. “It was really profound and foundational,” Hopkins explains. “They were just starting to create the idea of what they were terming ‘new Native theater.’”

“It’s not simply an exhibition,” Hopkins explains. “It’s activated by performance. There are all kinds of ways this can be experienced differently because performance is at the heart of it.”

What is Indian Theater All About?

Throughout its run, Indian Theater will house both one-time and ongoing performances from Indigenous artists, in works created from the 1960s to the present day. “So many Native artists are also performers,” says Hopkins, whose partner is the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Raven Chacon (Diné). “I think it’s one of the characteristics of Native artists; they are interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary.”

Among the singular performances, attendees will see renowned Indigenous creatives like Eric-Paul Riege (Diné), a fiber artist who creates sculpture, wearable works, as well as installations. Icons like Bad Bunny wear his work, and he’s going to show a series of jewelry pieces. “They are made at the scale so they could adorn the Navajo gods,” Hopkins says. “He does these amazing durational performances where he transforms himself, and you can really see these sculptures come alive. It’s really special.”

Indian Theater is just one of the ways Hopkins is working towards reshaping and informing the dialogue surrounding Native art, and what it means and feels like to be an Indigenous artist making work in 2026. She says, “It’s a way of Indigenous world-building.”

Story by Maria Manuela
Photo Courtesy of Art Basel

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