Dana Claxton
Headdress

Artspace is proud to present Hunkpapa Lakota artist Dana Claxton for the Banner Series, marking the first commission by an international First Nations artist in the series.

Dana Claxton's work challenges the ways Indigenous people have been seen and pictured. Working across photography, film and installation, the Hunkpapa Lakota artist interrogates how Indigenous identities have been constructed and erased, while proposing images grounded in sovereignty and cultural continuity. 

This Banner Series presentation brings together two works that reveal competing ways Indigenous lives have been recorded and remembered: one through regalia, adornment and cultural inheritance; the other through bureaucratic language of state surveillance. Together, they expose the tension between Indigenous self-representation and the colonial systems of classification and control. 

In Headdress – Shadae and her Girlz, (2023), a family is obscured by layers of beads, shells and treasured adornments, shifting the veil from concealment to cultural affirmation. Borrowing from the polished aesthetics of fashion photography, Claxton subverts expectations of both portraiture and Indigenous representation. The work's 'headdress' is not a ceremonial object but one assembled from gifts, trade beads, shells, feathers and treasured objects gathered across communities, transforming adornment into an expression of kinship and cultural memory. Rather than withholding identity, the veil shifts attention from the individual face to the relationships and histories carried across generations.

Alongside this, AIM (2010) reproduces declassified FBI surveillance files relating to the American Indian Movement, exposing another form of looking. Produced during decades of federal surveillance of Indigenous political activism, the heavily redacted documents make visible bureaucracy as an instrument of control. If Headdress redirects the gaze through cultural inheritance, AIM demonstrates how institutional power withholds knowledge. Together, the works ask who has the authority to look, record and define Indigenous experience.

'Having these artworks seen on the exterior of the building stimulates the possibility of dialogue in the public sphere for those who are not gallery goers. Seeing indigenous aesthetics and redacted documents pertaining to an indigenous experience, will hopefully spark curiosity to know more.'

– Dana Claxton