Summer Winter: Margaret Roach Wheeler and The Language of Place
By Kateri Smith (Blackfoot/Métis/Anatolian Greek Descent)
Santa Fe, NM – With the opening of The Language of Place in July, two shows have already proven themselves to be worth the visit. The first features a veteran of the Native American fashion scene, Margaret Roach Wheeler (Chickasaw/Choctaw), whose show Summer Winter: Margaret Roach Wheeler is in Zane Bennett Gallery’s first floor, while upstairs is A Language in Place featuring Heidi Brandow (Diné/Kānaka Maoli), Shaarbek Amankul (Indigenous Kyrgyz), Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk), and Clementine Bordeaux (Sičáŋǧu Lakótapi).
Summer Winter: Margaret Roach Wheeler at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art
Summer Winter showcases the breadth of Wheeler’s work, emphasizing her textile and fiber-based storytelling. The wide selection of the artist’s pieces includes a favorite of mine, Nafoka Ahilha Dance Dress, made from fine Belgian flax. Photographs don’t capture the complexity of this deceivingly simple dress; it can only be appreciated in person. Three pieces of her Marriage of the Snow Goose series, originally conceived as a performance piece, are completed with a headdress featuring birds that appeared in the performance. Marriage of the Snow Goose-Bride‘s prominent swan hood swoops around the face while its wings embrace the shoulders.
Wheeler collaborated with Marwin Begaye (Diné), printmaker and University of Oklahoma professor, to create two pieces: Raven’s Dream, a screen print on handwoven wool, and Cultural Algorithms, a woodblock and silkscreen on Belgian flax. Easily overlooked, Water Flow is a unique piece featuring looping motifs that date back more than a thousand years and can be seen in artwork from Cahokia, a settlement of the Mississippian Culture that traded with the ancestral Chickasaw.
Turning around the corner, one is (pleasantly) confronted by the beautiful blanket by Taloa Underwood (Chickasaw) and produced by Mahota Textiles, a Chickasaw-owned company. This blanket, To Carry Sweet Things, features sweetgrass that almost shines, along with an exaggerated woven pattern border, a statement of cultural resilience and warmth.
While Wheeler is most known for her weavings, this is not the only work that is shown. A series of her Ancestral Images–Tribute to the Mandans (1999) is on view. These nine images depict Wheeler’s tribute to the tribe, based on Karl Bodmer’s illustrations from the 1832–1834 Missouri River Expedition. In just four years, the Mandan population would decline to 125 due to smallpox. This series features thin, almost ghostlike, ethereal images where color is used sparingly to significant effect and leads back to the main space.
The Language of Place at form & concept
Ascending the gallery’s sleek, if slightly slippery, glass stairs (they are ADA accessible with an elevator) is form & concept, where contemporary, often edgy or playful, works are presented. This show, The Language of Place, is no exception. Co-curated by Shaarbek Amankul and Heidi Brandow, it showcases collaborations and interplay among the four Indigenous artists from diverse backgrounds. Two of Brandow’s works from her Keia’ Āina/ Keia Kino–This Land/This Body series can be seen: remembering your name (2025) and remembering your song (2025) in acrylic, plaster, graphite, and resin. These speak to the environmentally vulnerable ecology in Hawai’i. The appearance of the vulnerable ʻIʻiwi bird reminds viewers of the ecological loss that parallels potential cultural erosion in the face of colonization, especially in Hawai’i.
Tom Jones’s (Ho-Chunk) Kyrgyzstan Plant Study #1 and #5 (2025) are paired with Clementine Bordeaux’s A Humble Walk to the Mountains (2025) in the following gallery. These address the reciprocal relationships Indigenous peoples have with the land. Jones’s work features a variety of materials, including archival photographs, beadwork, velvet, salmon skin, and paint. These studies are grouped with photography that flanks or surrounds the beadwork. The beadwork’s floral design echoes the colors of the enhanced photographs, lending the series a bold and brash Pop Art feel, elevating and complementing the beadwork.
Bordeaux’s moccasins evoke her visit to the plains of Kyrgyzstan and the many similarities that she observed with her Northern Plains home. Inspired by the mountains, her moccasins are crafted with four directional colors central to Lakota worldview. While the materials used are typical of the Great Plains, these moccasins are an undeniable expression of the artist’s visit to the far-off country and a testament to her adventurous spirit and artistic worldview. Though time-consuming to produce, especially with Bordeaux’s assistant art history and visual culture professorship at the University of California–Santa Cruz, I am sure that visitors will be looking to see more of Bordeaux’s work in the future.
Next, prints by Shaarbek Amankul speak to the evolving contemporary Kyrgyz identity after independence, which continues to bear the scars of Soviet occupation. Amankul’s works resonate with the still-recovering nation and the reassertion of ethnic Kyrgyz identity. Lenin Stands–Lenin Fell Down (2017) speaks to the identity of the nation as historically and majority Islamic, and though statues and symbols of the officially atheist Soviet Union stand. The statue was removed with little fanfare or documentation in 2003. Another print, The New Breeds of the Steppe (2023), also speaks to the evolving culture, once marked by horse gatherings in Kyrgyzstan, which is now dominated by cars. The artist enhanced this by adding even more cars to the image, evoking a frantic jumble of vehicles that everyone has likely experienced.
The final room is dedicated to works created in collaboration by the artists, featuring a video installation, textiles, and ceramic plates. The most imposing piece is Shyrdak, a felted and embroidered weaving in bold colors by Brandow and Almankul, which is flanked by six plates, three on each side, half of which feature tigers. Caspian tigers were native to Kyrgyzstan. However, they went extinct locally under Russian colonization and are believed to be functionally extinct since the 1970s. Yet scattered sightings throughout the region remain, seemingly a call back to the series by Brandow, whose avian subjects have only been deemed threatened.
These two shows speak across generations and geographies, rooted in Indigenous worldviews yet forward-looking in form. While many galleries have events during Native Art Week, this gallery is not one to miss!
Both shows run through Native Art Week. Summer Winter runs through August 17, and The Language of Place continues through October 18, 2025.
Links
- Summer Winter: Margaret Roach Wheeler, Zane Bennett Gallery, 435 S. Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM
- The Language of Place, form & concept, 435 S. Guadalupe, Street, Santa Fe, NM
- FAAM Native Art Week Overview
- Kateri Smith, LinkedIn