Telling a Richer Story | Phoenix Art Museum

By Norman Kolpas

Imagine a museum where a vibrantly expressive figurative canvas by the late Luiseño painter Fritz Scholder might hang beside a surrealistic work from Pablo Picasso, their proximity inspiring fresh insights on the nature of artistic expression. Or, perhaps, a modernist collage by the late Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940-1925, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes) might enter into visual dialogue with, say, a mixed-media shadow box by artist/filmmaker Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), provoking contemplation of the conceptual and narrative powers of seemingly abstract creations.

Truth be told, such opportunities for 20th- and 21st-century Native artists to possess their rightful place on the wall beside other contemporary creators have been far too few. That issue has been feeling ever more important of late at an esteemed institution in the heart of Southwest tribal cultures: the Phoenix Art Museum. “If we’re really going to define ourselves as a great modern American art collection, we need to make sure that it is also representative of those Native voices and artists,” observes Jeremy Mikolajczak, who joined the museum as director and CEO in April 2022.

Such a dream of more representation, a turning point in how the public considers Native American voices in the Western art canon, began to become a reality for the museum on August 26, 2026. That day debuted select pieces from the recent major donation of 185 artworks by 20th- and 21st-century Native artists from the William P. Healey Collection in the exhibition The Way We Came: A Century of Indigenous Art. Standing as the single largest gift of Native art received by the institution in its 65-plus year history, in the future, pieces from the group will be regularly integrated into the broader collection and into other exhibitions to inspire new insights for museumgoers.

During Healey’s childhood in Long Island, New York, he first became fascinated with the art of the American West, growing up with Charles M. Russell prints on the walls of his family home. Moving westward after college, he began amassing a widely respected personal collection of art by the likes of Russell, Frederic Remington, Maynard Dixon, Edward Borein, Joseph Henry Sharp and many others. But, in the early 2010s, Healey reached a turning point.

On a visit to Heard Museum, just blocks away from the Phoenix Art Museum, he witnessed its deeply moving permanent installation on the Indian boarding schools that, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, forced Native youths to leave their families and homelands and assimilate into American culture. “I asked myself,” he recalls, “‘How can I tell this story through the art I collect?’”

With that question foremost in his mind, Healey changed his focus from primarily Western art to acquiring the best possible examples of Native American art of the 20th and 21st centuries, including work by artists who came out of the groundbreaking tribal-run Santa Fe Indian School and, later, the Institute of American Indian Arts. “I had to go on a whole new learning curve,” the collector admits. As his guide and teacher, he reached out to the acclaimed and widely collected Diné artist Tony Abeyta.

“I’d met Tony before and owned a couple of his paintings,” Healey says. “And I told him, ‘I know absolutely zero about the subject, but I’d like to accomplish something that tells the positive story of Native American art and artists of the 20th century.” Abeyta signed on to be his guide, helping to connect him with top artists still working today and important pieces available for purchase. Healey also gives special mention to two dealers specializing in Native art who offered significant help as well along the way: Corinne Cain of the Savvy Collector in Phoenix and Linda Pierson of the Pierson Gallery, now in Sapulpa, Oklahoma.

With such learned and supportive collaborators, Healey assembled a truly impressive collection by artists who, in the words of JoAnna Reyes, the museum’s adjunct curator of Art of the Americas, “have lived through this history and thrived and been proactive and creative in holding on to their culture and history and memory.” She looks forward to future opportunities that works in the new collection will offer “for a more complex understanding of the way that our cultures have rubbed up against each other—and sometimes crashed into each other—to create a richer, more truthful story about who we are as Americans, especially in the American Southwest.”

As a counterpart to the important stories of the boarding schools, both Reyes and Abeyta emphasize the collection’s inherent spirit of “survivance,” using a term first coined by Anishinaabe scholar and writer Gerald Vizenor in his 1999 book Manifest Manners. “It means we adapt and thrive rather than assimilate,” says Abeyta. “We are the ones who get to redefine what and who we are.”

In such a spirit, the works on display in The Way We Came, which remains on view through July 11, 2027, offer a wide range of deeply personal embodiments of survivance. “Every painting is a testament to how we’ve gained a voice through our communities and through our art,” says Abeyta, who is powerfully represented in Healey’s donation by the almost mural-sized CELEBRATION FROM THE UNDERWORLD, an oil on canvas work that is part of a series he painted more than 26 years ago to depict “the structural labyrinth within the Navajo creation story.”

The wealth of stories that the collection contains are made richer by the fact that almost a quarter of the artists are women and that a number of parent-and-child artist pairs are included, among them Abeyta and his father Narciso Abeyta, Fred and Michael Kabotjie, and Allan Houser and Bob Haozous (who returned to the original Apache word that was Anglicized for his father’s name). “Such living lineages are part of the wonderful story that exists in this collection,” notes Mikolajczak.

Every work serves as a thoughtfully chosen expression of the many ways Native artists have found their voices and earned and claimed their rightful places on museum walls and in the story of American art and beyond. Take, for example, a work from the collection but not on view in The Way We Came, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s XERISCAPE (a desert landscape requiring no irrigation). It’s a lively and thoroughly engaging mixed-media scene of animals and plants, earth, water and sky that invites long, rewarding pondering. “She was telling stories in totally different ways than any other artists,” Healey enthuses.

In an equally lively modernist style, the gouache on board SING BACK THE BUFFALO by the late, self-taught painter and sculptor Blackbear Bosin (Kiowa/Comanche) combines geometric forms and colors in the flatform style of the Southern Plains to evoke a ritual dance in a manner so electrifying that it virtually invites the viewer to join in the ceremony. “That’s what modernist art is to me,” Healy adds. “Everybody sees it through a different lens, and you have to make up your own story.”

Another wonderful aspect of the collection is that it includes work by more recent generations of Native artists. FAWN, by fine art photographer Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), presents artist, activist and former burlesque dancer Fawn Douglas of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe in a tableau evoking the natural world of her homeland before the casinos came, ironically surrounded by a border depicting symbols of the glitzy gambling culture that replaced it. Says Healey, “Tony first introduced me to her at Indian Market, and then

I met her again earlier this year when the Phoenix Art Museum [presented Cara’s] first-ever major museum solo show [organized by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College].”

In similar vein, painter Del Curfman (Apsáalooke), still in his early 30s and himself a BFA graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts, is represented by an untitled painting in which a realistic, energetically rendered tribal dancer shares the canvas with three large abstract golden dots against a blue-green background. “I purchased that in 2015 when Del was the poster artist for the Santa Fe Indian Market,” says Healey, noting a clear sign that Curfman was an artist on the rise.

At every turn, The Way We Came offers visitors opportunities to expand their perception of what American art means in all its complexity. As Healey sums it up, “I would like to hear visitors say things like, ‘That was a wonderful story that I’d never heard before’; ‘These works by Indigenous artists are wonderful’; and ‘I’m so happy that I was able to experience a comprehensive story like this and learn something totally new.’”

Based in Marin County, California, Norman Kolpas is an award-winning writer, editor and writing teacher specializing in art, architecture, design, travel and food.

The Way We Came: A Century of Indigenous Art from the The William P. Healey CollectionThrough July 11, 2027

Phoenix Art Museum(602) 257-1880phxart.org

This story appeared in the October/November 2026 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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