PROVIDENCE, R. I. — Sauntering from the humid Windfall streets into Brown College’s David Winton Bell Gallery (the Bell), the cool distinction of Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege’s hyper-modern black, grey, and white palette will shock you. However the coup de grâce for me, as a textile artist, is Riege’s employment of artificial supplies from retailers like Joann Materials and Amazon. The present’s curator, Thea Quiray Tagle, inspired me to the touch the works whereas expounding on the upkeep pointers Riege offered — hairspray the fur and lint roll the orbs and discs fabricated from wool and felt.
Within the vestibule hangs a totemic determine made out of black and white plush material, with braided tentacles cascading in aeolian suspension from a white, spherical heart. Flanking it’s Riege’s “ojo|-|ólǫ́,” the immersive set up that lends the exhibition its title. The choice to not assign particular person monikers to his textiles, sculptures, collages, and movies is deliberate. Collectivity, company, and motion stand on the core of Riege’s philosophy — his gross sales contracts embrace clauses that permit him to switch works for brand new initiatives. Their monumental scale, in the meantime, is a part of a broader effort by Native artists to rebuke the methods their work has traditionally been consumed by non-Native audiences (assume Southwestern buying and selling posts) and redefine what monuments could be — remodeling Diné mythology and weaving and metallic work into one thing unparalleled and playful.
This work about Indigenous resilience and neighborhood sits inside an establishment that just lately noticed one among its few Native professors, Adrienne Keene (Cherokee), step down from her position, citing the college’s overwhelming Whiteness amongst her causes for leaving. Towards this backdrop, Riege’s emphasis on neighborhood and collectivity feels each extra pressing and extra poignant.
Element of set up view of “ojo|-|ólǫ́” (2025)
Riege’s hypnotic tableau of hanging and stationary figures, jewellery, regalia, and sensible artifacts induces the impact of being dropped right into a mise en scène of a Diné pictorial weaving. Although many hanging works seem like static artwork objects, they preserve a practical essence typically central to Native creative practices. One hanging entity is a wall-mounted hole effigy adorned in elaborate regalia — a tufted and horned crown, its face and physique shields evoking buffalo bone chokers — affixed to a roughly hewn wood ladder. At its toes lie disembodied, fringed, and bejeweled arms and a talisman fabricated from a wool-woven basket emblazoned with the cardinal instructions — a logo in Diné cosmology representing Na’ashje’ii Asdzaa, or Spider Lady, the weaver of life. The vessel-like high quality of those components implies they’re stuffed and employed for ceremonial use; works of this sort are typical in Riege’s rite-like efficiency items, that are ancillary to all his exhibitions.
What I discover chillingly resonant is Riege’s emphasis on the various arms concerned within the making of his apply. The artist’s father will stuff stygian craft retailer pumpkins, turning them into summary orbs, whereas his aunt coordinates and delivers uncommon shipments of dyed black leather-based. In the course of the act of weaving, Riege says he typically contemplates the Diné shepherds who produce his wool. The arms of makers confer worth upon their sundry items.
Element of set up view of “ojo|-|ólǫ́” (2025)
Riege’s operational ideas flout norms of artwork as hermitic praxis. There is no such thing as a area for the trope of the solitary, troubled male artist within the Native neighborhood, the place well-being is an intricately shared duty — a stark distinction to Western romanticism of creative isolation and struggling. The nucleus of Diné society is a matriarchy of makers whose pedagogy instructs via direct motion, the place “like this” turns into a didactic chorus.
Honoring norms, this present additionally strays. A gargantuan turquoise and cream geometric weaving and stuffed silver material necklace references acquainted Navajo design components, however appurtenances additionally open a window to the personal. See, as an illustration, a portrait of a younger Riege within the arms of his great-grandmother — who lived to 106 — flanked by two God’s eye-like pictorial weavings with figures suspended in empty inlays. A wallpaper with a hair-tasseled lightbox motif containing different intimate footage of the artist’s influences, memorabilia, and previous works alerts a extra saleable course to his profession — elevating questions on how sacred cultural components translate into viably reproducible merchandise.
Finally, Riege disrupts not solely up to date Native artwork however advantageous artwork on a serious scale. He creates area for himself in an rising enclave of up to date artists, balancing gestures with historic modes and supplies to redefine what monuments could be. Whereas intransigence over materials selections, or different such snobbery, could have brought on the media to miss his work beforehand, his current Joan Mitchell Basis award and a big present on the Bell upend such snubs — even when in addition they reinforce the artwork world’s reliance on institutional validation — with ludic pleasure.
Set up view of “ojo|-|ólǫ́” (2025)
Element of set up view of “ojo|-|ólǫ́” (2025)
Element of set up view of “ojo|-|ólǫ́” (2025)
Element of set up view of “ojo|-|ólǫ́” (2025)
Eric-Paul Riege: ojo|-|ólǫ́ continues at David Winton Bell Gallery ( Checklist Artwork Constructing, Brown College, 64 School Avenue, Windfall, Rhode Island) via December 7. The exhibition was co-organized by the Bell and Henry Artwork Gallery on the College of Washington, and curated by Thea Quiray Tagle and Nina Bozicnik. It would journey to Henry Artwork Gallery from March–August 2026.
