Hold To This Earth Review Indigenous American Art Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Hold to This Earth review – an explosion of anger as Indigenous America shakes up Yorkshire

Neons and videos mix with weaving and beadwork to address subjects as diverse as stolen land, ancestral traditions and queer identity. But the self-made nude steals the show

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A breeze from the vast North American planes has blown across the rolling Yorkshire hills. The work of 38 Indigenous American artists has filled the galleries of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, transforming their underground space into a world of clay and earth, fabric and ceramics, painting and sculpture that talks of land, memory, oppression and freedom through art.

Everywhere, there’s a sense of ancestral identity, memory and tradition. It’s in the Navajo weavings of Tyrrell Tapaha and Melissa Cody, the patterned beadwork of Jeffrey Gibson, the dizzying geometricism of Dyani White Hawk’s towering column. They all use traditional aesthetics to explore new ideas: Gibson’s work is about how his queer identity meets his Indigenous culture, White Hawk pushes into pure abstraction, Cody mixes pixelated video game aesthetics into Navajo patterns, and on and on. Everyone here is taking the old ways and pushing them in new directions.

One of Pueblo sculptor Rose B Simpson’s ceramic figures carries a piece of clay made by her child, another depicts a figure cradling a baby. Nearby, a sculpture by Simpson’s mother Roxanne Swentzell – without doubt my favourite work in the exhibition – shows a nude woman in the process of moulding herself out of clay. Right here we’ve got two generations of women, working in an art form that their people have been experts in for centuries, even millennia, honouring their pasts, their land, using the earth itself as material. It’s a celebration of what makes us who we are.

It’s not all weaving, hides and beads; there are photos, neons and videos here too. But what links most of the work is a sense of art enduring in the face of oppression. Indigenous Americans live on occupied land, they have been persecuted and exploited for centuries, how could their art not reflect that injustice? This is a show full of anger and protest.

Edgar Heap of Birds’ placards protest against the exploitation of sacred sites. Yatika Starr Fields hangs tents from the ceiling which were used by protesters fighting against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Sayokla Kindness Williams calls for the return of stolen ancestral land with a beadwork sign. Virgil Ortiz commemorates a Tewa leader who organised a 17th-century revolt against the Spanish with a giant black ceramic bust. After centuries of colonialism and exploitation, there’s just so much anger and pain here. This show isn’t just about the earth and memory, this is art as a form of aesthetic resistance.

It’s hard not to see these ideas of stolen land and colonialism through the lens of Trump’s regime with its ICE raids and travel bans. This is a guy controlling access to the nation, policing who gets to call it home and who doesn’t. Looking around this exhibition, you can’t help but question what right he has.

Not everything here is great. Some of it’s not even good. Gibson in particular – who represented the US at the 2024 Venice Biennale – always feels pretty schlocky and chintzy to me. And it’s worth pointing out that this is not a proper survey of Indigenous North American art, because that’s a topic too vast to be contained in just three rooms.

Among the many exhibitions of Indigenous art that have become such a big trend in UK museums in recent years, this is neither the best nor the worst. But it is a moving and sometimes very beautiful snapshot of art from a diverse community, one united by a shared pain, a love of the land and a belief that, fundamentally, a lot more connects us than divides us.

• Hold to This Earth: Works by Contemporary Indigenous North American Artists from Tia Collection is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, 13 June to 18 April