Dana Claxton Headdress

Exhibition Period: 23 Oct 2026 – 7 Feb 2027

Organizer	Artspace
Curated by	Victor Wang

Curatorial Support: Zoe Theodore

Above: Dana Claxton, Headdress – Shadae and her Girlz, 2023, Headdress, 2018–23

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

Image: Dana Claxton, AIM, 2010

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About the Artist

Born 1959, Yorkton, Saskatchewan, Canada
Lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Dana Claxton is a critically acclaimed artist who works with film, video, photography, single/multi-channel video installation, and performance art. Her practice investigates

indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis, MN), Sundance Film Festival, Salt Lake City (UT), Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis (IN), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, AU), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (Durham, NC), Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (TN) and the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MN). Her work is held in public, private and corporate collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Mackenzie Art Gallery, Audain Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Getty Museum, Eiteljorg Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Forge Project, Minneapolis Institute of Art, University of Toronto, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery.

She has received the VIVA Award (2001), Eiteljorg Fellowship (2007), Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award (2019), YWCA Women of Distinction Award (2019), Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2020), the Scotiabank Photography Award (2020), and the Audain Prize for the Visual Arts (2023). She is the winner of Best Experimental film at the IMAGINATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival (2013).

Fringing the Cube, her solo survey exhibition, was mounted at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2018) and the body of work Headdress premiered at the inaugural Toronto Biennial of Art, Toronto ON (2019). Her latest solo exhibition Dana Claxton: Spark opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art in August 2024.

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