Breaking Ground: Identifying Indigeneity

​"Breaking Ground: Identifying Indigeneity situates contemporary Native art within the language of the dig. Paintings, pottery, and basketry rise from soil and trench—excavated not as artifact, but as assertion. The earth becomes both archive and witness, holding what has always been present.

​Here, Indigeneity is not unearthed—it emerges. The exhibition collapses time, positioning modern Indigenous expression amid the residue of history. What surfaces is not discovery, but continuity and resilience. To “break ground” here is to unsettle—an act of reorientation that reminds us Indigeneity is not something found; it is continually becoming.

​Organized, in part, by the Virginia Native Arts Alliance, a native arts council with a mission to uplift Indigenous voices and art within Tsenacommacah, (Virginia). Each work resists the notion of the Native as artifact. Instead, the artists position themselves as both origin and future—rooted yet restless, emerging from the same ground that once buried their stories. The installation becomes an active site of renewal, where material, memory, and land converge."