Dana Claxton Headdress

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.