Ishi Glinsky

Ishi Glinsky’s sculptures, paintings, and drawings are testaments to the breadth of Native North American artistic precedents rooted in material culture. These works range from woven wire baskets associated with Glinsky’s own nation, the Tohono O’odham people, to jewelry employing traditional inlay techniques of the Southwest. He links ancestral tradition with contemporary pop culture not to create a mash-up of the two but rather to Indigenize the present. The aesthetics of appropriation—beginning with European modernist artists’ use of non-Western tropes and culminating in pop art—are rewritten and contested in his practice. By shifting the anthropological gaze, the artist interrupts one of the core mechanisms of the colonial enterprise, constructing a practice in which the historically observed becomes the observer. Embracing collaborations with other Native American artists and designers, Glinsky has also worked with clothing companies such as Ralph Lauren, Brain Dead, Stance, and Alchemist. These collaborations honor the transdisciplinary approach that has often distinguished contemporary and Native American arts.

Ishi Glinsky (b. 1982, Tucson) has had solo exhibitions at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara (2022); Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Visions West Contemporary, Denver (2020); These Days, Los Angeles (2018); Shiprock, Santa Fe (2016); Open Studio Gallery, Tokyo (2017); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson (2015). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Stars, Los Angeles (2020); Studio, Los Angeles (2020); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2019); Visions West Contemporary, Denver (2018, 2017); Zohi Gallery, Santa Fe (2017); and Human Resources, Los Angeles (2017).