Indian Country: The Art of David Bradley


The Autry Museum
March 2019—January 2020

“The American Southwest frequently appears in artist David Bradley’s work as a fever dream of lived experiences, Native American histories, mythic figures, and classic stereotypes. Indian Country: The Art of David Bradley, now showing at the Autry Museum, is a survey of an artist whose adoptive home of New Mexico and identity as a Minnesota Chippewa living in the Southwest figure largely in his paintings and sculptures.”

—Hyperallergic

A retrospective spanning nearly four decades of work by David Bradley (Minnesota Chippewa, b. 1954), featuring 32 paintings, mixed media works, and bronze sculptures. Across 3,700 square feet of the Sprague Gallery, the exhibition traced Bradley's singular practice of reappropriating and redirecting the imagery of American popular culture, art history, and Native stereotypes — turning them inside out to reveal the Indigenous experience at the center of American life. Vivid, ironic, and densely layered, Bradley's paintings place Native people at the center of their own story, confronting commercial clichés, racial politics, and the commodification of Indigenous identity with equal parts outrage and wit.

The graphic design program was developed in direct dialogue with Bradley's canvases: wall colors were drawn from the artist's own saturated palette, and the exhibition typeface was a custom design created by adapting letterforms found within the paintings themselves — embedding the artist's visual language into every interpretive element of the show.

| Creative + Art direction, Spacial + Graphic Design

Team 
| Curation: Amy Scott 
| Studio: Autry Museum