Nancy Marie Mithlo is a professor of gender studies and American Indian studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and curator in residence at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In addition to the Venice Biennale, she has curated exhibitions at the National Museum of the American Indian, Occidental College’s Weingart Gallery, and the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum. She is the author of Knowing Native Arts (Nebraska, 2020) and editor of Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism and For a Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw, among numerous other publications. Her most recent book is Red Skin Dreams: Twenty Years of Curating Indigenous Art at the Venice Biennale (Nebraska, 2025). Visit Mithlo’s website at nancymariemithlo.com.

In Red Skin Dreams curator and scholar Nancy Marie Mithlo (Fort Sill Chiricahua Warm Springs Apache Tribe) recounts the challenges of exhibiting Indigenous art at the famed Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest and most-recognized international arts exhibition. Mithlo’s experience of organizing nine independently sponsored exhibitions in Italy from 1997 through 2017 reveals marginalization and breakthroughs in an ever-shifting global art market.

Mithlo’s curated exhibitions highlighted contemporary American Indian and Indigenous artists on a global scale while also calling into question the dichotomies of margin and center, insider and outsider. Her scholarship asserts that Indigenous peoples are active participants in the contemporary arts world, despite mainstream assumptions to the contrary.

This is a story about how Indigenous peoples—both collectively and individually—claim a place in a transnational world that often forgets their presence. It is a story not only about arrival but belonging.

Preface

I am lying on heavy cotton sheets—ironed and immaculate—looking up at a small glass chandelier on the ceiling. Delicate, molded wooden ceiling fixtures mesh perfectly with striped fabric wallpaper in royal blues and golds. An impossibly tall armoire monopolizes one corner. An ornate floral chair with gold-painted arms sits opposite. My suitcases are awkwardly stacked between. Two small pieces of chocolate wrapped in foil have been carefully placed on a silver tray by the bedside lamp. There is an open window—transparent white drapes blow effortlessly in the late afternoon sun. A tidy little porch beckons from the balcony overlooking a tranquil tree-lined sub-urban street. I am in Venice, Italy, a place I know intimately, yet all is not well. Gazing at the ceiling, I instinctively recall telling my family, “Should my life fall apart and I lose all sense, you can find me at the Hotel Biasutti on the Lido.” I have now checked into the Hotel Biasutti on the Lido. It is June 2017, in the heat of the summer, on an island in the middle of a lagoon, and deep into the world that is known as La Biennale di Venezia. I am defeated.

Defeated by love, defeated by betrayal, defeated by art elites, students, artists, and colleagues. Defeated by a centuries-old system that was built to defeat me. Commerce, capitalism, greed, appropriation, land theft, warfare, and kidnapping of children are just some of the tools of Native genocide that I can speak to with definite authority as a member of the generation of achievers that followed the generation of strivers, that followed the generation of survivors. Here on a tiny island in the Adriatic Sea, at the end of an era defined by U.S. late imperialism, I sense closure. Maybe it is time to move on. After twenty years, maybe it is time to move on.

It’s hard when heady idealism meets pragmatic reality. In my experience, it often takes multiple signs, delivered over time, to wake me fully to the reality at hand. Just one failure is nothing. Two, I can handle. Three, well, it’s just bad luck that will pass. Four, maybe I need to think this over. By sign #5 or #6, I am toast. My credit card is maxed, my eyelids are quivering, I have lost the ability to sleep, and not even chocolate, wine, cigarettes, Advil, or shopping can save me. Hotel Biasutti, I am yours.

But am I defeated? Maybe I am simply depressed, exhausted, and heart-broken. I feel, I feel, I don’t know what I feel! Introspection does not come easy for me. I am given more over to simply marching through life on a mission—a superwoman, a bad-ass, a “get it done,” “feet to floor” kind of gal. This has largely worked for me in the past. Yes, I got out of the South, got in the best school, got the damn PhD, got the job, kept the job, and raised my kids. But this arts thing has me tired.

My mission, almost stamped into my core, was to ensure some humanity and grace for American Indians. The arts became my way to talk about what it was I thought was wrong in the world and how we might go about thinking differently. The language of seeing and the power of representation—I had seen how these systems worked through museums, exhibitions, and films. I was led naturally to congregate with artists, see shows, make things, hang out. These impulses that led me to art schools, alternative communities, tribal colleges, and eventually teaching were fueled largely by a sense of injustice. Only a fool could fail to recognize how our deeply racist American society operates on all levels—jobs, housing, and, yes, the arts. The absolute alienation of Native arts from any art historical trajectory made me want to scream. Hey, there it is, maybe the emotion I am feeling is . . . anger?

At one point in therapy (yes, judge on . . .), my counselor provided me with a feelings wheel. Have you seen these? It’s a circle with spectrums of color emanating from its core like a pie cut into dozens of wedges. There’s mad, scared, joyful, powerful, peaceful, and sad, with subcategories like frustrated, bewildered, lonely, or hopeful, all in coordinating hues. Being a good patient, I considered incorporating this approach until I saw the exact same feelings wheel tacked to my daughter’s bulletin board. Turns out that my grandson, age six, also needed to learn what emotions he was feeling to “use his words.” Feelings wheel, help me out. I feel, I feel . . . frustrated!

All these emotions might be anticipated responses, given the circumstances. And what were the circumstances? Ah, the drama of Venice! I am thinking of hiding in a woman’s bathroom stall, perched on the edge of the toilet to peek out of a high window, watching the male version of the “walk of shame” as an Italian gentleman from the south, in a beautifully tailored blue suit, walks past with his head down, slumped, and awkwardly pulling his carry-on bag down a white pebbled path toward the vaporetto pier in the heat of the midday Italian sun. The wheels of his suitcase keep catching in the little pebbles, and he curses as he drags himself and the bag forward. He has departed the hotel bar, and I have no desire to find out his frame of mind after a verbal scorching by me about his poor behavior with one of my interns.

I am thinking of my breathless departure, leaving the key behind forever on a small table inside the apartment overlooking Sant’Elena, the neighborhood I called home for almost a decade. I hastily packed my valuables (the small oval photo of my granddaughter, my jewelry, my notes, and my essential clothes) after comprehending in a flash that my careless lover would never change and had, in fact, jeopardized my very existence in favor of his convenience. Seven-plus years, this relationship. Why had it taken that long for me to realize?

But mostly, I was thinking of an Indigenous colleague who had, with some authority, informed me that my work of the past two decades was “irrelevant” to the important work that he and others were enacting from the safe protection of their British Commonwealth support of the arts. This, at the opening of my exhibit sponsored by two tribal nations. Irrelevant? Really?

These ruminations are, I am certain, not unique. A young student’s stupid mistakes, a massive breakup, a haughty, up-and-coming professional colleague. No, I am not delusional enough to think that life is fair or that my path must be smooth. But there is something about centuries of imperialism that functions uniquely on the children of its survivors. On one hand, we feel fortunate to be alive; we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and are obliged to carry forth. But we are also burdened with unsurmountable odds, tricked into thinking that we are capable of mending centuries of dishonor because . . . because . . . well, because we can! If all I have to deal with are problem students, disloyal relationships, and professional dismissal, well then, isn’t this much preferable to outright slaughter? Shouldn’t I be grateful?

Perhaps this is a good place to present my received wisdom from this whole affair. The belief that I can accomplish superhuman goals is actually a product of a colonial mindset and a sure sign of successful assimilation. How egotistical to consider that I, as an individual, have the power to enact massive social change and redirect a hundred-plus-year-old institution known as the absolute center of global commerce for generations? No, this is surely a colonial dream for a Pellerossa (Italian for Native American, American Indian, Indigenous—literally “Red Skin”). How egotistical! How Western!

Yet, here I was, in the lovely Hotel Biasutti, pondering the impact of my escape and wondering how this would all look in another decade or two. It is not quite another decade, yet I am propelled to tell this story—not because I think it all went well (obviously the ending was quite sour) but because there was also such beauty in my twenty years of curation in Venice. I am obliged to my Venetian colleagues, to my Italian colleagues, and to the hundreds of Native artists and supporters who traveled to the lagoon with their art, with their ideas, and with, yes, their dreams. What an amazing journey! What a trip! So what if we did not achieve what it was we thought should happen, waking up the world to the immense, creative talent of contemporary Native arts? Whose notion of achievement did I have in mind to begin with?

Our initial thought was that by bringing Native American artists to Venice, we could demonstrate the power and beauty of our communities (we being a constantly changing and sometimes overlapping group of artists, curators, and activists). Given that Native arts were not going to be shown in majority museums and global exhibits, rather than beg or demand, we would simply show up with our art and do it ourselves. This plan actually worked pretty well; despite requiring an immense amount of money, time, and labor, we typically had a ball, learned a lot, met new friends, and generally felt better about our lot in life, despite our marginalization elsewhere. With a lot of help from our friends (in particular, our Italian colleagues in Venice), we mounted nine (yes, count them, nine) shows at the epicenter of global fine arts known as the Venice Biennale. We did this when showing as a representative of the United States, or even as a representative of a major arts institution, was virtually impossible.

Recognition by others means little when compared to an artist seeing the global scene and then realizing: My work is as good as that. This self-recognition is not easily won, and the dance that one has to achieve to manage simply showing up can be tricky. After the first few exhibits, I knew there was a likelihood that things would go wrong. This last exhibit echoed with the finality of knowing the dance could not keep going. Institutional power ensures a longevity that utopian dreams can never match. But there’s the catch—if we continued to exhibit, then we would become an institution, relinquishing our autonomy. The collective mentality that fueled these nine exhibits was strategically subversive, endlessly creative, and generative. This “freedom,” as my co-curator Ryan Rice noted in our 2007 exhibit Requickening (the first of our shows to not receive recognition by the Biennale powers that be), could be a good thing.

Red Skin Dreams is not a celebration, not a parable in which all goes right, but a tale that I hope is instructive. In the pages that follow, I grapple with the inconsistencies, the mistakes, the triumphs, and the joys of bringing Indigenous art to La Biennale di Venezia during a time of great transitions globally. The adoption of the euro, the invention of the internet, the development of the Biennale into an arts foundation—all these shifts from 1997 to 2017 were prophetic in multiple ways. The ability to not only observe but also participate in this, the oldest and most prestigious international arts venue, for twenty years was a unique honor. Yes, we were “dreaming,” and yet by extending the tradition of Indigenous peoples moving across time and space, our group demonstrated that other worlds are possible, even if just for a period of time. Our dreams were real, and it all happened. Here is the story.