Artists ROSE B. SIMPSON, JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE and JEREMY DENNIS on making SMITH, WORK that HONORS their INDIGENOUS ROOTS and why creating a BETTER FUTURE requires CONFRONTING the PAST

Every artist's perspective is in some way shaped by the people who have surrounded them and the places they're from.

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But for sculptor and performance artist Rose B. Simpson, painter, printmaker, sculptor, and collagist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and photographer Jeremy Dennis, the idea of home plays an especially urgent role in their work. All three are enrolled Indigenous American tribal members, and their practices don't just honor their individual Native histories, cultures, environments, and traditions, they also seek to ignite conversations about historical oppression and the land theft their communities continue to face.

Both Simpson and Smith have had expansive exhibitions at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art this year, symbolizing what is an encouraging yet long-overdue shift in how institutions are showcasing and giving platforms to art made by Indigenous artists.

A member of New Mexico's Kah'poo Owinge tribe, Simpson is best known for her mixed-media sculptures of large-scale beings, which she creates using a traditional hand-coiled method that she learned from her mother, a potter. Five such sculptures, part of a larger work called Counterculture, are on view at the Whitney through January 21.

Smith, a Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribal member, had her first New York retrospective, "Memory Map," at the Whitney this spring, bringing together nearly five decades of her work. Her latest curatorial effort, "The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans," on view through January 15 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., highlights work by a range of artists who deal with Indigenous knowledge of their natural surroundings.