Photographs of the desert never convey it fully. The landscape’s scale is incomprehensible, impossible to contain. The photographer often tries to capture either glorious, brief blooms or the dusty emptiness of eons. And they usually leave out all the people.
Cara Romero, who grew up on the Chemehuevi Reservation in the Mojave Desert, takes a different approach. Her photographs are full, in every sense: They picture Indigenous individuals, real and mythic, both in and out of time. Her work doesn’t portray the landscape as much as it shares some of its contradictions: specific and vast, constructed and natural, devastated and funny.
Romero presents more than 60 photographs in “Panûpünüwügai (Living Light),” her first major solo museum exhibition, on view through August 10 at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, N.H. Jami Powell, the Hood’s curator of Indigenous art, has organized a significant and expansive survey of works by this important contemporary artist. Viewers should seize the opportunity to see it before it travels to museums in Phoenix, Ariz., and Jacksonville, Fla.
Her photographs are full, in every sense: They picture Indigenous individuals, real and mythic, both in and out of time.
The exhibition opens with works made specifically in the context of the Chemehuevi Valley. Several feature four young boys (Curtiss, Winka, John and Kiyanni) in precolonial dress but contemporary time. In “Jackrabbit and Cottontail,” two boys represent figures who, in myth, made the burning Earth habitable and created the stars by firing their slingshots at the sun; near them, their mother leans against her Volkswagen dune buggy, a hand held against the bright sunlight, as though wondering how they will save the Earth again.
In “Puha (The Path),” the boys are silhouettes against the sunset; according to the label, they are “bird singing,” a way of sharing creation stories and intertribal histories. The medium, a vivid 40-by-64-inch print, is the only thing that places them in the contemporary world. In wall text and in the audio tour, Romero describes the boys as “time travelers.”
She uses the series to establish fluidity between people and landscape, history and future. “Evolvers,” a 5-by-16-foot work made as a billboard for the 2019 Desert X biennial, shows the boys running from a field of wind turbines; describing it, Romero says she “began to think about how all of our ancestors are still out in the landscape, experiencing changes to the landscape, to the environment.”
Most of the exhibition is on the second floor. At the top of the stairs, a group of works called “Reimagining Americana” references pop culture, placing Native American actors and artists into familiar-seeming images, such as a film noir tableau or the Beatles’ Abbey Road cover, reset on a desert highway.
The section is dominated by “The Last Indian Market,” which, at almost 8 by 27 feet, would be hard to miss. A riff on Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” it recasts the apostles with notable Indigenous artists; “Buffalo Man” — the alter ego of beadworker and performance artist Marcus Amerman — takes center stage as Jesus.
Like the other works in this grouping, it puts stereotypical depictions of Native Americans into a blender with other tropes, subverting them in the process. “It was just this moment of laughter,” Romero says in the audio tour, “of really wanting to see ourselves in a way that we actually see ourselves. For me, it was a moment where I found my voice.”
That voice is full-throated in several other groups of work, including “First American Dolls,” which imagines people from different Indigenous cultures as American Girl Dolls in their boxes — a counter to the idea of Native American as a monolithic identity.
“Wakeah,” the first in the series, depicts a Kiowa/Comanche artist named Wakeah Jhane Myers in a stunning traditional beaded buckskin outfit, which according to the label took five people over a year to make. At 53 by 40 inches, the photo is large enough that all the detail is visible. Myers’ suitcase, a nod to the powwow circuit, stands at the ready. The image presents simultaneous realities: a doll representative of generalization and objectification, but also an individual who is loved and whose accessories carry deep knowledge, craft and meaning.
Romero focuses mainly on women, ranging from images of goddess-like figures to a fictional roller derby team to an Indigenous Wonder Woman. “Kaa,” another wall-size piece made possible by dye sublimation printing on fabric, casts Kaa Folwell, a potter from Santa Clara Pueblo, as the deity Clay Woman.
Her nude body is painted in traditional geometric patterns with sacred clay; the image depicts the explosive moment of chemical reaction when clay is fired. Though Romero envisioned this female body as “a vessel,” she is also a person. It is a reclamation, an assertion that the body cannot be tamed or controlled.
Another room of large-scale photographs, titled “Environmental Racism,” presents carefully constructed images. While some interrogate the legacy of colonialism directly, others present the intersection of identity and environment as a dreamier place. Romero made these images underwater; the two most recent were made in collaboration with Dartmouth students Hope Ushiroda-Garma and Teani DeFries, both Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian).
The exhibition’s final room brings viewers into “Ancestral Futures,” sci-fi-inspired images that combine Indigenous mythos with a campy aesthetic and a nod to Afrofuturism. In “Devil’s Claw No. 1,” a black silhouette of a figure with a beaded belt holds a sphere containing the tangled desert plant, a source of seeds for traditional crafts and healing; it reads as a reinterpretation of the iconic iPod ads.
“Coyote Girl,” a trickster figure with a ray gun, white go-go boots and furry ears atop her space helmet, is ready to blast off. On the wall facing them, five photographs of Alika Sheyahshe-Mteuzi, an Afro-Indigenous woman, present her as otherworldly, striped with fluorescent paint.
At the end of the room, the wall-size “The Zenith” depicts a spaceman — Muscogee Creek painter George Alexander — floating in the void, surrounded by floating corn; more corn cobs “float” from the ceiling of the gallery, bathed in weird pink light.
The scale, elaborate detail and masterful technical skill — not to mention the sheer number — of works in “Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)” are overwhelming in the best way. That said, some of Romero’s quietest images are her most effective. One, “Crickett,” pictures her daughter at age 11. She wears a traditional Pueblo dress, with her hair pulled back; she could be from any time. Her expression is vulnerable and fierce, accusatory, knowing.
It’s like an image of the desert, staring back.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Time Travelers | Indigenous photographer Cara Romero presents her first major solo museum show at the Hood”
Related events
Cara Romero
Location: Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, Wheelock St., Hanover
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2025.
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