5 Indigenous artists begin year-long Eiteljorg Museum fellowship for November 2025 exhibit

Toronto-based Anishinaabe artist Maria Hupfield is one of five artists this year earning the renowned Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship.

The Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis houses an extensive collection of contemporary Indigenous art. The fellowship was first offered in 1999 as a way to support and highlight Indigenous artists in Canada and the U.S.

The 2025 fellows were announced in September. Each fellowship artist receives $50,000 US, and the museum will purchase more than $100,000 US of their artworks to add to its collection.

Hupfield said "it shows recognition of decades of work that I've been doing."

"I think at this stage of my career, I'm really able to look at an award like this and see the full scope, look at people who have won it before and just to think of myself being a part of that is really, really humbling," 

Hupfield is a multi-disciplinary artist from Wasauksing First Nation in southern Ontario. Her work is "expansive" she said, and uses materials such as industrial felt, tin jingles and bells. 

"I work sculpturally, make body size creations and then I activate those in live performances," she said. 

Her art is constantly evolving, she said.

"I often think of art as something that is living and connected to people and places and ideas and also the audience," Hupfield said.

She is currently in talks with the museum's curator about which of her pieces will be added to the Eiteljorg's collection. One project in consideration is called Alpha Alternative, a series of four boldly coloured banners with text adorned with bells and jingles.

Hupfield said her thinking has changed since her early days as an artist when she made a series of paper sculptures out of books that influenced her life.

"I took an old anthropology textbook and I shredded it and wove it into a basket because I thought the knowledge that's contained in that basket will tell us more," she said.

"At the time I was really drawing a strong division, as young people do, between these binaries; between a written text and the oral tradition, knowledge that's embodied and carried and passed down.

"I think both of those can exist as we know we have so many amazing authors and poets." 

An exhibit of her work called Mashkiki is Movement opens at the Patel Brown gallery in Toronto on Oct 19. Hupfield said she is reworking 13 looks from a fashion arts collection she presented at the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts fashion week in Santa Fe, N.M., into sculpture. 

Dorene Red Cloud, a citizen of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and Eiteljorg's curator of Native American Art and the fellowship, said when the fellowship started 25 years ago, there wasn't a lot of support available for Native American artists. The fellowship aimed to provide support while also putting a spotlight on contemporary Indigenous art.

'One-of-a-kind'

Fellows are chosen by a panel that includes a fellow chosen from the previous round, a curator of Indigenous art and a curator, art critic or writer of contemporary art who's not as familiar with contemporary Indigenous art to ensure balance, Red Cloud said.

This year there were 92 applicants.

"I think [Hupfield] was just a ... clear top choice when they initially went through all of the applicants," she said.

"Maria is really, to me, one-of-a-kind …. I feel like the world really needs to know her, embrace her."

The other fellows are Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich, a Koyukon Dené and Iñupiaq carver and inter-disciplinary artist from Anchorage and Cohoe, Alaska; Cannupa Hanska Luger, who is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota of Glorieta, N.M.; John Feodorov, who is Navajo and lives in Seattle; and Jean LaMarr, who is Northern Paiute and Achomawi of Susanville Indian Rancheria in California.

Gingrich said her primary focus is carving "and then all of my other art practices surround and adorn that work." That includes film and photography, as well as design, drawing, painting and text.

She began carving in 2008 under the mentorship of Kathleen Carlo-Kendall, one of the first Koyukon Dené carvers in Alaska and one of the few who pursued carving professionally, Gingrich said.

She said she was drawn to this medium because it's a subtractive process.

"That really requires you to have a very different form of thinking when creating the work because most art forms are additive, where you build something and you create volume," she said.

Red Cloud said there's something ethereal and magical about Gingrich's work.

Her snowshoe hare mask called Ukalliq and an installation of carvings and adorned willow branches titled Apunmiñ will be added to the Eiteljorg Museum's collection.

An exhibition of the fellows' work will open at the Eiteljorg Museum Nov. 7, 2025.