DC | Closer Look: Stretching the Canvas

Join curator Anya Montiel (Mestiza/Tohono O'odham descent) and artist Melissa Melero-Moose (Northern Paiute/Modoc) for an in-gallery conversation about select works in Stretching the Canvas: Ten Decades of Native Painting , including Melero-Moose's own Access Denied (2020-2021, 27/689) . The exhibition explores how American Indian art expanded after World War I and how Native painters began to advocate for themselves in a world that often ignored their talent. Melissa Melero-Moose is a Northern Paiute enrolled with the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe with ties to Fort Bidwell Paiute and Modoc tribes. She is a mixed media painter whose imagery, with use of willow, pinenuts and earth, portrays abstractions of landscape and memory in her Great Basin home. Melissa holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and a Bachelor of Science from Portland State University, Oregon. She lives with her family in Northern Nevada working as a professional artist, curator for the Great Basin Native Artists Gallery and community advisor for the Nevada Museum of Art. Her works are a part of the permanent collections of the Autry Museum, Los Angeles, CA; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM; Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, Washington D.C.; Nevada Museum of Art; Lilley Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Reno and the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, NM. Leading support for this project provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Generous support for this project provided by Daniela Power in memory of Charles Power and the Walker Youngbird Foundation.