Bockley Gallery

Bockley Gallery brings together new and existing works by leading American artists Kite (Oglala Lakota), Matthew Kirk (Navajo), and Grace Rosario Perkins (Diné/Akimel O’odham). As the artists’ dynamic and singular languages of abstraction resist legible representations of Native identity, they carry personal relations to respective ancestral knowledge as invitations towards expansive interpretation.  Two wall works by Kite are exemplary of her practice coalescing and iterating human-nonhuman relations and technologies, including dreams and their connection to the spirit world. Fragments from the artist’s dreams are embroidered and beaded on deer hide using Lakota geometric semiotics. The designs also function as scores to be interpreted for sonic performance.  The presentation of Matthew Kirk highlights new works in painting and sculpture. His distinctive style of mark making is expressed with a rare pastel palette on a zig-zagged edged canvas, inferring a thunderbird. The sculpture relays the playful and critical potency of Kirk’s assemblage practice, for which he uses found materials collected along his daily routes; in this case, balancing a shovel handle and shaft with a collaged, puppet-like plywood placard.  Grace Rosario Perkins’ practice conjures the autobiographical, transmuting and layering materials that hold personal and collective stories. Her maximal surfaces carry symbol-rich color and iconography such as the spider’s web, and incorporate visible and invisible traces of influence including Indigenous plant medicine. Her first large-scale sculpture, recently debuted at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is grounded in healing and collaboration with friends and family on and near her tribal homelands.

Bockley Gallery is a contemporary art venue and curatorial practice based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since its founding in 1984, the gallery has worked with artists living and working in Minnesota and the Great Lakes region, which led to a focus with Indigenous artists across Turtle Island/North America. While the gallery offers an intimate experience through a calendar of on-site programming, its broad collaborations expand the dialogue around what it celebrates as the most relevant ideas in art today. Gallery artists’ recent highlighted institutional solo exhibitions across Turtle Island include at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hammer Museum, ICA Miami, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Hessel Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Remai Modern while recent group presentations include Sydney Biennale, SITE Santa Fe, National Portrait Gallery, Toronto Biennial of Art, Whitney Biennial, and Prospect 5 Triennial. Gallery artists are regularly honored through significant recognition including the Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, MacArthur Fellowship, Baloise Art Prize, Aperture Next Step Award, and many more. The gallery regularly places works in leading private and public collections such as the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of American Art, Forge Project Collection, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the Singapore Art Museum. Having celebrated 40 years in 2024, Bockley Gallery recently launched a dynamic new website including an online publishing platform to center essays and voices of artists in conversation.

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