Fall arrives with a full slate of new exhibitions across The City Different
By Ania Hull
September 18, 2026
Eugene Tapahe (Diné) had a dream as the pandemic unfolded: He was sitting in a field of grass in Yellowstone National Park, watching bison, when he heard the sound of jingles. Then, jingle-dress dancers began appearing in front of him.
“It’s as if they were dancing with the bison to the rhythm of a silent drum,” Tapahe writes on the Navajo Strong website. “It was beautiful and peaceful.”
The jingle dress was used by the Ojibwe people to help cure the afflicted. Over the years, it has become a pan-Native American symbol of strength and resistance to Indigenous people outside the Ojibwe nation.
Together with his family and friends, Tapahe, a photographer and multimedia artist who often brings his work to the SWAIA Indian Market, decided to act on that dream.
He and his relatives formed the Art Heals: The Jingle Dress Project (see “Saved by the Bells,” August 15, 2025). Photographs from the project are on exhibit through November 1 at the Monroe Gallery of Photography. Added to the exhibition are photographs that Tapahe took at the Standing Rock pipeline protests in 2016 and during demonstrations in Minneapolis this past winter.
Many of Tapahe’s photos show three or four Indigenous women in regalia wearing skirts or dresses with jingles. They pose in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.; in front of a temporary “Indianland” sign at Desert X, outside Palm Springs, California; in tall grasses at Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming; in Monument Valley, Arizona; and at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.
The colors the jingle dancers wear, especially the red masks, speak to the many social and political issues faced by the Indigenous people of Turtle Island, or North America, such as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives crisis.
One of the photographs is titled Granite and Grace and portrays the four jingle dancers in black and white standing in tall grass in front of El Capitán in Yosemite National Park, with a forest between the women and the rock. This is the home, the photograph notes, of the Nyyhmy (Western Mono/Monache) people.
Monroe Gallery co-owner Sid Monroe says what strikes him about the photo is that it speaks to the erroneously white-centered documented history of the American West.
“You look at this photo and you think of the canon of American photography,” Monroe says. “Ansel Adams, especially, who is said to have ‘opened up the West’ to the world. But his photos and how they were received didn’t take into account the Native people who were already there, whose land this is.”
Tapahe’s exhibition is among dozens of shows across The City Different’s galleries and museums that have recently opened or are scheduled to open this fall.
