Eric-Paul Riege: ojo|-|ólǫ́

Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege (b. 1994, Na’nízhoozhí [Gallup, New Mexico]) creates large soft sculptures, weavings, performance, and video rooted in cultural memory and invested in questioning the (re)production of Indigeneity. Across his work, Riege combines customary Diné practices with contemporary cultural forms exploring Diné mythology, the history of Euro-American trading posts in the Navajo Nation, and the notion of “authenticity” as a value marker of Indigenous art and craft.

Developed in partnership between the Henry and The Bell/Brown Arts Institute at Brown University, ojo|-|ólǫ́ brings together Riege’s work across media in his largest solo exhibition to date. The exhibition is based on Riege’s material research and engagement with the Navajo collections held by Brown University’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. The resulting new body of work is informed by ancestral knowledge and traditions contained within Indigenous objects, and which aims, in part, to redress practices of cultural dispossession by museums and other institutions. Riege’s work manifests in unexpected materials and exaggerated scale, embracing infidelity to the archive as a modality to trouble the colonial record and the idea of an authentic Native artistry mythologized in the Western imagination.

As an extension of Riege’s collage-based practice and approach to artmaking, the exhibition will include museum collection objects alongside jewelry, regalia, and assorted ephemera from Riege’s own domestic space, as well a selection of his sketches and myriad source imagery. The resulting non-hierarchal display blurs lines between past and present, private and public, and real and fake, animating a story of cultural continuity as a living and dynamic process.

Eric-Paul Riege (Diné) is a weaver and fiber artist working in collage, durational performance, installation, woven sculpture, and wearable art. Using weaving as both means and metaphor to tell hybrid tales that interlace stories from Diné spirituality with his own interpretations and cosmology, he understands his artworks as animate and mobile. His practice pays homage and links him to generations of weavers in his family who aid him in generating spaces of sanctuary. Riege’s recent solo exhibitions include iiZiiT [3]: RIEGE Jewelry + Supply at Canal Projects, New York (2025), Hammer Projects: Eric Paul Riege at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2022–2023), and Hól ́ǫ—it xistz at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (2019). His recent group exhibitions include the 24th Biennale of Sydney in Australia (2024), Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination (2023), Prospect.5 Triennial in New Orleans (2022), and the Toronto Biennial of Art (2022). He holds a BFA in Art Studio and Ecology from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. His work is collected by Forge Project and ICA Miami, among others. He is represented by Bockley Gallery (MN) and STARS Gallery (CA). Riege is a member of the Charcoal Streaked Division of the Red Running Into the Water clan. He was born and is based in Na’nízhoozhí [Gallup, New Mexico].