Weaving Words, Weaving Worlds:
The Power of Indigenous Language in Contemporary Art
July 17 – November 22, 2025
Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, 1st floor, Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook University
Weaving Words, Weaving Worlds: The Power of Indigenous Language in Contemporary Art showcases how work in both traditional and new media explore how art can become a vessel for cultural continuity, storytelling, and the reclamation of Indigenous languages. ACT alumna and former lecturer Erin Genia (SMACT ’19) is one of 24 exhibiting artists in this group show curated by Jeremy Dennis (Shinnecock Nation).
“Weaving Words, Weaving Worlds explores the profound connections between Indigenous language and contemporary art, centering artists’ work engaging with Algonquian languages spoken across Long Island and the Northeast. Drawing from heritage, memory, and community, these artists use creative expression to revitalize and reclaim language as a tool for cultural continuity, storytelling, and healing. While the exhibition uplifts the resilience of Indigenous language, it also acknowledges a history shaped by violence and silence—from early colonial efforts to control and document language, to the trauma inflicted by boarding schools that punished children for speaking their own languages. It further holds space for those who were forcibly silenced, including missing and murdered Indigenous women, whose stories and voices remain essential to any conversation about cultural survival.
“This exhibition also recognizes how language intersects with lived experience, touching on themes of immigration, gender, family, love, trauma, and intergenerational memory. Despite the legacy of forced forgetting, efforts like the Algonquian Language Revitalization Project at Stony Brook University, led by Unkechaug and Shinnecock leaders, have sparked a powerful resurgence. Weaving Words, Weaving Worlds extends this work through visual art, where beadwork, sculpture, sound, video, and painting become acts of resistance and renewal. These works speak not only to the endurance of Indigenous languages but to the many ways they continue to shape, hold, and express the complexities of Indigenous life today.” – Jeremy Dennis, Guest Curator, Shinnecock Indian Nation
Also featured in the exhibition are archival materials from Stony Brook University’s Special Collections, which provide vital historical context for Weaving Words, Weaving Worlds, illuminating the enduring presence of Indigenous peoples and languages on Long Island. Highlights include the Native Long Island map by the Suffolk County Archaeological Association, which features over 400 Algonquian words and cultural references. These early maps, place-name studies, and historical documents underscore the exhibition’s themes of language reclamation, cultural continuity, and the resilience of Indigenous knowledge.
Accompanying the exhibition is a 42-page catalog featuring artist images and statements by all 24 artists of the exhibition, a curatorial statement, and text about the Algonquian Language Revitalization Project and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Stony Brook University. Exhibition photographs and archival materials from Stony Brook University Libraries’ Special Collections are also featured.
