Cara Romero Frames Indigenous Sovereignty in Sharp Relief

I can feel it through my thin sweater—a rich light piercing through the mountains, warm and filled with promise, affirming spring’s arrival. On that morning, on the ancestral homelands of the Wabanaki Confederacy, a local Penobscot woman told me that “Sìkʷan” means “it is spring.” As the Maytime sun illuminated the land, another kind of illumination unfolded inside the Hood Museum of Art: the radiant, evocative work of Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero, whose lens casts its own living light on Indigenous presence. And it’s a crucial light, given Romero’s provenance as a California Native artist—a group conspicuously under-recognized in a contemporary art landscape still largely oriented toward Southwestern and Plains Indigenous traditions, to say nothing of the profound erasure of California’s own Native populations.

Romero’s largest solo show to date, “Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)” on through August 9, stages monumental tableaux alive with pop-cultural camp, bright colors and deliberate anachronism—compositions that channel Indigenous memory, humanity and humor with unapologetic clarity.

Consider TV Indians (2011), in which four traditionally dressed figures stand alongside a moribund mound of televisions, their screens flickering with stereotypical images of Native peoples—a stark contrast between embodied presence and media distortion. Here, Romero’s subjects sit en banc, as if deliberating on their own misrepresentation, their collective presence forming a tribunal that judges the very images that have defined them.

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To be Native in America is to inhabit a tension inherent to the national mythology that, consciously or not, reorients the non-Native observer’s gaze. Romero’s design of contemporary visuals is an act of self-possession, echoing Chemehuevi scholar Joshua B. Glenn’s concept of sensate sovereignty: “artistic and sensory forms act both as obstructions to hungry listening and provide a structure of knowledge sharing for Indigenous folks to enter into.” This confrontation with entrenched American myth extends into Romero’s First American Doll portrait series. Featuring an eponymous Amber Morningstar (2022) and other Indigenous individuals, these life-sized dolls, adorned in their chosen vestments, offer a more accurate Native representation, sharply playing on the American Girl Dolls company.

But perhaps it’s Kaa (2017) or Three Sisters (2022) that draws your attention—works that underscore how Romero redefines the ways Native subjects are interpolated by the viewer and the camera alike. Here, her models include her daughter, close family and friends, encompassing women and young men, reflecting the vibrant and diverse community she seeks to represent. But they are not romanticized or hypersexualized; they don’t recapitulate a Pocahontas-type or Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Instead, like children, they are physical hearts outside Romero’s body—and this is the pain and beauty of her work.

In a country that births much of the world’s technological innovation, from A.I. to genetic engineering, a Google image search for “Native American” still yields the expected: staged black-and-white photographs of inaccurately dressed figures posed against disappearing, anonymous landscapes. The myth of the vanishing race persists. What is intelligence without nuance or, dare I say, trauma?

This tension between visibility and absence also haunts the history of Dartmouth College, the site of the museum in which Cara Romero’s show now resides. Samson Occom, the Mohegan minister who helped raise the funds for what would become Dartmouth, never set foot on campus. A painful irony the school seemed to solve—rather neatly—through Occam’s razor: for much of its history, there were simply no Native students to welcome. It wasn’t until 1970 that President John Kemeny sought to turn that absence into presence, launching Dartmouth’s Native American Program and reframing Occom’s erasure as a founding debt.

Romero’s subjectivity challenges a tension familiar in now-critiqued DEI frameworks: the difference between equality and equity. Where equality treats everyone the same, equity recognizes that individuals need tailored tools to succeed. In Amedee (2025), a striking figure from the First American Doll series, a Native Hawaiian woman enrobed in an ochre lei and green hula skirt is encased in a glowing light box. These are accoutrements of her choosing, not props imposed by an outside gaze but cultural markers worn with pride. She radiates power—her gaze direct, her posture authoritative—reclaiming the visual vocabulary of ethnographic display and inverting its colonial gaze.

Alike no. 2 (2024) pushes the refusal of the viewer even further. A side-lying nude figure with green braids and vertical neon stripes—black-and-white under neon light—looks away, withholding eye contact. Her painted body becomes both armor and illusion, a visual static that repels projection. The effect is alienating, even spectral, evoking the blue alien diva from The Fifth Element, whose operatic performance distracts as an audience is silently slaughtered. Here, too, we are made to question what spectacle obscures and what power lies in the act of looking away.

Decoupling outer space from the dominion of Silicon Valley futurism, where private capital lays claim to the stars, The Zenith (2022) offers a retro astronaut adrift in a zero-gravity field of heirloom corn. Suspended beyond linear time, the supine Indigenous figure gazes back, past the viewer, arms slightly raised, clad in a campy blue spacesuit and vintage helmet. Their posture, open yet unknowable, conjures a quiet refusal of conquest. In place of extraction or dominion, this scene seeds space with memory, sustenance and survival.

“Panûpünüwügai”’s levity allows it to dance across everything that the light touches. It moves to the Phoenix Art Museum near the Chemehuevi Indian Reservation next year.