On November 13^th, The Block Museum of Art was thrilled to welcome artist Cara Romero to Northwestern’s campus. Romero’s visit was a joyful chapter in a months-long collaboration with The Block that began in April, when two of her photographs, TV Indians (2017) and Amber Morningstar (2018), were acquired for The Block’s permanent collection through The Block Museum Student Associates’ annual acquisition process.

In 2023-2024, the Block Museum Student Associate (BMSA) acquisition was guided by the theme of “humor as an artistic strategy.” After narrowing down a list of artists whose work utilized different modes of humor, the Student Associates found Romero’s photographs to be the most compelling interpretation of the theme. Romero, who spoke with the BMSAs virtually during the acquisition process in April, finally made a trip to Northwestern to meet students in-person and discuss her works at The Block.

Cara Romero is a Chemehuevi artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Raised between Houston, Texas, and the Chemehuevi reservation in the Mojave Desert, California, Romero’s work is informed by her Indigenous identity and experience living between contrasting environments. Speaking to The Block’s audience, she recalled the origins of her photographic practice and drive to represent authentic Indigenous stories. “From a really early age, I just had this fierce desire to tell a truth of resilience, of rich culture, of something genuine to what I knew our lives—and at least my experience—to be,” she recalled. This desire manifests in Romero’s photography, which strives to capture contemporary Indigenous experiences while referencing Native histories and storytelling.

Romero’s unique brand of wit and irony, complemented by her bright, editorial compositions, resonated with the Student Associates when considering her work for acquisition in the spring. The BMSAs were also moved by the content of Romero’s work and thought it would enrich The Block’s collection. “It’s important to have representations of Native modernity,” says Roy Zhu, who worked on the acquisition research team. “I think that is something that a lot of institutions like The Block Museum can strive for.”

The Student Associates voted to purchase two of Romero’s large-scale photographs: Amber Morningstar (2022), and TV Indians (2017). Amber Morningstar depicts Amber Morningstar, a member of the Choctaw Nation, surrounded by cultural accoutrements like river-cane baskets and puck-toe moccasins. The image is part of Romero’s ongoing series First American Girl, which poses Indigenous people in life-sized boxes alongside cultural objects and other details chosen by the sitter. The series parodies products like American Girl® dolls, imagining iterations of these figures with a higher level of care, individuality, and historical accuracy. “I really wanted to examine the extraordinary beauty of the high fashion, of the quality, of the diversity of each of our tribes,” Romero recalled, discussing the origins of the series in her talk at The Block.

In TV Indians, Romero captures four Native sitters amidst the sweeping sky and arid landscape in Santa Fe, NM, posed next to a backdrop of discarded televisions. Each television screen displays depictions of Indigenous people in American media, from the 1990 Western film Dances with Wolves to footage of a mushroom cloud referencing US nuclear testing on Pueblo land. “There’s a very stark contrast between the intertribal Puebloan people, real Native people, and what we call ‘TV Indians,’ in slang, or ‘Hollywood Indians,'” Romero described the image to The Block’s audience. She recalled the Native community’s complicated relationship to these caricatural, often inaccurate depictions: “While they are somewhat problematic, they are also somewhat beloved… That’s all we had growing up.”

During the acquisition process, the BMSA cohort was particularly excited about how Romero’s works held connections to many different disciplines—for instance, Native American and Indigenous studies, environmental science, and gender studies—and would provide rich opportunities for teaching. This aspiration came to life during the fall quarter, when Romero’s works shaped classroom and public teaching at The Block. TV Indians was featured in Looking 101, an exhibition in The Block’s Katz Gallery that removed wall labels to encourage viewers to engage more closely with the works on display. Interdisciplinary class visits to the exhibition, led by Essi Rönkkö, Associate Curator of Collections and Academic Programming, used Romero’s work as a jumping-off point for observation-based learning. Just outside Looking 101, Romero’s work Amber Morningstar was featured in the exhibition The Block Collects, which featured works relating to the same theme as the BMSA acquisition: humor as an artistic strategy.

Beyond the classroom, Romero’s works also inspired conversations in public programs. Student Associate Meena Sharma, who co-led a tour with Gabby Bliss centered around Amber Morningstar, describes teaching with Romero’s work as an “iterative, beautiful, and layered process.” Both Sharma and Bliss note that teaching about “humor” in relation to Romero’s work, which addresses historical misrepresentations of Indigenous people, has been a unique experience to navigate with visitors. “What came to light… is that humor mean[s] different things to different communities and different cultural backgrounds,” Bliss recalls. Some visitors struggled to find humor in the works, while others laughed.

After engaging with Romero’s work since the spring, the BMSAs were thrilled that Romero visited the museum in person to see her work on display and teach the Northwestern community about her practice. “I’m just so grateful to her for having that care of community, which is so obviously enacted in her actions, and also something that comes up in her artwork,” says Sharma. “It means a lot.”

Likewise, in her closing remarks, Romero emphasized how meaningful it was to have her work selected for acquisition by university students. “It’s just an honor to have the students in the room,” she said. “I always wanted to teach about contemporary Indigenous issues, and I was not an academic, and I could not make it to professorship or write [a] textbook. So, it is extraordinary for me… to get to teach all of you with the work and for faculty to be using the work to teach cross-culturally. It’s really a dream come true.”

A recording of the program is available below. Cara Romero is joined in conversation by Aaron Golding, Co-Chair of the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative Education Committee and Sr. Program Administrator in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. 

Contributed by Madeleine Giaconia, Communications Coordinator and 2023-2024 BMSA