Artist: Cara Romero (Chemehuevi / American, born 1977)

Title: Amber Morningstar, from the series First American Girl

Date: 2022, printed 2024

Medium: Inkjet print, pigment-based

Dimensions: 43 1/2 × 39 3/4 in. (110.5 × 101 cm)

Credit Line: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 2023–2024 Block Museum Student Associates acquisition, purchase funds provided by Craig Ponzio and Block Student Impact Fund

Cara Romero’s photograph, Amber Morningstar (2022), will be on view in The Living Room at the Block Museum of Art from October 7 to October 25, 2026. This large-scale artwork is from Romero’s series First American Girl, in which Romero creates collaborative portraits with her sitters, portraying them in life-sized doll boxes that mimic the look of American Girl® dolls.

Cara Romero is a contemporary photographer and enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, raised between the rural Chemehuevi reservation in the Mojave Desert, California, and the urban sprawl of Houston, Texas. Romero’s series, First American Girl, includes six portraits made from 2015 to 2024. Inspiration for the series came to Romero while shopping with her daughter for a Native American Girl® doll. Although there are 575 Federally Recognized Tribes in North America, they could find only one Native doll meant to represent a Plains Indian girl. Encountering this reductive representation of Native girls, Romero was reminded of the Native American dolls she saw at truck stops along I-40 when traveling between the California desert and urban Texas. These dolls were made with inauthentic materials such as plastic beads and buckskin, promoting superficial and dehumanizing stereotypes. Romero’s series seeks better representation by portraying the specificity and diversity of the clothing and objects belonging to Native women, whose accessories connect to their families and community cultures. As the artist has stated, “we often get framed as only living in our isolated parallel universe when we’re actually thriving in urban epicenters and really astute in pop culture, and then simultaneously, we have a lot of tradition that’s been around for a very long time.”[i]

Amber Morningstar’s portrait is a great example of this specificity. Morningstar is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, an artist, film producer, Indigenous rights advocate, and lawyer who earned her law degree the same year this portrait was taken.[ii][iii] In Romero’s photograph, she wears her long hair loose over her red ribbon dress and carries a handful of feathers and a basket of sunflowers. Romero built a 7’ by 6 1/2’ “living doll box,” which she then took apart, stored, and repainted for each portrait sitter photographed in her series.[iv] Each item surrounding Morningstar in the box is important to her personally, including her wooden kipti (corn grinder), river-cane baskets, pucker-toe moccasins, and equipment for the Choctaw national sport, ishtaboli (kickball).

The baskets on the left belonged to Morningstar’s grandmother and speak to the importance of food sovereignty in Choctaw material culture as carriers of goods. Morningstar’s femininity is critical to her relationship with Choctaw basketmaking, as the practice has traditionally been reserved for women. The geometric white, black and red border of the box, created over several days and nights, is in the style of Choctaw beaded sashes—patterns specific to Romero’s family and used with their permission, [v] and is similar to a Choctaw Bandolier / Shoulder sash in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. Morningstar collaborated with Romero on the choice of each accessory, including the placement of her cowboy hat and rifle on the wall behind her. Her inclusion of a wealth of cultural objects prevalent in the Southern United States emphasizes the enduring presence of the Choctaw tribe in the south despite its forced relocation from Mississippi to Oklahoma under the US government’s 1830 Indian Removal Act.

In addition to critiquing the Mattel corporation’s American Girl doll’s Plains Indian girl as an inaccurate portrayal of the complexity of Native girls’ lives across tribal affiliations, Romero’s series highlights how the gendering of dolls affects what marketing tactics corporations use to sell them. In the case of many male dolls, such as G.I. Joe, marketing tends to focus on promoting the historical accuracy of the dolls’ weapons and tools, an expectation that the photograph Amber Morningstar subverts by displaying objects based on personal rather than historical significance.

Romero intentionally chose bright colors to emphasize the modern times in which Native women continue to live. She says, “It was a conscious decision to make sure not everything looks historic, so that psychologically when people see them, they immediately understand these are modern contemporary peoples, and living peoples. It’s not a photogravure from the 1850s.”[vi] By naming each photograph in the series after her models, Romero rehumanizes the Indigenous women who trust her to create their portraits, counteracting the anonymizing effects of portraits produced by photographers outside Native communities.

In addition to her work as an artist, Romero is also executive director of the Chemehuevi Cultural Centre.  In 2022 she founded the Cara Romero Gallery, the only Native-woman-owned art gallery in Santa Fe, in order to platform herself and other contemporary Indigenous artists whose practices “engage questions of identity, sovereignty, land, and contemporary lived experience.”[vii] Romero’s activist role in her community is clear in her artistic practice, as well as in her gallery, which is “dedicated to ethical representation, professional advocacy, and creating space for critical dialogue…”.[viii]

The acquisition of Romero’s photograph was part of a student-led project to select a work of art for The Block Museum collection based on a chosen theme. Each year, The Block Museum Student Associates (BMSAs), an interdisciplinary group of 20 Northwestern undergraduate students, work with Block Museum staff to research and consider artworks by contemporary artists for acquisition by the museum.

–Contributed by Llewyn Blossfeld, Curatorial Associate 

[i] Waldstein, Kaela. 2023. Cara Romero: Following the Light. Santa Fe, NM: Mountain Mover Media. 

[ii] Amber Morningstar’s full name is Amber Morning Star Byars, shortened here to Amber Morningstar.

[iii] Morning Star Byars, Amber. 2021. I Am The River: Conversation with Amber Morning Star Byars Interview by Ginger Dunnill. Broken Boxes Podcast. https://www.brokenboxespodcast.com/shownotes/2021/10/14/i-am-the-river-conversation-with-amber-morning-star-byars.

[iv] Ikenberg, Tamara. “Living Dolls: Chemehuevi photographer’s First American Girl Portraits pop with color and cultural detail.” Native News Online, August 26, 2020. https://nativenewsonline.net/arts-entertainment/living-dolls-chemehuevi-photographer-s-first-american-girl-pop-with-color-and-cultural-detail.

[v] Ikenberg.

[vi] Ikenberg.

[vii] Cara Romero Gallery. “About Gallery.” Cara Romero, 2022. https://www.cararomero.com/aboutgallery.

[viii] Cara Romero Gallery.