Home As It Was

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce Home As It Was, an exhibition of new works by Osage-Mvskoke-Cherokee artist Yatika Starr Fields. Opening Thursday, March 6, 2025, the exhibition builds on Fields’s previous Tent Metaphor series.

Inspired by his experience at the Oceti Sakowin camp during the No Dakota Access Pipeline protests of 2016–2017, Fields’s Tent Metaphor series gestures to the multiple ways tents have become a symbol of contemporary life. While they most visibly evoke the protest encampments, refugee camps, and ongoing housing crises that have touched communities across the United States, they also contextualize these contemporary struggles within a longer legacy of Indigenous survivance in the face of forced removal, allotment, and urban relocation. The tent’s function as a porous metaphor simultaneously signals hope, distress, and resistance.

In Home As It Was, Fields extends the metaphor, continuing to work with tent and tarp materials as his canvas. The vibrant colors and synthetic textures may be familiar to many of his viewers: the tent, even deconstructed, is a pervasive, dynamic icon of twenty-first-century life that dots the landscape of U.S. cities, towns, and rural communities. The artist revitalizes these materials by casting them as symbols of the ongoing logics of settler colonialism, dependent on dispossession, private property, and extraction. Many of the works in this series meld the materiality of the synthetic tent with the formal imagery of Indigenous regalia and shields. The round silhouettes are emblematic of Plains shields, like those Indigenous warriors used during the nineteenth-century “Indian Wars” to defend their nations against acute settler violence. These shields were symbols of valor, strength, and medicine; feathers or scalp locks—suggested here through polyester assemblage—were attached to convey a warrior’s prowess.

Fields’s shields act as icons, positing a fundamental correspondence between their medium and imagery. Polyester and other contemporary synthetics are durable, inorganic, and constructed from fossil fuels: like shields, they serve to protect, defend, and shelter their users. This contiguity between tent and shield invites the viewer to reflect on the bitter yet resourceful ways Indigenous people continue to adapt, change, and endure in a colonial world order that prioritizes extraction, personal wealth, and property. Tents allow us to weather the storm. At the same time, Fields embraces abstraction as a mode of resistance to simplistic readings of his work. While many of the pieces incorporate patterns, shapes, and imagery associated with Indigenous cultural and aesthetic traditions, they are not prescriptive: Fields invites the viewer to step into the abstract collective the artworks cumulatively invoke.

The exhibition’s title, “Home As It Was,” is taken from Octavia Butler’s prophetic novel Parable of the Sower (1993). The passage—and the novel as a whole—reflect on how to live and survive in a dystopian, apocalyptic world where social norms have broken down and climate change has upended previous ways of life. Fields’s assemblage works invite us to consider these same tensions, to navigate the rivers between loss and abundance, transit and permanence, and to recognize our place in an ever-changing and disrupted world. While the tent might signal despair, loss, and impermanence, it also gestures to collectivity, mobility, care, and change. We may yearn for the home that used to be, but we must continue to craft the homes that can shelter us in the now.

The artist would like to thank his studio assistant for this exhibition, Marly Nicole Fixico (Seminole/Navajo/Laguna Pueblo) from Seminole, Oklahoma.