Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers: Grace Rosario Perkins Wins Native Arts Grant for Large-scale Monumental Work

Diné/Akimel O'odham artist awarded 2025 grant for collaborative work grounded in ritual, abstraction, and community

WASHINGTON, Aug. 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Painter Grace Rosario Perkins brings Indigenous abstraction into bold new terrain through a collaborative project. The Brooklyn-based artist has been named the second 2025 recipient of the Walker Youngbird Foundation's Emerging Native Arts Grant.

The Emerging Native Arts Grant provides $15,000 over six months, along with mentorship from Foundation staff and Advisory Council members. The program supports emerging Native artists whose practices reflect cultural depth and material invention—bold work grounded in Indigenous experience.

Perkins, who is Diné (Navajo) and Akimel O'odham, creates layered abstractions built from text, found materials, and ritual—work that's both deeply personal and powerfully collective. A self-taught artist, Perkins was born in Santa Fe, spent time on both of her parents' reservations, and lived for many years in Oakland, California. She now lives and works in Brooklyn, where she has developed a distinctive practice that rejects didactic narratives in favor of complexity through abstraction.

"This grant gives me the freedom to focus on a large-scale sculptural work that is grounded in collaboration with friends and family members across different homelands," Perkins said. "Working through intuition guided by my plant studies, together we are transmutating a wide range of materials that hold both personal and collective stories. Rather than make these narratives legible, abstraction invites us all to form connections with our own experiences."

"There's a certain electricity in Grace's work—a mix of memory, ritual, and refusal that you don't come across often," said Reid Walker, founder of Walker Youngbird Foundation. "The curators, gallerists and cultural thinkers who guide our selections recognized that spark. She's building a language of her own, and we're honored to support it."

The grant will support Perkins's project Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers, which includes large-scale paintings and a monumental sculpture created collaboratively with friends and family members near the Navajo Nation and Gila River Indian Community. At the center of the work is a sculptural installation made from found detritus—beer cans, aluminum, and fast-food packaging—collected from sites impacted by addiction and environmental harm. Cast in concrete and embedded with medicinal plants and materials, the work becomes a sculptural act of ritual and alchemy.

The project includes youth programming with workshops engaging Indigenous and LGBTQ+ teens in shared storytelling and creative exploration.

Perkins has exhibited widely across the United States, including solo shows at MOCA Tucson (The Relevance of Your Data, 2022), Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis (2024) and de boer in Los Angeles (2023), as well as group exhibitions at SFMOMA (Get in the Game, 2024), Andrew Kreps Gallery, and Company Gallery in New York City (both 2024).

About the Walker Youngbird Foundation:
The Walker Youngbird Foundation supports emerging Native artists through funding, visibility, and curatorial connection. In addition to unrestricted grant support, recipients receive six months of active engagement, including promotion, strategic guidance, and access to a network of curators, gallerists, and arts leaders through the Foundation's Advisory Council.

For more information:
www.walkeryoungbird.org
[email protected]
instagram.com/walkeryoungbird

SOURCE Walker Youngbird Foundation