Hold to This Earth Exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture
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- Yorkshire Sculpture Park hosts "Hold to This Earth," featuring 38 Indigenous American artists across its underground galleries working in clay, fabric, painting, sculpture, neons and video.
- Rose B Simpson's ceramic figures include one incorporating clay made by her child; her mother Roxanne Swentzell contributes a sculpture of a nude woman molding herself from earth, highlighting two generations of Pueblo ceramic tradition.
- Several works function as aesthetic resistance: Edgar Heap of Birds' placards protest sacred site exploitation, Yatika Starr Fields suspends Dakota Access Pipeline protester tents from the ceiling, and Virgil Ortiz commemorates a Tewa leader's 17th-century revolt against the Spanish with a giant black ceramic bust.
- The reviewer connects the show's themes of stolen land and colonialism directly to Trump's regime, ICE raids and travel bans, questioning what right "a guy controlling access to the nation" has to call it home.
- Jeffrey Gibson, who represented the US at the 2024 Venice Biennale, draws the reviewer's sharpest criticism — described as "schlocky and chintzy" — while the show is acknowledged as a "snapshot" rather than a proper survey of Indigenous North American art.
Why it matters: For 38 Indigenous American artists, Yorkshire Sculpture Park provides a major UK platform that reframes abstract colonial-history debates through specific, tactile art objects — beadwork, ceramics, weavings — rather than didactic text. The reviewer's willingness to map the show's anti-colonial anger onto Trump's immigration policy gives the exhibition a political charge that reaches beyond craft appreciation into live political commentary.
