The Hood Museum of Art’s landmark exhibition, “Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light),” will travel to the Phoenix Art Museum on Feb. 28, 2026 and remain in the city until June 2026 following its showcase at the Hood, according to Hood Museum website. The move marks the Hood’s first traveling exhibition in over a decade, according to curatorial affairs associate director and Hood Indigenous Art curator Jami Powell.
The exhibition, which will be on display at the Hood starting Jan. 18, 2025 and features images that celebrate the multiplicity, beauty and resilience of Native American and Indigenous experiences, is the Chemehuevi photographer’s first major solo museum exhibition, according to Cara Romero’s website. As a citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero said she draws on her identity to represent Indigenous culture in the contemporary context.
“In a photographic practice that blends documentary and commercial aesthetics, I love to create stories that draw from intertribal knowledge to expose the fissures and fusions of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history and futurity,” Romero wrote in a statement to the Hood.
The exhibition, which features 60 large-scale images and spans two decades of Romero’s work, is divided into five distinct thematic sections: “California Desert & Mythos,” “Re(Imagining) Americana,” “Rematriation: Empowering Indigenous Women,” “Environmental Racism” and “Ancestral Futures.” All five sections are bound by the exhibition’s title, “Panûpünüwügai,” a Chemehuevi word that holds several meanings, some of them references to light, according to Romero.
“The title of the exhibition, ‘Panûpünüwügai,’ means ‘living light’ in the Chemehuevi language,” Romero said in a statement to the Hood. “The way that we’ve put the words together, ‘Panûpünüwügai,’ is a translation of the spirit of light.”
Romero noted that the title captures the “multiple meanings” of light.
“It’s not just about the subject matter that’s in the show — it’s also about the spirituality of how light plays with the subjects, how the light is alive, and how the subject matter is also living,” Romero said. “It speaks to the nature of photography being a painting with light.”
Powell, who organized the exhibit, added that its planned move to Phoenix — and the potential for wider impact — was “exciting.”
“The fact that this exhibition is traveling to Phoenix is exciting because we get to share the amazing work that my colleagues have helped me do here at the Hood, but also share it with a community that has a larger representation of Native and Indigenous folks,” Powell said.
Powell explained that, beyond expanding the exhibition’s audience, showcasing the exhibit off campus also strengthens its connection to Romero’s Chemehuevi community.
“[The Phoenix Art Museum] is just a couple hours away from [Romero’s] reservation, so there’s more opportunity for her and the Phoenix Art Museum to work directly with her community, and to do some things that we couldn’t possibly do here,” Powell said.
Powell and Romero have closely collaborated on the exhibition for several years. In June 2024, Romero completed a residency with Hood Museum where she worked with four Kānaka Maoli Dartmouth students, resulting in four new works: two pieces for her “First American Girl” series and two underwater photographs. All four works will be featured in the gallery, Powell added.
Both believing in the power of education, Powell said Romero’s collaboration made a particular emphasis on how the exhibition is taught to K-12 students.
“Our educators here at the museum have worked with an outside contractor who is Indigenous on creating component education materials for the show that will be used here, but also travel with the exhibition,” Powell explained.
In addition to educational materials, the exhibition will include an audio tour, allowing visitors to hear from the artist and six of her collaborators depicted in the photographs. Powell explained that the exhibition will also feature two installations that will immerse visitors in Romero’s artistic process.
“There will be two installation elements that are kind of bringing [Romero’s] set design and the techniques that she uses when she’s taking the photographs into the gallery spaces,” Powell said. “One [installation] is looking at her photograph ‘TV Indians’ and creating … an immersive space where people can take their own photographs in the exhibition.”
The other installation, featured in “Ancestral Futures,” aims to recreate the set design of Romero’s 2022 photograph “The Zenith,”, which depicts an astronaut floating in space, surrounded by ears of indigenous white corn. Over 100 types of indigenous corn will hang from the gallery to explore ancestral foodways and food sovereignty.
As the installation took form, student involvement added an intimate, collaborative layer to the project. Kaitlyn Anderson ’24, a former Native American Art intern at the Hood, was one of the undergraduates who worked with Romero during her residency this summer. Anderson is set to appear in “Re(Imagining) Americana” as a subject in the “First American Girl” photo series, which depicts Indigenous collaborators in dollboxes surrounded by cherished cultural objects. Anderson collaborated closely with Romero and her team to curate the items such as hibiscus flowers and gourds for the dollbox.
“I stood in the [doll]box, and then they arranged the objects around me based on my height and the dress I was wearing, so it was all really organic,” Anderson said.
Anderson noted that Romero valued input from students as part of her artistic process.
“She would listen to us and hear our concerns, or whatever advice you wanted [to give],” Anderson said. “She wanted to make sure the objects were used properly. She got the names of all the things the doll boxes were centered on hula culture.”
Amedee Conley-Kapoi ’26, a Kānaka Maoli student who collaborated with Romero during her June 2024 residency at the Hood and who, like Anderson, will appear as a subject in “Re(Imagining) Americana,” explained that the exhibition’s move brings “mana,” described as Conley-Kapoi as “power to our people.”
“To be able to share our people and our culture with others is such a blessing because I think that’s what our kūpuna, our ancestors, would have wanted,” Conley-Kapoi said. “I think I just feel empowered to represent my culture and people more knowing that this is so accessible to other people across the world.”
Conley-Kapoi said Romero’s commitment to respecting a subject’s culture was “empowering.”
“You’re sitting in a place of comfort when you’re working with her because she’s somebody who understands those complexities behind representing one’s culture and people,” Conley-Kapoi said. “And sometimes, there are certain things that you know that can’t be shown, that cannot be displayed or cannot be known by the public.”
For Conley-Kapoi, the exhibition could push beyond observation and challenge audience members to engage, sharing their own culture.
“I think that’s what’s going to happen at her exhibition: you’ll see that exchange, you’ll see that relationality with other people, and people will come up and hopefully see these photos, and be inspired to share their culture and their people,” Conley-Kapoi said.
