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The Dartmouth
February 26, 2025 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Cara Romero’s landmark photography exhibition opens at The Hood Museum

“Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)” showcases over 60 photographs and spans more than two decades.

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Courtesy of Anna Wills Patten

On Jan. 17, “Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)” opened at the Hood Museum of Art. Curated by curatorial affairs associate director and Hood Indigenous Art curator Jami Powell, the exhibition — a showcase of over 60 photographs spanning more than two decades — marks photographer Cara Romero’s first-ever solo museum exhibition. 

The exhibition represents the culmination of a years-long relationship between Romero and the Hood and “extends a commitment that [the Hood] has had to Native American art and culture,” according to Hood director John Stomberg.

Stomberg also elaborated on the experience of witnessing Romero’s work, which she said evolves from a “visual experience” to an “intellectual one.”

“[Romero’s photographs] never stop being stunning,” Stomberg said. “They never stop being beautiful. But as you think about them, as you let them do their work, they also start really informing you in a powerful way.”

“Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)” includes five thematic sections: “California Desert & Mythos,” “Re(Imagining) Americana,” “Rematriation: Empowering Indigenous Women,” “Environmental Racism” and “Ancestral Futures.” In each of the sections, Romero explores a new concept through her photography.

The exhibition begins with “California Desert and Mythos,” a reference to California’s Mojave Desert. In an interview, Romero described the Mojave — the ancestral home of the Chemehuevi Tribe of which Romero is a citizen  — as the place where her “bones are from.”

“[The Mojave Desert] is wild — it’s pristine,” Romero said. “My hope in this particular gallery is that people feel a sense of the Mojave desert, of the people that are from there, whose DNA has emerged from there since the very beginning of time.” 

The photographs in this section — rich with yucca, coyote and other desert iconography — capture not only the Mojave’s natural ecosystem but the people who live there. One particular snapshot, titled “Evolvers,” shows four Chemehuevi boys, each wearing aviator sunglasses and feathers, running across the dust. Behind them loom a sea of white windmills. 

“[‘Evolvers’] is a very candid moment where four little boys, two sets of brothers, are racing through the desert,” Romero said. “But they’re also representing time travelers, which is a worldview that [the Chemehuevi] have, that our spirit beings — our time travelers, our ancestors — are there, experiencing with us in the landscape.”

According to Romero, she created “Evolvers” as part of a 2019 public art billboard takeover in which 25 international artists were invited to “respond to the landscape” for the biennial art exhibition Desert X. The rapid push for solar and renewable energy in the years preceding the exhibition triggered what Romero described as one of the largest land grabs in U.S. history, as massive wind and solar farms began to overtake the desert. It is this recent history that has reformed the desert into what Romero describes as an “almost science fiction-like landscape.”

“The title ‘Evolvers’ is about the embrace of an inevitable change that comes with the development of renewable infrastructure in the Mojave Desert,” Romero said. “But it’s also a moment to recognize what those impacts feel like to Indigenous peoples.” 

Romero’s attentiveness to both past and present similarly emerges in “Re-Imagining Americana.” In this section, Romero considers historical portrayals of Indigenous people while also “quickly placing [them] in the present,” she said. 

“The ethnographic photography at the turn of the [20th] century really captured the world’s imagination, but simultaneously stopped time,” Romero said. “That stoppage of time created an absence of contemporary Indigenous peoples.” 

One photograph in this section, “Last Indian Market,” draws inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” The photograph appears in “monumental scale,”  spanning across an entire wall of the Lathrop gallery, Romero explained. In the photograph, a series of Indigenous artists from different tribes are situated across a long table. The central figure — emulating DaVinci’s Jesus — wears a bison head. 

“So many of the pieces in this particular section are a flip of the canon,” Romero said. “[The photographs] are about helping people from outside the community understand that [Indigenous people] are astute in pop culture … by combining things that are ever-permanent from our communities with 21st century ideas.” 

“TV Indians,” another key photograph featured in this section, was acquired by the Hood in 2017 after a chance meeting between Romero and Stomberg at the Santa Fe Indian Market. The photograph, a snapshot of four young Indigenous people leaning against outdated television monitors, was the Hood’s first piece of Romero’s work.

“Romero takes on visual culture representing Native American history, but she creates it anew, and she creates it from within,” Stomberg said. 

A physical installation of Indigenous corn cobs dangle from the ceiling in the exhibition’s final section, “Ancestral Futures.” The corn serves as a nod to the section’s largest and most centrally-located photograph, “The Zenith,” which shows an astronaut surrounded by floating corn. 

Romero noted that “Ancestral Futures” centers on the “beauty and sophistication of Indigenous science,” foregrounding the community’s ancestral knowledge in considering the future. Neon colors imbue the section’s photographs — a shift from the browns and yellows of the Mojave featured earlier in the exhibition. 

From “California Desert and Mythos” to “Ancestral Futures,” the exhibition broadly moves from a consideration of history to an imagination of the future. However, rather than moving strictly through chronological time with each photograph, Romero layers past, present and future into a cohesive work.

“I realized I could just throw linear time out the window,” Romero said. “I can refer to the way photographs looked when I was a little girl and the color of bad film. I can reference my grandma and myself and my future children all at the same time.”

Kaitlyn Anderson ’24 and Amedee Conley-Kapoi ’26 are both featured in Romero’s “First American Girl” photo series. In them, subjects pose within life-sized “doll boxes,” replete with selected personal objects. Conley-Kapoi, a Kānaka Maoli student from Maui, wears her own hula costume brought from home. Anderson, a Kānaka Maoli student from Oahu, wears more contemporary Hawaiian clothing. 

“[Romero] was helping us tell our story,” Conley-Kapoi said. “It’s one of her incredible traits as a photographer: she wants to tell individual stories of people from all different types of cultures.”

Romero characterized the collaborative process with Dartmouth students as “delicate” and one defined by careful listening. 

“It was the very first time that I ever got to work alongside Kānaka Maoli culture,” Romero said. “As Indigenous peoples of the Americas, we have so many similar stories — but there’s a moment where our stories separate and diverge from each other.”

“Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light)” will remain at Dartmouth until Aug. 10, before traveling to the Phoenix Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville by 2026.