CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AMERICAN ART

ARTIST STATEMENT

Sobé (Silvester Hustito)

I am an A:shiwi (Zuni) artist born and raised in Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico, where ceremony, art, and cultural memory remain inseparable from daily life. Raised among centuries-old ceremonial traditions, sacred imagery, and histories of resistance, I developed an early understanding of image-making as both spiritual and transformative—an understanding that continues to shape my contemporary practice.

After spending several years in the Bronx immersed in New York’s cultural landscape, I returned to Zuni carrying the visual languages of pop culture, underground art, fashion, cinema, and urban life back into dialogue with Indigenous experience. My work exists in direct conversation with layered histories of survival, reinvention, and cultural continuity.

I began working as a full-time artist in 2009, driven by an obsessive commitment to building a life through art. During those years, the music of Anohni and the Johnsons became a profound influence and companion within my practice. Working late into the night for countless hours, Anohni’s voice became both teacher and atmosphere—guiding me through themes of vulnerability, transformation, longing, beauty, and survival that continue to echo throughout my work.

Working across painting, digital art, sculpture, and video, my practice frequently centers Two-Spirit figures, fragmented faces, spirit beings, and geometric forms that move between ancestral memory and contemporary life. These figures occupy unstable spaces—between the sacred and the urban, vulnerability and power, Indigenous identity and contemporary visibility. I am interested in creating images that resist ethnographic expectation while expanding the visual language of Native contemporary art.

Beyond my studio practice, I have worked through publishing, curatorial projects, and community-building to support Native artists working within contemporary and experimental spaces. Rooted in Two-Spirit cultural leadership, these efforts seek to create visibility for Indigenous artists whose work exists beyond stereotype—artists navigating abstraction, queerness, conceptualism, pop culture, and new forms of cultural expression while remaining deeply connected to community and ancestral memory.

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