Eric-Paul Riege brings Diné soft sculptures to New York gallery
Canal Projects presents “iiZiiT [3]: RIEGE Jewelry + Supply,” the first institutional New York exhibition of Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege (b. 1994, Gallup, NM), on view from January 31 to March 29, 2025. Through a multilayered installation of new textile, sculpture, performance, and video works, Riege examines the legacy of the American Southwest pawn shops and trading posts he grew up around. Riffing on the economy of counterfeit merchandise and material culture prevalent on Canal Street, where Canal Projects is located, Riege’s work questions and complicates conceptions of authenticity surrounding Native American art objects, systems of exchange, and notions of value.
While his textile works pay homage to generations of Diné weavers that have aided him in generating spaces of sanctuary, Riege’s sculptures will be activated via performances during the opening and closing of the exhibition.
By referencing traditional trading post goods, Riege grapples with presumed notions of cultural authenticity and agency. While significant to Native art markets and livelihoods, historical pawn shops and trading posts have also facilitated centuries of unethical and coercive trading practices between colonizers and Indigenous peoples. Today, modern trading posts continue to buy and sell Native goods, often catering to tourists and offering wares divorced from their original context and creators.
The title of the exhibition, “iiZiiT [3]: RIEGE Jewelry + Supply,” refers to a double entendre commonly heard on the reservation where Riege lives—“is it?” or “for real?”—which poses the ontological question, “is it real?” and thus reflects Riege’s nuanced reading of the marketplace economy of Native goods.
“iiZiiT [3]: RIEGE Jewelry + Supply” features Riege’s signature woven sculptures, evoking the jewelry worn by “Holy People”—Diné giants who roamed the Earth before humans. Titled jaatloh4Ye’iitsoh, or Earrings for the Big Gods, these monumental felted earrings and necklaces honor the artist’s matrilineal heritage of weavers, especially the protective deity Na’ashjé’ii Asdzáá (Spider Woman) who introduced early Diné people to the art of weaving.
As one of Riege’s grandmother taught him, wearing jewelry is thought to amplify the senses: earrings can hear what we miss and necklaces placed close to the heart help us feel emotions more deeply. Drawing on this insight, Riege considers his practice through the framework of beads, as each of his artworks, like precious beads, are restrung into new necklaces, combining new and old in a formation akin to a family lineage.
Riege’s soft sculptures combine natural and synthetic materials—genuine horse hair and plush sheep shearling with synthetic dyed hair extensions and faux fur—to create striking visual and textural contrasts while simultaneously questioning what is “real” versus “fake.” Similarly, the artist’s plastic weavings repurpose packing materials used by museums to ship his works, which not only provide protection in transit but also imbue them with a degree of preciousness, the same value attributed to Indigenous artifacts exhibited behind vitrine casings.
Throughout the exhibition, Riege additionally displays his work as found or purchased Native jewelry from supply shops, highlighting their beauty while also emphasizing their isolation, especially when displayed in homes and museums where they are stripped of their function and cultural context. In contrast, a newly-commissioned video documenting Riege’s performances or “weaving dances” demonstrates the vitality and activation of his hanging works.
Playing upon these binaries and serving as the central node of the exhibition are Riege’s hooghan: large octagonal structures reminiscent of Diné homes, which function as spaces of welcome. Here in New York, far from Riege’s own roots, the hooghan enable the artist to recreate and share a sense of home, inviting visitors to immerse themselves within the woven structures and, in doing so, consider the complex dynamics of who is the guest and who is the host—insider versus outsider—and how these relationships are negotiated both in public spaces and on unceded land.
Much like the forms and techniques that Riege has inherited from his family and Diné culture, the concept of hózhó—a central tenet in Diné philosophy encompassing the values of beauty, balance, and harmony, both aesthetic and spiritual—is suffused throughout the exhibition. For the artist, hózhó embodies the belief that the world nourishes, cares for, and supports its people. “iiZiiT [3]: RIEGE Jewelry + Supply” is consequently grounded in this act of carrying: while trading posts traditionally carry goods, its objects also carry their own metaphorical weight and value and different materials carry their own auras. Through this body of work, Riege carries the weight of both heavy histories and joyful cultural lineages into an unknowable future.
About the artist
Eric-Paul Riege (Diné/Navajo) works across media with an emphasis on woven sculpture, installation, and performance. He celebrates the ancestral stories in weaving, language, and adornment passed down from his maternal family. As a descendent of this knowledge, Riege honors the Diné worldview of hózhó which encompasses the values of beauty, balance, and goodness in all things physical and spiritual. What results are sensorial projects built in homage to ceremony, cosmology, and craft.
Riege recent solo exhibitions include “Hólǫ ́llUllUHIbI [duet],” Hammer Museum, and “Hólǫ ́—it xistz,” ICA Miami. Recent group exhibitions include “Ten Thousand Suns,” The 24th Biennale of Sydney, Australia; “The Land Carries Our Ancestors,” National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; “Indian Theatre: Native Performance and Self-Determination since 1969,” Hessel Museum of Art, New York; “What Water Knows, The Land Remembers,” Toronto Biennial of Art; “Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow,” New Orleans Triennial; and “Casa Tomada,” SITElines Biennial, SITE Santa Fe.
He received his BFA in Studio Art and Ecology, with a minor in Navajo Language and Linguistics, from the University of New Mexico. Riege lives and works in his hometown Na’nízhoozhí (Gallup, New Mexico).
About Canal Projects
Canal Projects is a nonprofit contemporary arts organization dedicated to supporting forward-thinking local and international artists at pivotal moments in their careers. Through production, exhibition, research, and interpretation of this work, Canal Projects intends to foster artistic practices that challenge and reflect on the current moment.
Canal Projects is generously supported by the YS Kim Foundation.
