A Bead at a Time

De Boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Chelsea Bighorn, marking the artist’s debut with the gallery in Los Angeles. Bringing together a new body of large-scale textile works, the exhibition foregrounds Bighorn’s distinctive synthesis of material, memory, and cultural inheritance. While rooted in specific cultural references, Bighorn’s work also engages broader questions of abstraction, perception, and materiality. Working across canvas, dye, beadwork, and found materials, including glass beads, brass sequins, leather, horsehair, and porcupine quills, Bighorn constructs richly layered surfaces that operate between painting and textile. Her works resist fixed categorization, instead occupying a space where image, object, and adornment converge. Across the exhibition, densely worked compositions such as Leonid (2024), CMYK (2024), and Triple Point (2025) unfold as both abstract fields and embodied forms, their tactile complexity emphasizing the labor and temporality embedded in their making. Bighorn’s practice is deeply informed by her Lakota, Dakota, and Shoshone-Paiute heritage, as well as her Irish American background. Drawing from the visual language of powwow regalia, its color, movement, and ornamentation, Bighorn’s works evoke the rhythms and choreography of dance. Beaded surfaces, suspended fringe, and the incorporation of jingle cones and bells introduce a latent sense of motion, as though the works carry the memory of performance within their structure. At the core of Bighorn’s work is an engagement with memory as both personal and collective. The artist has described her practice as an act of revisiting formative experiences, particularly attending powwows with her grandmother, and translating them into material form. In works such as Reconciliation (2025) and Ease the Burden (2025), repetition and accumulation function as methods of remembrance, with each bead or gesture contributing to a larger system of meaning that unfolds over time. Chelsea Bighorn (b. 1989, born in Tempe, AZ) is Lakota, Dakota, and Shoshone–Paiute and is based in Chicago. She is a textile artist who works in finding the beauty in her rich, mixed Native American and Irish American heritage. Finding great inspiration in the history of traditional dance. Bighorn has a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fiber Material Studies. Bighorn has had a solo exhibition at the Freeport Art Museum, Freeport, IL; and her work has also been shown at the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; Museum of Contemporary Native Art, SITE Santa Fe, Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco; and The Center for Native Futures in Chicago, IL. Bighorn recently completed a residency with the Chicago Artist Coalition.

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