For the first time since his release from federal prison, artwork by Leonard Peltier will go on public display in New York City this fall.
“The Paintings of Leonard Peltier” opens Sunday, October 4, from 2 to 7 p.m. at the Fifteenth Street Friends Meeting House. An RSVP is welcome but not required.
Peltier, an elder and longtime activist with the American Indian Movement, was a political prisoner for five decades before he finally made it home to the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe Nation in North Dakota. He emerged from federal prison on February 18, 2025, when President Biden granted him clemency and commuted his sentence to home confinement. He’d been locked up since his conviction in the 1975 deaths of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a case his supporters have called unjust for decades.
He picked up painting while he was locked up, and the work bears the marks of both his own life and his people’s culture. A selection of his paintings is being trucked from North Dakota to New York by his son and grandson for the October show.
The afternoon opens at 2 p.m. with greetings and song, with members of Peltier’s family joining. Reverend Billy and Savitri D, along with the Stop Shopping Choir, will perform, and musicians and drummers will follow, providing a soundtrack as people move through the paintings. The exhibit stays up in the meeting house and its lobby until 7 p.m.
Whether Peltier makes it to New York himself is still an open question.
He’s been invited, but the Federal Bureau of Prisons still keeps tight limits on his travel. If the BOP grants him a furlough, he plans to come in person. If not, organizers will put him up on the big screen the meeting house normally uses for its Sunday meditation so that he can join the event that way instead. Either way, his family will be there all afternoon.
The Church of Stop Shopping hosts the event along with the Ad Hoc Indigenous Affairs and Arts committees of the 15th Street Quaker Meeting House. Organizers say the day is a chance to spend time with the paintings, with longtime New York advocates and Native friends, and, one way or another, with Peltier himself.
Peltier wrote this from prison, published in his book “Prison Writings”:
Let my unheard voice be heard.
Let me speak in my heart and the words be heard
whispering on the wind to millions,
to all who care,
to all with ears to hear
and hearts to beat as one
with mine.
Put your ear to the earth,
and hear my heart beating there.
Put your ear to the wind
and hear me speaking there.
We are the voice of the earth,
of the future,
of the Mystery.
Hear us!”
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