“Brutal Beauty”, A New Exhibition Curated by Ninabah Winton Rips a Hole Into the Alternative Character of Indigenous Experience

Mesa Arts Center reopens its museum today after a summer closure, and one show in particular is worth the drive: “Brutal Beauty,” on view in the South Gallery through January 3, 2027.

“Brutal Beauty” is anything and everything, but soft. Guest curator Ninabah Winton curated the show around work that pushes back on the postcard version of Native life that’s dominated Western art for more than a century: the sunset silhouettes, the stoic profiles, the whole mythologized package.

“Brutal Beauty” leans into art that’s rougher, louder, and a lot more honest about what contemporary Indigenous experience actually looks like.

One of the pieces getting attention is Justin Guthrie’s “Rez Metal Spirit Cabinet,” a 2025 assemblage built from a modified found cabinet fitted with a working amplifier, then layered with vintage band merch, a ceramic mask, an electric guitar, sneakers, denim, and plaster. It’s part shrine, part garage-band relic, and it sums up the show’s whole approach: take materials nobody expects to see in a fine art gallery and let them speak for themselves.

Winton has spent years building a reputation for subverting colonial narratives in the art world and championing more authentic and raw Native perspectives. She served as the Windgate Assistant Curator of Contemporary Craft and Design Fellow at the ASU Art Museum, where she curated “Everything’s a Little Fuzzy” and co-organized “Making Visible,” a show built around gaps in museum archives. Before that, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Heard Museum, where she co-curated “Color Riot! How Color Changed Navajo Textiles,” which later traveled to the Montclair Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.

Winton has talked before about why reinterpretation matters to her. “I think the big point of this work is to give people from different cultures and especially people of color the access and ability to interpret things through a different lens,” she told Phoenix Art Museum, adding that Indigenous perspectives “have either been glossed over or minimized throughout the centuries.” She’s described the dominant narrative in Western art as “manufactured, romanticized, fake, and focused on a mythological past,” and sees her own work as a way to correct that record.

“Brutal Beauty” isn’t the only exhibition ushering in the reopening of the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum. It’s one of six exhibitions opening simultaneously as part of the museum’s fall lineup, alongside “Recon/Figured,” Samira Hemmat’s “IN CONCRETE CONTRAST: A Story of Withheld Spring,” Perla Segovia’s “RETABLO SONORENSE,” and a new exhibition by artist Zarco Guerrero..

Mesa Arts Center marks the Sept. 11 relaunch with a Fall Exhibition Opening Reception, 7 to 10 p.m., free admission, with a members-only VIP hour starting at 6. Expect live music, light refreshments, a cash bar, and a screen-printing station run by OXDX Clothing, the Tempe-based Native streetwear label founded by Diné artist Jared Yazzie. From 6 to 10 p.m., OXDX will print original designs onto attendees’ shirts and totes at no charge, a fitting pairing for the night.

OXDX has spent years putting Indigenous stories on streetwear, working with partners ranging from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian to the NFL. The fall season also ties into Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, a Craft in America initiative marking the country’s 250th anniversary.

Funding for “Brutal Beauty” comes from the Arizona Commission for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Flinn Foundation, and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, backing that reflects how seriously the show is being treated.

Anyone tired of “Native” art forced into a stereotypical depictions covered in fringe and feathers, and never straying from the Wild West aesthetics should make the trip before “Brutal Beauty” closes in January.