10 Indigenous Women Artists to Know and Support

November represents Native American Heritage Month in the United States, an opportunity to deepen our appreciation of Indigenous creativity and carry that support throughout the year.

Indigenous art is not a single style or story. The women featured here work across illustration, public art, fashion, painting, quillwork, sculpture, and graphic design. Each brings her own perspective, community connections, and creative practice.

This list includes artists from Native nations in the United States and a Métis artist in Canada. Explore their work through the links below, learn how they describe their own practices, and support them directly when you can.

1. Crystal Worl

Crystal Worl is a Tlingit, Athabascan, and Filipino multidisciplinary artist based in Juneau, Alaska. Her practice includes printmaking, painting, and public art, exploring relationships among people, land, and animals. She also co-owns and co-designs for Trickster Company with her brother, Rico Worl.

Explore her work for the connections between Northwest Coast design, contemporary expression, and public space.

Explore Crystal Worl’s official website

2. Weshoyot Alvitre

Weshoyot Alvitre is a Tongva and Scottish comic book artist, writer, and illustrator. Her work brings historical material into view through an Indigenous lens, drawing on archival research, tribal knowledge, and storytelling.

Her comics and book illustrations offer a compelling starting point for readers interested in how art can challenge familiar narratives and make room for Indigenous perspectives.

Explore Weshoyot Alvitre’s official website

3. Jackie Fawn

Jackie Fawn is a Yurok, Washoe, and Filipina graphic illustrator whose work connects art with Indigenous resilience, land protection, and community well-being. Her illustrations include vivid depictions of women defending land and people, and she has described parenthood as an important influence on her practice.

Visit her website to explore past work, collaborations, and her direction with Fishbear Studios.

Explore Jackie Fawn’s official website

4. Mer Young

Mer Young is an Indigenous multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes collage, drawing, painting, and public art. Working on the traditional lands of the Tongva in Long Beach, California, she creates work that inspires, celebrates, and elevates Indigenous, Brown, and Black communities.

Her layered compositions invite viewers to consider identity, representation, environmental justice, and who is made visible in public and cultural spaces.

Explore Mer Young’s official website

5. Jamie Okuma

Jamie Okuma is a Luiseño, Shoshone-Bannock, Wailaki, and Okinawan artist and an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Indians. Her practice spans one-of-a-kind, hand-executed pieces and ready-to-wear fashion.

Major museum collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Explore her practice at the meeting point of fashion, craftsmanship, and fine art.

Meet Jamie Okuma and explore her work

6. Sarah Agaton Howes

Sarah Agaton Howes is an Anishinaabe artist and the founder of Heart Berry. Rooted in beadwork and the Ojibwe floral tradition, her work brings together cultural art, contemporary design, and community teaching.

Heart Berry grew from a custom regalia business into a platform for sharing designs and helping others become makers. Explore its story and offerings to see how creative entrepreneurship can connect art with community.

Discover Sarah Agaton Howes and Heart Berry

7. Christi Belcourt

Christi Belcourt is a Métis visual artist whose ancestry originates in the historic Cree-speaking Métis community of Manitou Sakhigan, also known as Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta. Her paintings draw on Métis floral beadwork and celebrate the natural world while engaging with biodiversity, spirituality, and Métis culture.

Her practice also includes design, community organizing, environmental advocacy, and work with a range of traditional materials.

Explore Christi Belcourt’s official biography and work

8. Monica Jo Raphael

Monica Jo Raphael is an Anishinaabe–Sičangu Lakota artist and an enrolled member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. A fifth-generation quillworker, she creates woodland porcupine quillwork, beadwork, and contemporary and traditional attire.

Her practice brings traditional materials and techniques together with bright modern colors, carrying cultural knowledge forward through both making and storytelling.

Explore Monica Jo Raphael’s official website

9. Sadie Red Wing

Sadie Red Wing is an Indigenous graphic designer and advocate from the Spirit Lake Dakota Nation. Her research addresses cultural revitalization through design tools and strategies, and she encourages Native designers to express visual sovereignty in their work.

Her perspective invites a closer look at whose visual languages are taught, recognized, and respected in graphic design.

Learn about Sadie Red Wing’s design practice and talk at Typographics

10. Roxanne Swentzell

Roxanne Swentzell is a sculptor from Santa Clara Pueblo whose expressive figures explore human feeling and experience. In her own account of her practice, clay became a way to communicate before she could easily express herself through speech.

Her official gallery offers a window into a creative life that also embraces gardening, building, community work, and care for the world around her.

Explore Roxanne Swentzell’s official gallery and biography

Turn appreciation into support

Spend time with the artists’ own words. Follow social accounts linked from their official websites, buy directly from their shops or authorized galleries when possible, and credit artists when sharing their work. Ask permission before reproducing artwork.

Native American Heritage Month can be a beginning, not a deadline. Keep discovering, learning from, and supporting Indigenous creators year-round.

Artist information is drawn from the linked artist biographies and websites, First Nations Development Institute’s Jackie Fawn profile, and Typographics’ Sadie Red Wing speaker biography.