For the second Spotlight presentation at Garth Greenan Gallery’s 529 West 20th space, the gallery will exhibit three works by Yatika Starr Fields. Encompassing painting, sculpture, and assemblage, the display will provide a focused view of Fields’ practice over fifteen years, demonstrating how an early fascination in graffiti—evident in the nearly fifteen-foot-wide spray painted Skate School Santa Fe Mural (2011)—informs his newer work, such as La Pieta (2025), a recent example from his ongoing Tent Metaphor series. 

Fields began the Tent Metaphor series in 2017, after the February 22 police raid on demonstrators at the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests. Collecting the abandoned tents left behind after the police violently raided the encampment, he sewed the recovered material into shapes resembling coffins, sleeping bags, and kites. The brightly hued results assimilate the dynamic, swirling color in his graffiti-oriented work, but transform it to new ends, yielding explosive, powerful statements on inequality, Indigenous sovereignty, and colonial resistance.  

About the Artist 

Born in 1980 in Tulsa, Yatika Starr Field is a member of the Cherokee, Muscogee, and Osage tribes. He studied landscape painting at the University of Oklahoma’s Sienna, Italy, summer program before enrolling at the Art Institute of Boston from 2001 to 2004. While living on the East Coast, the artist developed an interest in street art, receiving public and private mural commissions across the country from Portland to Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Santa Fe, and Bentonville. With his more recent work, Fields has continued to highlight—and attempt to shift—cultural narratives around Native and Indigenous issues. Earlier this month, the artist completed a residency at Surf Point in Maine.