Riverlines

David Nolan Gallery presents Riverlines, an exhibition of work by three generations of Amazonian Indigenous artists Chico da Silva, Joseca Yanomami, and Kuenan Mayu. The exhibition brings together sustained practices rooted in the living traditions of the Yanomami, Tikuna, Tariana, and Tukano peoples. Through painting, drawing, and bark-cloth, these works examine how knowledge moves across lineage and territories, and how ceremonial practice is reimagined in contemporary form. The works reveal continuity, transformation, and innovation: an elder generation’s interpretation of cosmology, a middle generation’s negotiation of tradition alongside modernity, and a younger generation’s experiments in cross-cultural and cross-gender exchange.

Riverlines makes visible artistic genealogies long underrecognized in global narratives of modern and contemporary art, and positions these works within current discourse on climate, extractivism, and indigenous rights. The Amazon – with its visionary painters and relational cosmologies — can no longer remain at the margins. While the paintings are beautiful, their beauty is political. They offer ways of seeing that refuse a separation of art from life and insist upon integrity as both an aesthetic and an ethical practice. The exhibition features sixteen 1964 paintings on paper mounted on wood by Chico da Silva, alongside signature works from the 1970s and early 1980s that map riverine geographies and cosmologies. It also includes a cycle of Joseca Yanomami paintings embodying the visions of the Yanomami people’s land–forest; and twenty paintings by Kuenan Mayu, who uses natural Amazonian pigments on sacred tururi canvas to create works ranging from intimate ancestral gestures to hallucinatory cosmologies.