Artworks

Jamie Okuma

Luiseño, Shoshone-Bannock, Wailaki, and Okinawan, b. 1977, Glendale, CA

Lives and works in Pauma Valley, CA on the La Jolla Indian Reservation

Jamie Okuma’s multidisciplinary practice synthesizes ancestral beadwork, quillwork, and garment construction
with a rigorously contemporary vision, forging a distinctive practice that reclaims and reimagines Indigenous materiality. In both her fine art and fashion practice, Okuma asserts Native modernity, refusing romanticized pasts in favor of nuanced, present-tense narratives of resilience, complexity, and creative sovereignty. 

Rooted in her Luiseño, Shoshone-Bannock, Wailaki, and Okinawan lineages, Okuma’s process is both intuitive and disciplined: an embodied negotiation between memory, innovation, and lived reservation experience. In her functional sculptures, soft sculptures, and contemporary Native couture, each seed bead, porcupine quill, and structural element is meticulously hand-stitched and placed with devotional precision. Her work is situated within a profound cultural continuum, merging traditional and contemporary Plateau and Great Basin aesthetics with modernist form, popular culture, and conceptual inquiry.

Okuma’s work is the collections of the Denver Art Museum, CO; Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC; Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, IN; and Spencer Art Museum at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, among others. Jamie Okuma: With These Hands, a mid-career retrospective of Okuma’s work, will open at the Phoenix Art Museum and Heard Museum in 2027. Recent exhibitions include Majestic Figures: Contemporary Sculptures by Native American Artists, Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ (2026); To Take Shape and Meaning: Form and Design in Contemporary American Indian Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC (2024); Sustained! The Persistent Genius of Indigenous Art, Denver Art Museum, CO (2024); In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2022); and the touring exhibitions Radical Stitch (2022-25) and Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists (2019-20).

Okuma is a recipient of the Maxwell/Hanrahan Awards in Craft (2022), John S. Knudsen Prize (2019), and seven Best in Show awards at the Heard Indian Art Market and SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Art Market—one of only two artists to have achieved this distinction. In addition to her fine art practice, she is a nationally renowned fashion designer, most recently becoming the first Native American inducted into The Council of Fashion Designers of America.

Artist CV (PDF)

Photo courtesy the artist