Phoenix Art Museum's Healey Gift Puts Indigenous Modernism on the August Calendar

Phoenix Art Museum will open The Way We Came: A Century of Indigenous Art from the William P. Healey Collection on August 26, drawing more than 70 works from a gift of nearly 200 modern and contemporary pieces. Museum officials describe the acquisition as one of the most significant infusions of Indigenous art in the institution's history, with 99 artists across 44 tribal nations represented in the larger gift.

The exhibition is curated by JoAnna Reyes, PhD, adjunct curator for Art of the Americas, and guest curator Tony Abeyta (Navajo), who helped shape the collection with Healey. That dual credit matters. It signals the museum wants the show read as scholarship and stewardship, not as a donor vanity wall with better lighting.

Themes include storytelling, abstraction and modernism, landscape as sovereign presence, and the transmission of visual knowledge through families, collectives, and schools, including the contested legacy of Native boarding schools. Named artists in museum materials include Fritz Scholder, T. C. Cannon, Kay WalkingStick, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Emmi Whitehorse, Quincy Tahoma, Cara Romero, and Abeyta himself.

August around the gift is not only about the opening. PhxArt's summer calendar pairs the forthcoming exhibition with Kids Day on August 9, CATVIDEOFEST on August 8 and 9, Phoenix Symphony gallery performances, and Sissy Art making sessions. The museum is stacking attendance hooks while the serious show waits in the wings.

For Arizona, the stakes are straightforward. A major Southwest museum either builds a durable Indigenous modern and contemporary collection or it keeps borrowing the region's defining arts story from somewhere else. A gift of this size does not settle that argument forever. It changes the baseline for what visitors should expect to see in Cummings Great Hall.

The Way We Came runs through July 11, 2027. That year-long window is the real test. Opening night will be photographed. The quieter question is whether Phoenix keeps returning after the press cycle ends, and whether the galleries treat these works as permanent conversation partners rather than a seasonal theme. Survivance, the exhibition's borrowed keyword, is about presence that continues. The museum now has to practice it on the wall and on the calendar.

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