Line Break

Lines are a core facet of all visual language—used to convey ideas and emotions as well as to chart time, document history, and share stories. Although linearity is often correlated with forward progress, linear relationships do not necessarily advance in only one direction. Examining line in formal, conceptual, figurative, and metaphorical terms, this exhibition spotlights how lines can serve as living networks and bridges across generations.

Drawing primarily on works of contemporary Native American art from the Gochman Family Collection, Line Break investigates the function of lines across a number of themes, each positing Indigenous understandings of cyclicality and relationality. Line, an allusion to cartography, is presented as a tool to recontextualize land and landscape in contrast to Western conceptions of property and borders. In many works, the fluidity of line is utilized to evoke sound, movement, and migration, disrupting standardized forms of notation, while in others, curving forms conjure the passage of knowledge, time, and generational teachings. Line Break presents art that imagines reciprocal and expansive relationships with lineages across family, art, and land, and considers what forms they take when these living lines bend and break.