On a warm August evening in Santa Fe, the Center for Contemporary Arts will become a gathering place for the living and the dead. The occasion is The Noise of Being Seen: Performance Art of James Luna, a program devoted to the work and legacy of the Payómkawichum/Luiseño/Mexicano artist who died in 2018, leaving behind a body of work that changed how Indigenous art is made, seen, and understood. Curated and presented by the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) Archives in collaboration with CCA and SITE SANTA FE, the evening promises rare screenings, live readings, interactive experiences, and a panel discussion connecting Luna's archival legacy to contemporary Native art, research, and storytelling.
The event is part of the public programming for Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, the landmark exhibition curated by Candice Hopkins and on view at SITE SANTA FE from June 5 through September 7, 2026. That exhibition takes its impetus from a modest but significant 1969 document: Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Progress, published by the Institute of American Indian Arts and written by Lloyd Kiva New and Rolland R. Meinholtz together with IAIA students. That document initiated the New Native Theater movement and offered a radically different way to contextualize the long-standing practice of performance in Native societies across Turtle Island. It is fitting that Luna, one of the most influential figures in Indigenous performance art, should be honored within this exhibition's frame.
James Luna was born in 1950 in Orange, California. He moved to the La Jolla Indian Reservation in 1975, where he lived until his death. He earned a BFA from the University of California, Irvine, in 1976 and a master's degree in counseling from San Diego State University in 1983. In 2011, he received an honorary doctorate from the Institute of American Indian Arts, the same institution that now stewards his archival papers and artwork. For twenty-five years, he worked as a full-time academic counselor at Palomar College in San Marcos, California, while building an international career as an artist. He taught art at the University of California, San Diego, and performed in over 58 solo exhibitions and group exhibitions across the United States and the world.
Luna's most famous work, The Artifact Piece, debuted in 1987 at the San Diego Museum of Man. In it, he lay nearly naked in a display case filled with sand, wearing only a breechcloth, with artifacts such as his favorite music, books, and legal papers. Labels described the scars on his body. The work looked exactly like the ethnographic displays that surrounded it, but with a crucial difference: the object on display was alive.
Another landmark work, Take a Picture with a Real Indian, was performed outside Washington, D.C.'s Union Station in the early 1990s. In that performance, Luna stood at a podium and announced, "Take a picture with a real Indian. Take a picture here, in Washington, D.C., on this beautiful Monday morning, on this holiday called Columbus Day. America loves to say 'her Indians.' America loves to see us dance for them. America likes our arts and crafts. America likes to name cars and trucks after our tribes." Then he simply stood there. Eventually, one person would pose with him, and then others would line up.
Luna's work was often comedic and theatrical, but it was never merely entertaining. He called himself an "American Indian Ceremonial Clown," a "Culture Warrior," and a "Tribal Citizen." His performances confronted colonialism, violence, sexuality, and identity with a starkness that critics called disruptive and radical. In 2005, he was sponsored by the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian to participate in the Venice Biennale, where he presented Emendatio, a multi-part installation and performance dedicated to Pablo Tac, a Luiseño scholar who died in Rome in 1841. In 2017, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He died in New Orleans on March 4, 2018, at the age of sixty-eight.
The Noise of Being Seen takes its title from the idea that Luna's work made visible what museums had long rendered invisible: the living, breathing, complicated reality of Native people. The evening's screenings and readings will draw on the IAIA Archives, which hold Luna's papers and artwork. The program will engage audiences with Luna's work as both performance and record, exploring themes of representation and identity. The concluding panel discussion will connect Luna's archival legacy to contemporary Native art, research, and storytelling, illuminating how his practice continues to shape the way Indigenous experiences are seen, understood, and shared.
The event also resonates with another program in the Indian Theater exhibition: Artifact Piece, Revisited, performed by Erica Lord on August 15, 2026. Lord, an Iñupiaq/Athabascan/Finnish-American artist, presents an interpretation of Luna's influential performance, which is the first performance of the work since Luna's passing. The work prompts critical reflection on the objectification and fetishization of Indigenous bodies and cultures, while foregrounding contemporary and gendered perspectives.
The venue for The Noise of Being Seen is the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) at 1050 Old Pecos Trail in Santa Fe. The event is presented by SITE SANTA FE at CCA Santa Fe, and attendees are asked to meet at the CCA address.
Tickets are $10, free for members. The program runs from 6 to 8:30 PM. For those who cannot attend, the Indian Theater exhibition itself remains on view at SITE SANTA FE through September 7, offering a broader context for Luna's work within the history of Native performance art since 1969.
The Noise of Being Seen continues Luna's project, not by placing his body in a display case, but by placing his archive before a public that is invited to see, to listen, and to think. In a city that has long been a crossroads of Indigenous and colonial histories, the evening offers a chance to reckon with what it means to be seen, and what it means to look.