On the evening of October 16, 2026, the Southern Utah Museum of Art in Cedar City will throw open the doors of its fall exhibition, Tooveep (The Land), with a free public celebration running from 6 to 8 p.m. The show is an exploration of contemporary Indigenous art, and the opening will include remarks from its guest curator, Fawn Douglas, along with a performance by the Indigenous Student Union of Southern Utah University and the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah Youth Program. Visitors are invited to wear purple.
The purple is not incidental. It is a memorial gesture for Jean LaMarr, the Northern Paiute and Achomawi artist, printmaker, muralist, and advocate for Native artists. LaMarr was given the name Pahime Gutne, which translates to Purple Flower Girl. Purple was the favorite color of her maternal grandmother, Libby Joaquin, and it became LaMarr's own, calling up the lilacs, lupine, and long mountain shadows of her homelands in northeastern California. An exhibition of her work at the Nevada Museum of Art carried the title Purple Flower Girl, and a short film of the same name, directed by Tsanavi Spoonhunter, documented her life. LaMarr's work is included in Tooveep, and the invitation to wear purple folds her memory into the opening itself.
LaMarr's path to that body of work was not a straight one. She made her first mural in the fourth grade, a piece titled Sir Frances Drake Christianizing the Indians, and the experience stayed with her. But she grew up poor, faced racism from her teachers, and had to hide her art-making at home from a father who wanted her to pursue something more practical. She went on to study at San Jose City College and then at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her BFA between 1973 and 1976 and became deeply involved in activist politics. She described herself afterward as a community artist-activist, and she spent her career addressing cultural stereotypes, the representation of women and Native people, and the traditions of her ancestors. She lived on the Susanville Indian Rancheria, where she ran the Native American Graphic Workshop, and she was an enrolled citizen of the Susanville Indian Rancheria.
Tooveep itself takes its name from the Southern Paiute word Too-veep, meaning the land. The exhibition gathers work by emerging and established artists from the Southwest and Great Basin alongside pieces by nationally renowned artists drawn from the Gochman Family Collection. Through painting, weaving, basketry, and mixed media, it presents the land not as a backdrop but as a collaborator and keeper of stories.
That framing comes directly from Douglas's curatorial approach, which she roots in Indigenous storytelling, self-determination, and joy. Seeing a smile on their faces, or a deep, loud laugh from an Auntie, is the driving force, Douglas has said. I want to show work that reflects the heart of our Indigenous people. She selected more than twenty artists, many of them people whose work she knows intimately, including Avis Charley, who is Spirit Lake Dakota and Dine, and LaMarr. From the Gochman Family Collection come artists such as Marie Watt, who is Seneca and of German-Scott descent, and Jeffrey Gibson, who is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw and Cherokee. Together they represent Tribal Nations and Indigenous experiences from across North America, while the regional artists in the show point to specific cultural practices, visual expressions, and sacred places.
Douglas is an enrolled member of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe with roots as well in the Moapa Paiute, Southern Cheyenne, Creek, Pawnee, and Scottish nations. She was born in Claremore, Oklahoma, but has lived in Las Vegas since childhood. She is the head matriarch of Nuwu Art plus Activism Studios and directs the Nuwu Art Gallery plus Community Center, known as Nuwu Art, in the Historic Huntridge neighborhood of Las Vegas. The center, which she cofounded, marked its fifth anniversary in 2025. She earned a BA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2015 and an MFA there in 2022 with presidential honors, and she has taught in the university's art department and its American Indian and Indigenous Studies program. Her own studio practice spans painting, weaving, sculpture, dance, and performance, and she has worked as an art and cultural consultant, as a board member and secretary of the nonprofit IndigenousAF, as Ward 3 Art Commissioner for the City of Las Vegas, and part-time with Meow Wolf. Her activism has included work toward the designation of Nevada's Gold Butte as a national monument, and as a student she painted a mural, Free Leonard Peltier, on the exterior of a dilapidated trailer on the Snow Mountain Reservation.
The Gochman Family Collection, which lends work to Tooveep, holds one of the largest collections of contemporary Native art, comprising more than 800 works. Its stated mission is to expand and deepen the global understanding of contemporary Native art and to support artists whose practices critically engage with colonial worldviews and challenge dominant historical narratives. As a lending collection, it has placed more than 260 works in over 100 exhibitions worldwide, and in November 2026 it will open Branchline, an exhibition and gathering space in Katonah, New York.
The setting for the opening has its own story. The Southern Utah Museum of Art, known as SUMA, sits at 13 South 300 West in downtown Cedar City, part of the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Center for the Arts. Its building, designed by the Los Angeles firm Brooks plus Scarpa, was named the best-designed museum in Utah by Architectural Digest; its sloping form is meant to evoke the slot canyons of the surrounding region. Inside, the climate- and humidity-controlled galleries use both permanent and thirteen movable walls, allowing staff to reshape the space for each exhibition. The museum holds nearly 2,000 objects in its permanent collection, including a significant body of work by the landscape painter Jimmie F. Jones, whose estate laid the foundation for the museum's creation. Admission is always free.
For the Paiute communities of southern Utah, the exhibition's arrival carries particular weight. The Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah has its tribal headquarters in Cedar City, and the Cedar Band of Paiute Indians, known as the Suh'dutsing or Cedar People, received federal recognition on April 3, 1980, under the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah Restoration Act, after the Utah Paiutes were wrongfully subjected to the Termination Act in 1954. The youth program that will perform at the opening belongs to that same tribal nation, and the Indigenous Student Union of Southern Utah University represents Native students on the campus where the museum stands.
SUMA will be closed for gallery rotations from September 28 through October 16, 2026, so the October 16 celebration is the first chance to see Tooveep in place. The event is free and open to everyone, and those who come are asked to wear purple, in memory of a woman who was given the name Purple Flower Girl and who spent her life insisting that Native stories be heard in the present.