James Luna was a ground-breaking performance artist, cross-cultural mediator, and leader in the Native arts community. His thirty-year practice responded to a broad number of Native American social and political issues, and confronted the fetishization, display and extractive use of Native American culture. Through work that was often unsettling, he examined issues of agency, history, contemporary mainstream society, and cultural misconceptions and conflict. Luna is featured in the Wheelwright’s current exhibition, California Stars: Huivaniūs Pütsiv which explores the impact of multiple generations of First Californian artists.
Ryan S. Flahive is an educator and historian and currently works as Archivist and Museum Studies faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Since 2009, Flahive has stewarded and promoted the rich archival history of IAIA through exhibitions, publications, classes, and lectures. He compiled and edited Celebrating Difference: Fifty Years of Contemporary Native Arts at IAIA, 1962-2012 (2012) and The Sound of Drums: A Memoir of Lloyd Kiva New (2016). Flahive also contributed writing to Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s-1970s (2018) and Making History: IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (2021). Flahive is the immediate past President of the New Mexico Association of Museums (NMAM), serves on the New Mexico Historical Records Advisory Board (NMHRAB), and serves on the Advisory Board for the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM).