Indigenous art meets comic books, children’s toys and mythology in Cara and Diego Romero’s “Tales of Futures Past” at the Figge

Artists Cara (Chemehuevi) and Diego (Cochiti) Romero’s traveling exhibition “Tales of Futures Past” premiered this month at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport. Cara and Diego Romero are Indigenous artists who work in different media exploring the diversity and impact of Indigenous identity.

“We were looking at the full bodies of work for both Diego and myself and it was really hard to come up with one throughline, but as we were working towards that, [we found] it is about about the timelessness of the work and about how we bring our pasts to the present, to the future,” Cara said about how they put their largest collaborative exhibit together. “It’s kind of cyclical, for our worldview but also for our art. We’re not just based in linear time, we are always just borrowing from whatever time is relevant to the piece.”

She said the name of the show was Diego’s idea, referencing the comics that have long inspired her husband’s work. Diego added that he loves the oxymoron of “futures past,” but that it also works with their ultimate belief that art, and Indigenousness, exist outside of time.

Cara and Diego Romero met through the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), where they both went to college. They were introduced by Diego’s brother, who was faculty there when Cara was a student. This program was formative for Cara and Diego as both artists and people.

“It was free back then for Natives,” Diego said of IAIA. “That was huge. If you don’t have a scholarship or money to afford a formal education you could go to IAIA. I hadn’t been a good student in high school but I had it in my head I was going to make it to the East Coast and be an illustrator. Not having many options, I made it to Santa Fe.”

Diego was working at McDonald’s with an IAIA student who encouraged him to look into the school. “I remember he said, ‘I get three square meals a day and art supplies. Diego, you’re a damn fool if you’re going to flip burgers here and not go to IAIA.’”

Diego spoke to a counselor at the school who told him he needed to be a full-time student to qualify for housing and put him in the pottery program. “Before you know it, I was a professional student.”

Diego credits his education, and the faculty in particular, with this. Someone in registration told him “‘[Otellie Lolaman] has a good way of working with urban Indians,’ and they were right.” 

“IAIA specializes in retention with Native students where other institutions fail,” Cara added. “… You can’t get an art education anywhere else as a Native person that is such a deep dive into our own history.”

Cara also received a free education at IAIA, where she enrolled sight unseen. “The professors were making their own supplies. When we got to Diego’s art. It was the first time I’d seen American history from a Native perspective. It was immediate love for that.”

Growing up Native and having access to an holistic education influenced the Romeros’ work. While Diego has always loved illustration and especially comics, learning traditional pottery practices gave him an outlet for telling the stories that were left out of textbooks and pop culture while also engaging with the work his ancestors were doing.

Diego’s pottery, often into bowls and vases, are painted with traditional patterns around the edges to create a frame for his central image or images. In the “Tales of Futures Past” exhibit, most of his work depicts images of Native history as it would be told by Natives. Saints & Sinners depicts a Native person being tortured by Junipero Serra, a scene that is well documented. Serra was a Spanish colonizer and was later canonized by the Catholic church.

Other pieces show Native people as superheroes or characters from Native folklore, or portray scenes from contemporary Native life. The piece Women in the Anthropocene depicts a woman doing laundry with factories and smog in the background. Its companion piece Boy in the Anthropocene shows a child playing football with a similar backdrop. These pieces draw attention to Indigenous people’s survival after society has pushed them into the margins, which creates further vulnerabilities for already marginalized communities.

Cara added that some of Diego’s work is based in mythology or his tribe’s oral tradition, “coming through time and showing up in the future. He’s writing through the cosmos almost like a neo-mythology.”

The artists think it’s important to underscore that Native design persists in the future through baskets, pottery and beadwork. Per Cara, “They have been around for a very, very long time, passed down through cultural transmission from one generation to the next. This [exhibition] is about a future where our transmissions, patterns are present. We still grow.”

Cara’s photography work features models dressed and depicted according to the subject’s own identity. In her First American Girl series, each model poses in a decorative box with the environment, accessories and clothing they would have if they were part of the American Girl doll line. Cara’s models have discretion over how they are portrayed in their portraits. In the photo Kaa, the subject is a potter from a lineage of potters, and is covered in a traditional Mesa Verde pattern made from white clay. 

There are several sections within the exhibit, including The Power of Indigeneity, Apocalypto and Ancestral Evolution. Each section uses the art from both Romeros to tell an evocative story about who and where Indigenous people have always been and will always be. While stylistically disparate, Cara and Diego’s art fuses into a bright and complicated documentary of possibility. Each piece in the exhibit asks the viewer to see themselves and be present within a reality outside of time but still very much of this place.

“We’re telling it from a perspective that has not been — these stories, our history, have not been told from our perspective. If you open up the [text]books it’s all told from Washington across the Delaware, Lincoln freed the slaves, Custer died at Little Bighorn,” Diego spoke of the motivation behind these projects. “We want to reach all communities, those who are open to it, to just say, basically, these stories are untold stories of history, of perseverance, how Native people have survived. It’s been written out of the textbook, so this is an opportunity as artists … We know that we’re still here after all this and the other, and we still continue to struggle.”

Their art is in service to their communities, Cara said.

“Native people can look at artwork of Native people and tell if it was made by a Native person or not,” she said. “The importance of being a storyteller from within the community is something that we can see and something that our community receives, especially in the photographic medium because so often we’ve seen our visual story told from outside the community. This looks like ethnography and anthropology.”

Cara wants to make her community feel seen. “I want them to feel beautiful. I want them to feel like they are so gifted. I want them to feel so much strength and beauty. I want to give humanity to our stories, empathy. I think our community deserves that.”

The two are proud of the opening spot at the Figge and the rest of the tour, which will span four cities around the country through 2026. “It’s amazing to me to be in these spaces of American museums, being in this breakthrough moment for contemporary American Indian art,” Cara said.

Their work references history and keeps its eye on the future. While much of Indigenous American history is tragic, Diego maintains he wants to communicate “hope, perseverance…We go about our lives and we do it all in the shadow of big industry. But yet we’re still here. We persevere throughout.”

“A lot of times in our communities we talk about how an apocalypse has already happened. We’ve already been through destruction of language, of cultures, of foodways, of lifeways and survived. Diego and I come from a place of celebrating resilience and vibrance. An amazing thing about our communities is how strong they’ve been through American history. I have no doubt we will be able to take care of the things we’ve been able to take care of for a long time.”

Cara and Diego Romero: Tales of Futures Past is on display through June 8, 2025.

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Cara and Diego Romero: Tales of Futures Past Program