Don Tyson Prize winner Nicholas Galanin talks about his art
By Becca Martin-Brown
April 17, 2025
Nicholas Galanin, whose heritage is Tlingit-Unangax̂, is the winner of the 2024 Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art awarded by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. His work "is a celebration of the rich cultural heritage, spiritual beliefs and deep connection to the land of Indigenous peoples,” Crystal Bridges Board Chairwoman Olivia Walton said in a news release. (Courtesy Photo/Crystal Bridges Museum)
Everything about Nicholas Galanin is low key. He enters the room quietly, even though he knows he’s the star of the moment. He’s dressed unassumingly. He speaks softly, in measured tones. Anyone who met him in the galleries of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art would imagine he’s just a visitor. He is, in fact, an internationally known artist whose work won him the 2024 Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art.
It’s also fair to say Galanin is not an easy interview. He’s answered any questions a writer can come up with scores of times, told his story in London, New Zealand, New York, Berlin and Zurich. It’s his first visit to Bentonville, even though his work has been shown at both Crystal Bridges and The Momentary, and he’s interested to see how both his art and its viewers engage with the museum space. Institutions, he says, aren’t always friendly toward Indigenous art.
Growing up, he says, education was often “a tool of assimilation.”
“That surfaces still in institutions,” he says. “Institutional spaces are not always safe spaces.”
Still, he calls the $200,000 Don Tyson Prize “a profound honor.”
“My work seeks to disrupt colonial frameworks while celebrating Indigenous presence, knowledge and creativity,” he says. “This recognition fuels my ongoing efforts to create art that sparks dialogue, reclaims narratives and envisions a future where culture, land, and identity are protected and celebrated.”
“Nicholas Galanin’s work is a celebration of the rich cultural heritage, spiritual beliefs and deep connection to the land of Indigenous peoples,” Crystal Bridges Board Chairwoman Olivia Walton said in a news release. “We are inspired by his talent and are thrilled to award him with the fifth Don Tyson Prize. He’s a bold artist who creates thought-provoking work. Nicholas has impacted the field through innovation, creative thinking, and risk-taking.”
The Past
Galanin’s heritage is Tlingit-Unangax̂. He was raised in Sitka, Alaska, where he began learning art from his father and grandfather as soon as he was old enough to be in the workshop.
“What influenced my art was growing up with my father,” he says in a March interview at Crystal Bridges. “He was an artist and a musician. My grandfather was a totem carver. My brother makes really great jewelry.”
He was fortunate, he says, to have access to not just the materials and tools to make art but all of the moments of seeing his relatives at work. He remembers fondly the smell of the wood shop and being taught to make the tools needed for his family’s practice of art.
Still, he says, “I never got fully serious until I was 18 — which I feel like was when I was freed from school and had more options.”
Galanin says the last job he had that was “non-creative” was at a national park, where he “sat in a small room behind a desk and took a fee for an historic building.” During the down times, he drew and studied his cultural history — until he was told he couldn’t. It was a Russian Orthodox building, he recalls, and he was only allowed to study that culture during work hours.
It wasn’t the last time his will to learn was restricted by someone else’s expectations.
“Later on, I met with that at [London Guildhall] university in the U.K.,” he says. “I couldn’t do my cultural work in that curriculum. They weren’t equipped to have those conversations.”
Instead, Galanin kept a sketchbook he never showed his professors and engaged with the instructors of evening classes and artists in the community. By the time he left to continue his education in New Zealand, “I had a strong community connection with those artists. It was a really exciting moment of cross-cultural sharing.”
Galanin left London with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in jewelry design, headed for Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and a Master of Fine Arts in Indigenous visual arts.
“That’s where my ideas and my sketchbook came to life,” he says.
The Present
“My work is deeply connected to my culture, to land, history, the present moment and future possibilities — envisioning new futures,” Galanin said in a February 2024 interview with the Joan Mitchell Foundation, where he was named a 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellow.
“I’ve noticed, through the engagement of the world right now, how romanticized that culture and history is and the constraints that are put on it by outside perspectives and institutions,” he continued. “So, I’ve seen the necessity to venture off and create work that represents experience now, bringing that into global conversations.”
One such project was created for Davidson College during the covid pandemic. Galanin excavated an outline of the well-known image of Andrew Jackson on horseback — “a highly problematic figure in American history, connected to oppressive colonial actions towards indigenous people and enslaved Black Americans,” he said in the Joan Mitchell Foundation interview. In that space, Galanin planted Indigenous Catawba corn. He called the piece “Unshadowed Land.”
“At the end of the project, the corn was all harvested by the Catawba community, and it was shared as a feast. Some of the people had never tasted that corn before.”
Galanin also created a neon installation for the Seattle Art Museum that said: “I’ve composed a new American national anthem: Take a knee and scream until you can’t breathe.”
It wasn’t his original proposal. That was for the museum to remove its entire Indigenous collection from display.
“Ultimately,” he said in the Joan Mitchell Foundation interview, “it’s a conversation about sovereignty of who gets to view our objects, and about how they’re shared and cared for, with an end goal of returning them back to their community.”
Crystal Bridges first presented Galanin’s work in the 2018 exhibition “Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now,” the museum’s inaugural exhibition of Indigenous art. “His powerful installations resonated deeply,” says museum spokeswoman Michelle Moore, “leading to his inclusion in ‘A Divided Landscape’ at the Momentary in 2022.”
“In 2024, Crystal Bridges acquired two major recent works by Galanin and received a gift of a 2018 work from a significant collection,” according to Walton. “These artworks will feature prominently in our re-installation and expansion, underscoring Nicholas’ influence on contemporary art and important role in the ever-broadening American art story.”
New acquisitions include “I think it goes like this (memory and interference)” (2024) and “White Noise, American Prayer Rug (2018)”.
The Future
All the while, Galanin’s roots remain deep in Alaska and his culture. He’s always wanted to know more about being Tlingit-Unangax̂ and to live that life fully. The oppression of his culture was so pervasive, he says, that when he started studying the Tlingit language, his father asked him why.
“He wasn’t trying to be negative,” he says. “He just didn’t understand why.
“My daughter gave a speech in Tlingit when she graduated from school,” he adds. “I was so proud.”
Galanin returns to his roots when he returns to Sitka. “Everything comes to life,” he says, when it’s spring and time for the herring spawn.
“I get to be out and experience the seasons, not the corporate clock,” he says. “We were never poor — we had abundance beyond the construct that capitalism has built.”
In his language, he says, there is no word for “art, but it’s everywhere.”
“I grew up in a healthy society that was wealthy because we had time to make art. That balance is very important.
“We cared for the land, and in turn it cared for us. When that relationship is broken, you’re on a dangerous path.”
Galanin says he always promises himself that he’ll be home for all the celebrations of the spring and summer seasons. But he also feels a deep and abiding responsibility as an artist — and as winner of the Don Tyson Prize.
“I am always aware of my practices being a responsibility,” he says, “and an opportunity to create space for Indigenous artists.”