The California Aggie reports that the Gorman Museum of Native American Art has opened "BDT: Brian D. Tripp with Charley Burns and Leatrice Mikkelsen," on view until March 30, 2027.

According to the Aggie, the show centers on newly acquired works by Tripp, a Karuk Tribe member who spent his life making art and poetry while working to preserve Karuk culture and teaching at Cal Poly Humboldt.

Many of the new pieces were donated last year by Dorothea Theodoratus, a professor emerita at California State University, Sacramento, who — as executive director Veronica Passalacqua tells the Aggie — discovered the museum after its move brought it new visibility and donors "coming out of the woodwork."

What makes this show surprising to a casual visitor is that much of the art is inseparable from direct political action.

The Aggie notes that among the acquisitions are pieces from the 1980s "NO-GO" campaign, in which Tripp contributed art and activism against a planned road through the Siskiyou Wilderness; the road was eventually blocked, which the paper describes as a symbol of successful Indigenous resistance and organizing.

The exhibition also includes Tripp's drawing "The Sun Set Twice on Our People that Day," sharing its title with one of his murals and a line from his poem memorializing the 1860 Wiyot massacre, in which at least 80 people were murdered by white settlers in present-day Humboldt County, per the Aggie.

The exhibition pairs Tripp with two connected Indigenous artists whose work the Aggie says shares his visual language. Charley Burns, a Yurok tribe member born in the same city of Eureka, California, examines geometry with motifs originating in Indigenous basketry.

Leatrice Mikkelsen, a Navajo, Cherokee and Wyandot artist, works in watercolor, acrylic, chalk and ink, often using spiral motifs and the Navajo story of the White Shell Woman; the Aggie reports the Mikkelsen family donated most of the Burns and Mikkelsen works.

Passalacqua tells the paper she chose to present them together because of their friendship and shared artistic relationships, hoping the next generation learns this part of California Native art history.

For the museum's student staff, the show is personal.

The Aggie quotes fourth-year theater and dance major Elio Cathcart Randall, a museum assistant, saying Tripp's mixed-media practice inspired them as a queer artist for its ability to "take corporeal images from other pieces of media and infuse it with his own meaning."

Mariah Alire, a museum assistant and member of the Ione Band of Miwok Indians, tells the paper that highlighting local Native artists shows the public "that we're still here and this kind of history matters."

The exhibition runs at the Gorman, which the Aggie notes offers free admission, until March 30, 2027 — a milestone year in which American institutions, from Davis to New York's LIU and its Museum of Democracy partnership, are also staging landmark shows marking the nation's 250th anniversary.