There’s a new exhibition up at the Ucross Foundation ranch in Sheridan County. It’s called “Resilience” and features the work of the 2025 recipients of the Ucross Fellowship for Native American Artists.
That includes Sarah Ortegon, who’s an enrolled member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and is also Northern Arapaho. She’s a visual artist, an actor and a dancer, who was born in Denver and now lives on the Wind River Reservation.
Back in 2013, Ortegon won the crown for Miss Native American USA and started touring with the Native Pride Dancers, traveling and performing the jingle dress dance around the world. She was also the first artist with Wyoming roots to be featured in the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ recurring exhibition series “Women to Watch” in 2024.
The artist has three pieces up in the Ucross gallery: two paintings and a video of a jingle dress dance performance.
“Resilience” also includes work by sculptor Gina Herrera (Tesuque Pueblo), writer Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians) and mixed-media artist Wade Patton (Oglala Lakota), and was curated by artist Marwin Begaye (Navajo).
The exhibit is on display until May 15 at the Ucross Art Gallery. Admission is free. Ucross is also hosting a talk with the curator and featured artists at Sheridan College on April 17, as well as a reception at the gallery that evening for the community.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann sat down with Ortegon to talk craft, creativity and politics.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Sarah Ortegon: The most recent piece that I completed is 30 inches by 30 inches. It's a square art piece and the background is blue. I created buildings going up into the sky, and on top of the buildings I beaded a mama and a calf buffalo on one side and then a father buffalo overlooking the other buffalos.
It's touching on how the areas in which we have cities in the Northern Plains and mountains – Denver, for example – those are literally the areas in which the buffalo used to roam. They used to caretake the area, because if you do any research on buffalos, they are amazing for the ecosystem and their history, very much so, is a mirror to our history as tribal people.
[The art piece] was just me bringing them back to the areas in which they originally were, though in a different space and time.
Hannah Habermann: You are a very creative person! You're a visual artist, you're an actor, you're a dancer. Do you feel like you're able to express different messages through those different mediums?
SO: Through my 2-D art and beadwork that I create, that's typically a meditative process where I wait for the image to come to me, and then once I get that image, it's almost an obsession to get it out.
For dancing, I feel like that's a way to get my creative ideas going as well, but also to give back to [the] community because I typically dance the jingle dress dance. That's to bring healing and happy feelings to those who are watching.
Through acting, I'm able to tap into some of the harder emotions that you face. A lot of people face hardships on a daily basis, and I’m able to tap into those emotions and let them out. There's different ways in which the expressions come out, but I'm appreciative of all of them.
HH: The theme of this Ucross show is “Resilience.” What does that mean to you, and what does that look like for you on a day-to-day basis?
SO: Resilience is facing hardships, whatever may come, whenever they show up, and still being able to not just exist, but also to have a good impact on the things around you, the people around you.
Also, providing life to others around you. Maybe you have a cat that you take care of, or maybe you have a baby and that's so much that you're pouring into the baby. It's resilience to teach that baby their history or even just how to walk.
The smallest things have the biggest impact on those around you, and I think that that's a part of resilience that's not acknowledged enough.
HH: Looking at the lineup for this show, the exhibition features work from artists from a bunch of different tribal nations and artistic disciplines. To you, what does that say about resilience as a concept?
SO: I think it says that resilience as a concept is open to many different disciplines, but also to us as humans. Throughout history, there have been so many issues that humans have had to overcome and especially Indigenous peoples in the area of Wyoming.
Our resilience is – it's still an everyday fight. I know that not a lot of people like to be political, but our existence in and of itself is a political existence, because our treaties are tied to the federal government and our rights are also tied to our treaties.
HH: You were born in Denver. You spent your summers on the Wind River Reservation and you live there now. How does that place influence your creativity?
SO: Growing up in Denver, it felt way more confined. Everywhere I went, there were places that were dangerous that you shouldn't go. It just felt like I was a caged bird in Denver. Until I grew up, of course.
Then, coming out to the reservation, I was allowed to run anywhere I could. We built dirt hills. We rode our bikes everywhere, swam in the river. Of course there are always rez dogs that you gotta be careful of. We used to have rocks in our pockets and sticks.
It was just a more – it was a free existence. And it was somewhere where we could get our hands dirty and it was somewhere that I definitely feel connected to.
HH: You were recently part of a sold-out performance of a reading of “What Was Ours / Who She Is” at the University of Wyoming. It was based on two award-winning documentaries from Wind River about bringing tribal belongings back to their home and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons crisis. What was that experience like?
SO: What you see is maybe an hour of performance, but behind the scenes we – Professor CC Aragon and Jordan Dresser – we met on a weekly basis for several months leading up to it.
I love their creativity, and it was fun to bounce ideas off of each other to come in knowing what we were going to practice within the play.
And then during the play of “What Was Ours / Who She Is,” heavy topics. They're very heavy topics. They gave me the option to name my sister, in memory of her, and it was a healing process for a lot of us within the play.
It was also nice to bring education to those who may not know how the Allotment Act of 1887 affected us and how it basically checkerboarded our jurisdiction for so many things: water rights, us bringing back our buffalo. There's just so many issues [from] the Allotment Act that still impact us and impact the reservation.
HH: For folks who are less familiar, could you describe a little bit about the Allotment Act?
SO: The Allotment Act of 1887 basically checkerboarded our reservation by opening up our reservation for non-Indigenous people to purchase up to 160 acres at a time.
That money did not go back to tribes, it actually went back to the federal government. So in no way did Natives benefit from the selling of our land and checkerboarding our lands.
Now there is fee land, there's allotted lands, there's reservation land and then there's federal lands also, within the one reservation area that exists on the Wind River. That creates some many different issues for us.
HH: You currently work at the Native American Rights Fund. That's a nonprofit that protects indigenous rights and tribal sovereignty. What connection do you see between the legal world and resilience?
SO: I would say the legal world exists for the Native American tribes because of a lot of these issues that we face jurisdictionally. A lot of these jurisdictional issues are fought with the federal government, and so it's not even sometimes a state issue. It goes straight to the federal government and then sometimes even up to the Supreme Court.
I think a lot of people get lost in the fact that we have treaties with the federal government. It's not a play on race, but it is a play on the actual contracts or treaties that you see playing out in real life in real time, now.
HH: What words of advice or support do you have for people who want to get more into art to express themselves?
SO: If you view yourself as an artist and you're having a hard time, maybe you just had a baby and there's no time to dedicate to art, that's okay. Put it on the back burner and it'll always be there for you.
Creativity, I think, is a way for us to express ourselves and sometimes to just get some of those emotions that we feel so suppressed within ourselves out on a 2-D canvas. Whether it be to sell or just for you yourself, just to let some emotions out.
I also fully support anyone who wants to pursue their art as an art career. There are so many fellowships available. I actually was not aware of a lot of fellowships that I’m now pursuing. It might even lead you to being a full-time artist.
There's different ways to express art and never let the square canvas limit you.
