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Gochman Family Collection

@gochmancollection

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A contemporary art collection with a focus on Indigenous artists, shared through lending and exhibitions.

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It’s official: Branchline opens November 6! ✨

We’re excited to announce that Branchline, our new space for contemporary art in Katonah, New York, opens November 6, with an opening celebration from 6–9pm!

Located just steps from the Katonah Metro-North station, Branchline will be free and open to the public Thursday-Sat 11-6, Sunday 12-4

Branchline will debut with Line Break, an exhibition organized by GFC Assistant Curator Moonoka Begay (Ndee + Diné), with Collection Associate Nicole van Brugge. Bringing together 18 artists, the exhibition explores the ways lines connect histories, landscapes, and generations.

Featuring works by Saif Azzuz, Teresa Baker, Andrea Carlson, Nanibah Chacon, Raven Chacon, Berdina Y. Charley, Sara Flores, Jeffrey Gibson, Ishi Glinsky, Faye HeavyShield, Rachel Martin, George Morrison, Nadia Myre, Jean Shin, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Kay WalkingStick, Marie Watt, and Emmi Whitehorse.

We’re looking forward to welcoming artists, neighbors, and visitors to Branchline and sharing this new chapter of the Gochman Family Collection.
💫💫💫💫💫💫

Link in bio for more info ✨

Image 1: The Gochman Family Collection team, from left: Rachel Martin, Becky Gochman, Audrey Lea Collins, Nicole van Brugge, Moonoka Begay, and Laura Phipps.
Photo: Denis Gutierrez Ogrinc @denisogrinc taken in Katonah, New York by @gochmancollection

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9 days ago

River Webb (Nimíipuu, Meskwaki) is a fifth-generation ribbonwork artist, traditional scientist, knowledge keeper, and competitive powwow dancer. Webb’s interdisciplinary art practice utilizes traditional Meskwaki ribbonwork along with beading and weaving to initiate dialog surrounding gender diversity, geochemistry, traditional ecological knowledge, language preservation, land recovery, and more.

This work, entitled ‘Dance of the Berdashe - Eyeigewai Nimiweni’ is inspired by George Catlin’s painting of the same name, which depicts a feast honoring a Meskwakia Eyeigewa (a Meskwaki trans woman) in 1835. George Catlin (1796-1872) was an American painter, author, and expeditionist who specialized in producing portraits of Indigenous communities during his travels throughout the American West. As a documentarian of the culture and identity of Indigenous peoples, Catlin’s painting career extended aspects of the colonial project, including the invasion and chronicling of nations. Catlin’s extensive yet highly fraught portrait collection has been circulating globally since its conception, reinforcing the myth of the Vanishing Indian and ultimately depriving Indigenous communities of their right to self-represent. 
Kent Monkman was the first contemporary artist to reinterpret Catlin’s painting in the form of a video installation in 2008. Following Monkman’s interpretation, Webb identified the strong need to reinterpret Catlin’s painting from the real perspective of an Eyeigewa. As a Meskwaki trans woman herself, Webb chose to tell the story of Eyeigewaki, through the traditional medium of Meskwaki applique, to represent her community as they truly are. Her applique blanket is wearable and features two plant varieties used in traditional Meskwaki medicine. Both plants are known for their ability to change sex within their lifespan. The blanket is also adorned with Estrogen bottles.

“The vials attached are estradiol, a modern twist to this medicine robe to show that we as Meskwakia Eyeigewa are a modern people. Just as our designs____

>>>caption cont’d in comments >> by @gochmancollection

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And so it begins!

The Gochman Family Collection will open its public exhibition and gathering space, Branchline, on Friday, November 6th. The Katonah community has welcomed us so warmly and we are so thrilled to contribute to their vibrant arts and cultural landscape. More updates to come!

Follow along here at @gfcbranchline as we get ready to open our doors! We’ll be sharing sneak peeks, introducing artists, and announcing exhibitions and upcoming programs. We can’t wait to welcome you in November. ❤️ taken in Katonah, New York by @gochmancollection

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4 days ago

Chief Henry Speck Sr. (U’dzistalis, Kwakwaka’wakw, 1908–1971) was a hereditary chief, painter, carver, dancer, songwriter, and composer of dances.

Throughout his life, Speck played an important role in the renewal of Kwakwaka’wakw art and cultural practices, including the potlatch, following decades of prohibition by the Canadian government.
He was also among an early generation of First Nations artists to bring Northwest Coast artistic conventions onto paper and into gallery contexts. Many of his drawings depict dance masks and subjects connected to Kwakwaka’wakw cultural life, carrying inherited knowledge into new forms and spaces.

Speck’s work speaks to a continuum that remains central to contemporary Native art: cultural knowledge carried forward, adapted, and expressed on artists’ own terms.

Slides 1-4
-Raven Head Mask, Date unknown.
Gouache on paper, 13½ × 16 inches
Slides 5-8
-Gikumi - Chief with Beaverhead Gear, Date unknown. Gouache on paper, 16 × 13 ½ inches

Caption: Rachel Martin by @gochmancollection

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13 days ago

Rose B. Simpson is a multi-disciplinary artist from Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico known for her ceramic sculptures, metal work, performances, installations, and custom art cars.

Centering care, self-reflection, and kinship, Simpson creates objects of empowerment as a project in healing the damages of colonial legacies. At times, this empowerment manifests through allusions to femininity and maternal love; at others, through depictions of androgynous, regal warriors and post-apocalyptic aesthetics, suggesting resilience and protection in her community.

Simpson’s works function as psychological ruminations of the self while simultaneously reflecting the layered histories and culture of her hometown. Hailing from a long matrilineal lineage of clay artists, Simpson’s engagement with ceramic traditions deepens this entanglement between personal and historical narratives, melding ancestral knowledge with visions of Indigenous futures.

This sculpture, titled “Crown II, “uses a technique Simpson calls “slap-slab” — a process of repeatedly throwing slabs of clay against a flat surface until they are very thin. These fragile sheets demand urgency and decisiveness; the clay dries quickly, resisting hesitation. Yet the process also invites surrender to chance, encouraging compassion and grace toward imperfection. Visible seams and surfaces retain the trace of touch, foregrounding process as a form of power and clay as a site of memory.

“My work is research into a very personal space, into my relationship to process and to a spiritual or psychological journey. The objects are the result or the by-product of that investigation. It’s what comes from the journey.
These things are kind of like the wake of it, that can ideally go out into the world and help other people, maybe, in their own investigation, their own journeys.”

~Crown II, 2017
Ceramic, steel, leather, 67 x 22 × 10 inches

Caption: Nicole van Brugge by @gochmancollection

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18 days ago

Jean Shin is a Korean-American sculptor and installation artist who uses donated or discarded objects to interrogate material consumption, environmental pollution, and labor practices. Collecting cast-off materials from local communities, her work explores the hidden histories that lie within these objects—their production, circulation, disposal, and environmental impacts.

“My work often begins by observing a place, probing the indexes of a site’s physical reality to identify an object or material that is ubiquitous yet implies a deeply personal sensibility.”

In the artist’s hands, e-waste, plastic discard, and excess textiles transform from everyday remnants into confrontational public monuments, returning to the communities from which they came carrying a new sense of value and urgency.

The “S.O.S.” series uses branches salvaged from a fallen 140-year-old hemlock tree in Olana State Historic Site, which was originally planted in response to the tanning industry’s deforestation of the Catskill Mountains. Through acts of adornment, the series commemorates the historical and continued ecological threats hemlock trees face.

Shin carefully cleaned each branch before upholstering it with deadstock leather, recasting fashion-industry waste into a beautifying armor she describes as a “second skin.” The slow, meticulous process became an act of mourning, inviting reflection on forms of labor that are often obscured by consumer culture.

Separated from the trunk, the branches evoke a haunting feeling of dismemberment, while the leather functions as a funerary shroud for both the fallen tree and the calves from which the materials originated, linking these lives not through cycles of extraction and consumption, but in an act of remembrance.

“S.O.S #13,” 2022. Salvaged hemlock branches from Olana State Historic Site, leather remnants, upholstery tacks, 70 x 7 x 3 inches

Caption: Nicole van Brugge by @gochmancollection

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a month ago

Faye HeavyShield is a sculptor and installation artist belonging to the Kainai (Blood) Nation of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Using minimal forms and humble materials, HeavyShield creates poetic meditations on memory, lineage, and place. She often draws upon the landscape of her Southern Alberta homeland and her Kainai upbringing, distilling natural elements, family histories, and lived experiences into spare forms that are equally symbolic and open-ended.

“The red line II” is composed of a beaded cord that meanders along the ground like an intuitive sketch. HeavyShield created the first version of this work at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, finding comfort in the solitary act of beading: “‘The red line’ was a refuge for me at a time when this was much needed. It stood in for family when we couldn’t share in person solace, laughter, and grief.”

Deeply process-based, HeavyShield describes beading as a contemplative exercise—each session fostering a different kind of reflection: a connection to the ancestral art of beadwork, an investigation of the color red or the formal quality of a line, a metaphor for family lineage, or simply the mindful occupation of the artist’s hands. Upon display, “the red line II” recalls beaded Kainai necklaces or the winding rivers in Southern Alberta, yet remains intentionally ambiguous, allowing these associations to coexist openly.

With each installation of “the red line II,” HeavyShield assembles the cord segments on site, creating new configurations in response to the space. The sculpture thus embodies both the slow deliberate beading process and the immediacy of a contour drawing. This iterative quality is emblematic of the use repetition found in much of HeavyShield’s work. Repetition, together with her use of humble materials, shifts attention away from the artwork as a singular precious object and toward the quiet acts of making and care that bring it into being.

-the red line II’ , 2025
Beads, thread, and cord
2/4 x 342 inches

Caption: Nicole van Brugge by @gochmancollection

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a month ago

Hayden Haynes (Seneca, Kiowa, Mvskoke) is a visual artist born in Claremore, Oklahoma, and raised on the Seneca–Cattaraugus Territory in Western New York. He currently lives and works in Seneca-Allegany Territory.

Working across antler carving, found objects, mixed media, and photography, Haynes brings a distinctly contemporary approach to materials and forms grounded in Hodinöhsö:ni’ cultural knowledge.
Haynes’s work moves between cultural revitalization and contemporary social critique, engaging questions of identity, representation, resilience, and who is permitted to occupy Indigenous spaces.

In Indian Fetish, these concerns take on a pointed visual form. A white figure, appearing to be a Native art enthusiast, wears Diné jewelry and a skirt trimmed with money. Holding a camera, the figure represents the settler’s gaze and the fetishization of Native culture. Constructed from antler, turquoise, obsidian, and sterling silver, the work brings questions of identity, exchange, and value into direct conversation.

As Haynes describes, Indian Fetish is “Inspired by times I’ve spent sitting at my booths at Indian markets.” In this way, the work speaks to how—and by whom—Indigenous identity and culture are consumed and assigned value.

~Indian Fetish, 2025.
Moose antler, whitetail deer antler, turquoise, obsidian cabochon, and sterling silver, 5½ × 2 inches x 28 inches

caption: Rachel Martin by @gochmancollection

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a month ago

Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota ) is a multidisciplinary artist best known for her mixed media works that merge Lakota traditions of abstraction with the sensibilities of so-called modernist Color Field painting.

By seamlessly integrating glass beadwork with acrylic painting, Dyani’s practice effectively highlights the foundational influence of Indigenous visual aesthetics on Western art and invites viewers to think critically about the imposed sets of value systems that exist within institutional art scholarship.
Abstraction is a crucial facet of Lakota visual culture, and can be traced through lane stitch beadwork, porcupine quillwork, parfleche painting, and other forms of personal adornment—practices all historically upheld by women. By grounding her practice in these customs, White Hawk’s meticulous treatment of both material and concept pays tribute to the women in her community, honoring their profound contributions to art history.

The artist has become especially well-renowned for her use of beadwork in reframing Eurocentric legacies of modernism by stitching interlocking panels of beads onto her original color field paintings so that “you meet the beadwork first.” This superimposed process of encountering the Lakota artform before the paint on canvas illustrates how White Hawk works to actively rearrange hierarchies of invention.
In addition to texture, the artist also toys with scale, often working monumentally, in turn expanding possibilities of celebration and functionality.

“Abstraction is a global practice, and abstraction is a human practice. So by creating works that draw from the rich history of Indigenous art forms, and making sure that they are big enough to hold space on walls next to their counterparts who have been written into histories as the supposed inventors of abstraction, I am asking people to stop and to think critically about the development of abstraction on this continent, but also globally, and how we talk about it, how we’re teaching it, how we’re displaying it, and how we’re thinking about it.”

artwork info cont’d in comments >> by @gochmancollection

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2 months ago

Athena LaTocha (Hunkpapa Lakota and Ojibwe) is a mixed media artist based in New York. Informed by her upbringing in Alaska, where the grandeur of wilderness and the visible effects of the oil industry collide, her practice explores relationships between natural and man-made landscapes.

LaTocha’s work is rooted in a deep, site-responsive engagement with place. She begins each project by visiting a location, gathering photographs, sound recordings, and physical materials, both industrial and natural, from the environment. This in-depth research defines both the conceptual framework of each piece and the media that comprise it. Incorporating dirt, construction debris, charcoal, pulverized brick, moss, and mica, LaTocha evokes the cultural and physical history of these landscapes across geological and human time.

In the studio, she lays large sheets of paper on the floor, exploring unconventional mark-making methods with found objects such as tire treads and brooms. Gestural and improvisational, these marks harken to traces of displacement left in the landscape by human intervention and natural processes. “Surrounded on all sides by the expanse of paper,” LaTocha observes, “I move through the work as if traversing the terrain.”

This work, titled “Vestige,” is inspired by the Great Falls of the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey. Characteristic of her practice, LaTocha pressed a thin sheet of lead directly onto rock, capturing its texture and contours in scale. She then overlaid the lead onto a monumental piece of paper stained with shellac ink and wild berry pigment. The resulting work presents landscape not as a static moment or image of passive reverence, but as an immersive, bodily encounter shaped by time, transformation, and material memory.

“Vestige,” 2021. Shellac ink and wild berry stain on paper, lead, fiberglass, steel, 45.5 x 8.52 x 5.25 inches.

Caption: Nicole van Brugge by @gochmancollection

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2 months ago

Seferina Ortiz (1931-2007) was a 5th-generation Cochiti Pueblo potter. Ortiz learned traditional techniques from her mother, Laurencita Herrera, employing hand coiling and pit-firing to form whimsical red-clay pieces. Regarded as a great matriarch of Cochiti pottery, she continued to pass this knowledge on to her children and grandchildren, notably artists Virgil Ortiz, Mary Janice Ortiz, Lisa Holt, and Kyle Ortiz.

These works, called “Bathers,” expand on the Cochiti tradition of figurative pottery, a practice that was driven to commercial popularity in the 1870s by the non-Native tourist economy. Ironically, these pieces often depicted wryly humorous representations of the very peoples who purchased them.

Ortiz began making sun-bathing figures in the 1970s in response to the US Army Corps of Engineers building the Cochiti Dam that flooded nearby fields, fundamentally shifting the way the Cochiti Pueblo community interacted with the land. This development also prompted an influx of tourists enjoying the pools that were once the Pueblo farmland. Ortiz satirizes this tableau of a relaxing pastime, posing a pointed critique of the policy that enabled it. These “Bathers” stand not only as a testament to Ortiz’s artistic skill and stewardship of cultural pottery techniques, but also as a sophisticated joke that hinges upon the layered history of who produces, consumes, and is depicted in Cochiti figurines.

“Bathers,” Date unknown. Glazed ceramic, 6 ½ × 5 × 5 ½ inches.

Caption: Nicole van Brugge by @gochmancollection

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2 months ago

Bazille Owen-Reese is a citizen of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, based in Northern New Mexico, and an important emerging voice in contemporary Native art.
Her practice is part of a broader generation of artists expanding the possibilities of beadwork, placing it within a contemporary visual language that feels distinctly her own.
Playful, polished, and often fashion-forward, Owen-Reese’s work draws from graphic floral motifs, abstract patterns, and video game icons, bringing together cultural knowledge, personal expression, and a distinctly contemporary sensibility.
Sunset Summer, her first beaded purse, is a compelling example of this approach—transforming an everyday accessory into a meticulously constructed art object that moves fluidly between beadwork, design, fashion, and sculpture.

~Sunset Summer, 2023
Beadwork, 11 × 7 × 2 inches

Caption: Rachel Martin
Photography: Tyson Houseman
Hair: @deyah_cassadore
Makeup: @beautybybrita
Model: Alizae Shaw @itsalizae by @gochmancollection

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