Kimberly Fulton Orozco, Generative Love

October 30 - December 12, 2025

Generative Love is an exhibition that transforms paper— from a material historically wielded as an instrument of control—into a site of renewal, expression, and celebration of ancestral roots. Through vivid, abstract compositions informed by Northwest Coast formline design, the work reclaims this surface from the bureaucratic logics that seek to fix identity and place it under surveillance. Here, paper becomes a ground of freedom, a medium of agency, and a space for imagining futures that cannot be contained by the past.

The histories embedded in these works are layered and personal, shaped by the legacies of forced assimilation and the will to endure. Native relatives of the artist survived mission boarding schools designed to sever language, culture, and kinship. Mexican relatives navigated systemic discrimination that demanded adaptation as a means of survival. These intertwined narratives reveal assimilation as both a tool of oppression and a complex site of strategy and care—where communities negotiate, resist, and reimagine what it means to live and thrive within imposed borders.

The exhibition moves through these tensions with both urgency and grace. The paintings radiate with bright neon tones, refusing erasure through the strategic use of vibrancy as a form of safety and presence. Sculptural works speak in quieter registers: a cassette tape, adorned with shredded tools of measurement, becomes a vessel of ancestral memory; a terracotta vessel, broken into three and planted with Native flora, affirms the right to take root and flourish on one’s own terms.

A suspended screen of archival documents physically divides the space, compelling viewers to pass through the residue of state and institutional power in order to encounter the work on the other side. This gesture underscores a central premise of Generative Love: archives are never neutral, and histories of categorization must be disassembled and disengaged.

At its core, Generative Love asserts self-determination as both inheritance and practice. Through abstraction, material intervention, and layered storytelling, the exhibition honors the endurance of ancestral knowledge while insisting on the right to imagine and build liberated futures.


Kimberly Fulton Orozco is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, printmaking, and conceptual installation. Her practice interrogates the psychic aftershocks of assimilation and the social architectures that shape—and fracture—our sense of belonging. Drawing from Kaigani Haida, Mexican immigrant, and Scottish ancestry, she uses bright color, abstraction, and ancestral knowledge as acts of presence and resistance. Rooted in visual language as a vessel of shared understanding, her work reimagines systems of power while honoring cultural continuity. Fulton Orozco holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is a designer for the United States Mint Artistic Infusion Program.


Artist Talk
November 13, 10a-12p
hosted by Native Arts and Cultures Foundation



@kimmhmm
saandlaanaay.art

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