The Collection

Chelsea Bighorn is a textile artist whose practice draws from her Lakota, Dakota, and Shoshone–Paiute heritage as well as her Irish American ancestry. She merges traditional Native American design histories with European influences to create large-scale textile works that articulate her personal and familial narratives. Memories of attending powwows with her grandmother and the cultural significance of traditional dance remain central sources of inspiration, grounding her work in both lived experience and intergenerational knowledge.

Bighorn received her BFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2021 and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024. Through material experimentation and culturally rooted patterning, her practice explores hybridity, identity, and the continuity of Indigenous making traditions within contemporary art.

Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), SITE Santa Fe, EXPO Chicago, Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, the Balzar Gallery, and the Center for Native Futures in Chicago, where her work has also been featured in ongoing presentations. Her projects bridge traditional craft vocabularies with contemporary textile forms, highlighting the layered histories embedded within her materials and motifs.

Bighorn currently resides in Chicago, Illinois, where she is an artist-in-residence with the Chicago Artist Coalition.