Description
Bush Shoeing, currently on view in The Heckscher Museum of Art 2026 Long Island Biennial, curated by Dr, The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY, May 16, 2026 – September 13, 2026
This work stages a deliberate interruption of America’s founding moment. A Native figure is shown mid-gesture, throwing a moccasin toward a colonial residence where the Declaration is being publicly debuted. The action references the 2008 incident in which an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush—an act widely understood as protest, refusal, and moral indictment. Here, the moccasin replaces the shoe, grounding the gesture in Indigenous presence and history. It is not an act of violence, but a symbolic disruption: a refusal to accept the Declaration as a universal promise when its freedoms were never intended to include Indigenous nations.
The Declaration is often celebrated as a document of liberty, yet for Native peoples it marked the acceleration of dispossession, broken treaties, and the legal framing of Indigenous nations as obstacles to progress. By throwing a moccasin—an object tied to land, movement, and survival—the figure confronts the colonial narrative at the moment of its self-mythologizing. The work asks what it means to celebrate independence on stolen land, and who is allowed to speak back when history declares itself complete.
