Shifting Perceptions, Opening May 17

In the late 1990s, Cara Romero went to the University of Houston to study cultural anthropology. But when she opened her textbooks, she was shocked. The depiction of Native Americans didn’t look anything like her friends and family on the Chemehuevi Reservation in California. Determined to resist Eurocentric narratives, Romero picked up a camera. She hasn’t put it down since. “I am deeply committed to making work that addresses Native American social issues and changes the way people perceive us in contemporary society,” Romero shares in her artist’s statement. “My style offers viewers sometimes serious and sometimes playful social commentary on pressing issues like the border wall, the hyper-sexualization of Native women in histories of photography, environmental destruction of Native lands, and stereotypes of Indigeneity in pop culture.” Romero’s work, “T.V. Indians,” will be one of several photographs featured in Shifting Perceptions at Asheville Art Museum. Opening in late May, the exhibition will present photographs that riff on seemingly opposing forces like natural and unnatural, together and apart, and inside and out. While some of the photos will fall neatly into one such grouping, “many invite contemplation of the in-between, the intersections between two categories, and even the contradictions,” a press statement notes. After all, “art dwells in questions and wonderings rather than in certainties.”