Joe Harjo says he didn’t have “access to seeing ‘artist as profession,’” while he was growing up in Oklahoma as a member of the Muscogee (Creek) nation. When he told a guidance counselor in high school that he wanted to teach, the counselor rebuffed him. When he said he wanted to be an artist, he got a similar response. Now he’s both artist and teacher, and his work tries to counter misrepresentations of Native peoples in popular culture. After a particularly difficult year of isolation, an injured knee, the resurgence of racial strife, and Covid, Harjo discovered his origins anew, both as an artist and as a Native person. He felt “lifted” and “carried through” by histories, his own and that of his ancestors, and he shared that discovery in a series of prints. It’s one of the mysteries of art that you will find something of yourself in his story as well.