Feature Gallery Artist

Wakeah Jhane is an Indigenous ledger artist and mother of two daughters whose work honors the enduring strength, love, memory, and beauty of Indigenous life. She descends from the Penatʉka and Yaparʉka bands of the Nʉmʉnʉʉ (Comanche), as well as the Gáuigú (Kiowa), ᏣᎳᎩ (Cherokee) and Amskapi Piikani (Blackfeet).
Her practice continues the historic Plains ledger art tradition and is deeply connected to her own lineage. A Kiowa relative, Beahko (“Old Man”), was among the Indigenous men imprisoned at Fort Marion in 1875, where Plains warriors created drawings in ledger books to remember their lives and homelands during incarceration. Today, Wakeah works on authentic antique ledger paper from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, transforming these historical documents into contemporary expressions of Indigenous presence and cultural continuity. Through what she describes as her Heartwork and Art That Speaks, Wakeah paints intimate reflections of Indigenous womanhood, motherhood, kinship, and lived experience to be felt by the viewer. By reclaiming historic ledger pages once used to record colonial economies on reservations; Wakeah’s work restores them as spaces for Indigenous story, love, remembrance and resiliency. In doing so, she carries forward a living tradition, bridging ancestral memory with the stories of our Indigenous lives today.

In her practice, Wakeah creates pieces meant to be lived with and carried forward. Visual heirlooms that hold story, love, presence, and heart.