Kathleen Ash-Milby is Curator of Native American Art at the Portland Art Museum, where since 2019 she has expanded the Museum’s engagement with Indigenous artists. She has overseen the acquisition of notable works, including from Marie Watt, Wally Dion, and Sara Siestreem. In 2024, she served as a commissioner and curator for Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, the space in which to place me.
Ash-Milby spent 19 years at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York. She organized numerous solo and thematic group exhibitions of Native art across a range of media including Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe (2022); Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound (2021); and Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist (2015).
International projects include SITElines Biennial: much wider than a line, at SITE Santa Fe (2017) and Stop (the) Gap: International Indigenous Art in Motion, Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide, Australia (2011). She was curator and co-director of the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City, a community-based non-profit devoted to the exhibition of Indigenous and Native American artists in the United States.Recent publications include essays in The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada (2023), Jeffrey Gibson: Beyond the Horizon (2022), and Joseph Yoakum: What I Saw (2021). She has also written for publications including Art in America and Art Journal.
Ash-Milby was a fellow in the Center for Curatorial Leadership Program in New York (2015). She served on the boards of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective, American Indian Community House, and Native American Art Studies Association. A member of the Navajo Nation, her Master of Arts is from the University of New Mexico in Native American art history.
