Lydia Cheshewalla
Visual Art
Skiatook, OK
Lydia Cheshewalla is a recipient of the Midwest Native and Indigenous Fellowship.
Lydia Cheshewalla is an Osage ephemeral artist from Oklahoma, living and working in motion throughout the Great Plains ecoregion. Through the creation of site-specific land art and ephemeral installations grounded in Indigenous land stewardship practices and kinship pedagogies, Lydia engages in multivocal conversations about place and relationship. By working within a framework of change and collaborating with beyond-human kin, she rejects Capitalist reliance on scarcity, immortality, preciousness, and waste production in the creation of value and remains responsive (responsible) to the realities of shifting ecologies in an age of climate crisis. Her work has been shown at Generator Space, the Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), Comfort Station, Harold Washington Library, the Center for Native Futures, Elmhurst Art Museum, and Brushwood Center (Chicago, IL) among others. She was awarded a 2020 Tallgrass Artist Residency, participated in the 2022/23 Chicago Art Department Think Tank:On Mending, was a 2024 Spring Tanda Fellow through Chuquimarca Projects, and a 2025 artist-in-residence at the Center for Humans and Nature. She has been filling the bucket with water to see if it leaks.