Standing In Her Power: Portraits Beyond the colonial frame

A Portrait Series by Alexa LexMex Treviño
In collaboration with the SRJC Multicultural Museum

On View: November 3rd, 2026- March 16th, 2027
Reception: Saturday, November 14th, 2026 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

For centuries, American Indian women have been photographed and documented through a distant, colonial lens, flattened into stereotypes, relics, and symbols of a vanishing past. The work of Edward S. Curtis remains one of the clearest examples: carefully staged images that shaped a mythology of the “Indian” as stoic, timeless, and disappearing.

These images did more than misrepresent us. They helped create a visual language that continues to shape how Indigenous women are seen.

Standing in Her Power offers another way of looking. Through portraiture, we turn the camera toward dignity, agency, and self-representation. The women within these pages are dancers, artists, beadworkers, teachers, mothers, daughters, grandmothers, language keepers, and land and water defenders. They are culture bearers, but they are not defined by what they carry for others.

They are joyful, complicated, funny, creative, vulnerable, powerful, and ever-changing.

These portraits are an act of witnessing, not of studying. They honor Indigenous women as living, breathing people defining for themselves how they are seen: rooted in ancestral knowledge, present in their own lives, and carrying their stories forward on their own terms.

— Julian Cook, Co-Creator

Funded by a grant from the SRJC Foundation Randolph Newman Cultural Enrichment Endowment.