Exhibition view of “ten:ten,” 2025, at Center for Native Futures. The exhibition title “ten:ten” refers to the artists sharing similar birth times: one at 10am, the other at 10pm/Photo: Center for Native Futures

Has Tony Soprano in an FBI hat ever greeted you?

Rain obfuscated street-view windows, yet flamboyant hues glimmered. Arriving at the Center for Native Futures’ “ten:ten” by Kalyn Fay Barnoski (Cherokee, Muscogee descent) and Haley Greenfeather English (Ojibwe), co-founder and director Debra Yepa-Pappan briefly mentioned the friendship on display. The exhibition statement hymns this “catharsis” dialogue between the artists.

English’s painting “Gwiiwizhenzhish!!!” skewers with Soprano’s pompous gaze, his orange bulbous head with a puckering grin. He’s a planet; the center of a universe adorned with flowers and swirling atmosphere (crowned with a tornado). A visage amidst transmogrification (not gross, but pleasantly surprising). A couch perpendicular to Barnoski’s “New York” designates a cozy alcove. This alcove weaves the first entanglements of their relationship. Iridescent grids akin to a city map (“New York”) are a foil to English’s celestial beings (“NDN Paintbrush”). The paralleling materials become doppelgangers—Rives BFK paper, polycord and hot-stamped foil dance with acrylic and spray paint. They are all reflections and refractions of glam-smoothness (Barnoski) and textured surreal reality (English).

Haley Greenfeather English, “Gwiiwizhenzhish!!!”/Photo: Center for Native Futures

The gallery’s back corner houses Barnoski’s isochronous scroll, strung and draped from the ceiling. It’s a tremor and a wave, a grid tracing to the floor, textile tendrils announcing a demure attitude that demands respect. Across the room, a mural by English (a practicing muralist, actually) is a nested choir. A whispering hand grasps a cigarette, and a lyric-less song strums in the background (Barnoski is a musician, actually). Untitled and site-specific, it is a metaphorical postcard to Barnoski.

The artists’ correspondence appears in the wall labels. They’re playful and poetic: “I stomp around the city looking for you.” “An invitation, will you accept?… Did it get lost in the mail like mine?” And “Does the sun know how bright it is or does it even care?” These reinstate “ten:ten”’s romantic gestures and import a spiritually veiled realm in which the artists’ cosmic connection floats. These staccatos of celestial joy atmospherically fade in and out.

The artists’ abstract toolboxes hint at Ojibwe and Cherokee culture. Returning to “Gwiiwizhenzhish!!!,” English unveiled the Soprano portrait in a phone call to me: it is a subconscious emergence and portal into how both English and Barnoski source inspiration. In the final season, Soprano repeatedly paraphrases an Ojibwe proverb, first seen and scrawled on paper in his hospital room: “Sometimes I go about in pity for myself and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky.” It’s a serendipitous find for English, the reference annotating the artists’ own correspondence and dialogues with a wider universe in a flirty and funny wink-wink.

Exhibition view of “ten:ten,” 2025, at Center for Native Futures/Photo: Center for Native Futures

In that same warm, giggly and hopeful phone call with the artists, they make sure to state the importance of showcasing Native joy. Their ephemeral memories of nights dancing and laughing when they reconvene are their touchstones, disregarding a white audience that wants trauma to produce Native artworks. A reference from scholar Bill Anthes’ book “Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960”: famous painter Patrick DesJarlait (Ojibwe, 1921-1972) said he was “dedicated to painting the Chippewa [Ojibwe] people” to manifest “things in my paintings that many white people may never see—the happy people.”

“ten: ten” used the artists’ relationship to showcase that uncanny connection when you meet someone and feel you’ve known them in many past lives. English and Barnoski fold into one another, caressing and convalescing portals to ephemeral earthly splendor—always sweet and joyous. Yet, some things remain touchingly unknown to the viewer, the specific inside jokes only remaining in pigment particles. And that’s delicious; that’s what it’s like to decipher an unknowable universe. English and Barnoski say even though the abstract world, the angelic sun, may never know its effect on you, it’s trust and laughs that emplace the earthly with the cosmic.

“ten:ten” is on view at the Center for Native Futures, 56 West Adams, through June 14.