Arts do not exist in a vacuum. They are inspired by the social, cultural, and political conditions in which people live, experience, and create. Emerging from their lived experience, arts often go beyond merely creative expressions for marginalized communities, and they become a form of advocacy, an act of witnessing, of reclamation, and in many cases, of survival. In the same vein, the art history of indigenous women cannot be separated from their lived experiences. More specifically for Indigenous women, whose lives are shaped by both gendered and colonial violence, it is essential to explain why they are often left out of historical narratives. In other words, to study the art of Indigenous women without attending to the lived experiences that shape it is to risk reproducing the very structures that have silenced them. 

Despite this intrinsic connection, the scholarship often deals with the study of art and the lived experiences of its creators in separate domains, especially when those creators fall outside dominant racial, gendered, or colonial frameworks. Even when popular views and scholarship increasingly acknowledge the role of context, people continue to treat cultural production and social experience as parallel, rather than interwoven. Fortunately, more and more people started to notice the division. And this disconnection becomes particularly stark when we reflect on their art representation; Whose and how art is preserved, who is granted voice, and, more importantly, whose aesthetic frameworks are considered legitimate? To address this issue, it is necessary to adopt a theoretical lens that can hold both the symbolic and the structural in view. Since the tension between artistic theory and lived experience is certainly not a new problem, but one that demands a different kind of theoretical attention, it is essential to ensure a theoretical framework that simultaneously considers both aspects. This is where Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality becomes indispensable.

Since its invention in 1989, Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality has gained traction among gender studies scholars. Originally proposed to address blind spots in anti-discrimination law, intersectionality has since become a powerful tool for many fields, providing a foundational framework for understanding how systems of oppression influence and co-produce one another. Its employment and application have extended into the study of art representation. As Ankyian and Bamfo wrote in 2023, “intersectionality recognizes that artists and their works are influenced by multiple aspects of their identity, and that these identities intersect to shape their perspectives and artistic expressions” (2023, 62). Intersectionality, as an open-ended theory, does not presuppose an arbitrary relationship between the symbolic and the structural; rather, it insists that they must be held in the same frame.

Crenshaw first introduced the term in her influential article, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color. Drawing on earlier work on employment discrimination, Crenshaw started by highlighting the inadequacies of anti-discrimination law, which, though designed to address inequality, failed to account for the specific living experiences of Black women. Hence, she argued that the legal system’s failure to protect Black women who experienced both racial and gender discrimination, which was structured in a way that treated race and gender as independent categories. As a result, women of color fell through the cracks; their experiences appear illegible to institutions that could not recognize the simultaneity of multiple oppressions. Crenshaw writes, “the problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, but rather the opposite–that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences” (1242).

Aiming to shed light on the exposed issues, Crenshaw argues that identity is not a sum of separate parts but a relational and situational structure. In discussing cases of battering and rape, she illustrates how the experiences of women of color are obscured when legal and social systems rely on assumptions rooted in white, middle-class norms. By extension, this same logic applies to cultural visibility: when art history assumes a neutral or universal subject, it risks demonstrating white, colonial, and male perspectives as default. Intersectionality exposes this bias and insists on foregrounding the voices that have long been rendered invisible. Therefore, what makes intersectionality influential is that it does not treat identity like a simple checklist. It challenges the idea that you can just add things together, race plus gender, for example, and call it a full picture. Instead, it looks at how these parts of identity combine and interact. In particular, there is a significant gap between the experiences of, since “racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices.” (1242) Crenshaw describes “intersecting patterns of racism and sexism” that shape the lives of women of color in ways that neither racism nor sexism alone can explain (1243). Their erasure is both cultural and structural, tied to their position at the intersection of colonialism, gender discrimination, and racial injustice.

At its core, intersectionality is an approach that refuses the artificial separation between experience and theory. Crenshaw is careful to clarify that intersectionality is not a grand theory but a method; “not being offered as some new, totalizing theory of identity,” she remarks, “but instead a method to disrupt the tendencies to see race and gender as exclusive or separable” (1244). In other words, the goal is to illuminate how existing frameworks have systematically failed to see. When reflecting on its application and development in 2020, Crenshaw calls it “a lens, a prism, for seeing how various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other.” Following this line of thinking, intersectionality thus offers a way of seeing how seemingly distinct forms of inequality interlock and intensify, while simultaneously challenging one to pay attention not just to what is represented but how, and to what is omitted and why. Henceforth, through the discursive space in this article, Crenshaw introduced a transformative framework, coined as “intersectionality”, to thoroughly comprehend how different systems of power (race, gender, class, and colonialism) interact to shape people's identities and their experiences of oppression. More specifically, this conceptual framework contributes to the construction of a comprehensive framework when considering how Indigenous women have been positioned within dominant narratives of art and representation.

Crenshaw’s vision of intersectionality, “is not being offered as some new, totalizing theory of identity,” but instead a method “to disrupt the tendencies to see race and gender as exclusive or separable” (1244). While “intersectionality” offers a solid framework to situate my original question over the entanglement of arts and living experiences of Indigenous women, it needs some further refinements to maximize its use in this particular context. On that note, it is crucial to examine how Crenshaw outlines three overlapping modes through which intersectional oppression manifests: structural, political, and representational. 

In terms of structural intersectionality, exclusion often happens through systems that appear neutral but are built around mainstream assumptions. To help readers understand its practical effects, Crenshaw draws attention to domestic violence shelters as one example. These institutions often operate on the theories devised upon a dominant community, which is predominantly white, middle-class, English-speaking, and legally secure. For women of color, these assumptions can make such services not only inaccessible but actively unsafe. As she writes, “The physical assault that leads women to these shelters is merely the most immediate manifestation of the subordination they experience” (1245). Therefore, by only attending to the practical issue, the presently existing shelters risk becoming sites of further alienation. Moreover, this situation leads to "shelters serving these women cannot afford to address only the violence inflicted by the batterer; they must also confront the other multilayered and routinized forms of domination" (1245). The same logic applies to the structures that govern cultural legitimacy. Although museums, galleries, funding, and academic institutions often make room for Indigenous women, such “rooms” predominantly open when their work conforms to settler expectations or aesthetic norms. This is not merely an oversight but a structural feature of how cultural value is assigned.

In the second section, Crenshaw examines the political dimension, which becomes visible when one looks closely at how social justice movements themselves are shaped by exclusion. While feminist activism has too often centered the experiences of white women, the anti-racist efforts have privileged the voices of men. Women of color are left to navigate between these poles, leaving issues like violence against Indigenous women to be deprioritized or ignored. As Crenshaw argues, “intervention strategies based solely on the experiences of women who do not share the same class or race backgrounds will be of limited help” (1246). This dynamic applies equally to debates over artistic value and inclusion. Efforts to diversify the canon may expand to include “women artists” or “artists of color,” but without considering how colonialism, gender, and race intersect, such inclusions remain tokenistic and politically hollow. Tokenistic inclusion risks reinforcing the very hierarchies it claims to resist. Intersectionality resists these flattened categories, advocating instead for frameworks that reflect the complexities of identity and power. Feminist movements might focus on gender inequality without addressing colonialism, while Indigenous advocacy may center land rights without fully confronting patriarchy.

The third type, representational intersectionality, examines how marginalized people are portrayed in media, art, and culture, or how they are left out altogether. Crenshaw points out that women of color are often romanticized, stereotyped, or erased entirely from mainstream art history. In other words, media and cultural constructions that either stereotype or render invisible women of color. In the case of indigenous women, public institutions like museums and textbooks have long favored settler narratives, and even when Indigenous people are included, their identities are often flattened to fit colonial expectations like the noble savage, the Earth-mother, the tragic victim. These figures are politically loaded forms of containment. Representational intersectionality addresses the cultural and symbolic dimensions of erasure. By employing the idea of intersectionality, one is encouraged to look beyond what is shown and to ponder who gets to speak through this portrayal, as well as on whose terms this portrayal is created. Crenshaw remarks that cultural constructions are never neutral; they reflect and reproduce power. Museums and art histories rarely present Indigenous women as autonomous theorists, critics, or aesthetic agents. When included, their presence is often curated to fit a predetermined narrative, one that affirms the authority of the institutions doing the curating.
Together, these three dimensions form a scaffold for understanding the layered, recursive nature of marginalization. Intersectionality does not flatten difference; it helps to trace how power produces difference in the first place and how that difference is subtly mobilized to justify exclusion. It is a framework that shifts the emphasis from individual identity to systemic operation, from representation to structure, from visibility to voice.

In the context of this paper, I agree with Crenshaw in arguing that intersectionality does not provide final answers. Thus said, it is instrumental in providing a generative starting point and a way to hold together the symbolic world of art and the material world of lived experience. For Indigenous women, whose erasure has long been normalized in both cultural and political discourse, intersectionality becomes more than a concept. It becomes a means of return. Rethinking the canon, then, is not simply adding more names to a list. It is to ask different questions about how that list came to be in the first place. Who was excluded from the beginning? On what grounds? And what systems of power are still at work in determining who gets remembered, who is heard, and who is allowed to speak on their own terms? Intersectionality is a reminder that these questions transcend the theoretical realm. They are dynamic and complicated issues that take root in people’s living experiences.