The Blessings Will Test You: Demian DineYazhi on Radical Indigenous Queer Feminism * Oregon ArtsWatch

"On a warm August morning, Portland still heavy with summer's residue, I stood beneath the Burnside Bridge billboard: ' Long Live the Wildcards, Misfits & Dabblers.' The words lingered like a chant, revealing pride, broken promises, and ironies. It was in that humming space that I spoke with Demian DinéYazhi´ (Naasht'ézhí Tábaahá [Zuni Clan Water's Edge] and Tódích´íi´nii [Bitter Water], clans of the Diné Tribe), a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist whose work refuses the tidy boxes of colonial etiquette."

"Demian's practice moves across forms-radiating neon signs, letterpress posters, self-published books with BIPOC communities, endurance performances, and sonic interventions-always unsettling the remnants of settler colonial conditioning infecting the body. Born in Gallup, New Mexico, a bordertown entangled with the commodification of Native art, DinéYazhi´ grew up questioning what it meant to create work rooted in Diné traditions outside settler frameworks."

"Demian's work has traveled widely-recently to the Honolulu Biennial, the Biennale of Sydney, the 2024 Whitney Biennial, where a neon sign glitched with the hidden message FREE PALESTINE, and to the BOFFO Residency on Fire Island in NYC this August (2025), where banners proclaiming Stolen + Colonized / Sacred + Ancestral /UNKECHAUG LAND stretched across luxury homes and along the shore."

Demian DinéYazhi’ is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist working across neon signs, letterpress, self-published books, endurance performance, and sonic interventions. The practice unsettles settler colonial conditioning by merging Radical Indigenous Queer Feminist ideology with ceremony, refusal, survivance, migration, and revolutionary care. Born in Gallup, New Mexico, DinéYazhi’ interrogated the commodification of Native art and the art-school industrial complex while earning a BFA in Intermedia Arts from PNCA. Exhibitions include the Honolulu Biennial, Biennale of Sydney, the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and a BOFFO Residency project that deployed banners and public text interventions protesting land dispossession and homonormative queer culture.

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