In a watercolor painting, children in T-shirts run through a field carrying what look like lacrosse sticks. A photograph shows a woman with a cigarette in her hand enjoying a moment of quiet reflection. In another painting, a man in a cowboy hat sits in the shade with a cold beer, his loyal dog by his side.
These scenes clearly take place in the present-day. They also convey a long history.
The sport in the first painting is not lacrosse, but the Indigenous game of stickball, one of the oldest sports continuously played on the continent. The tattoos adorning the woman on her smoke break originate in Indigenous traditions centuries old. And the man with the dog and a cold one? Well, like childhood games and taking a moment for yourself, some things are universal.
“Continuum,” on display on the first floor of Oxford College Library through December, focuses on depictions of everyday life by two Muscogee artists, Johnnie Diacon and Hotvlkuce Harjo. The exhibit, which is free and open to the public during library hours, is the result of a partnership between Oxford Library and Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum, where the exhibit originated in fall 2025. Its artwork will return to the Carlos’ permanent collection after the Oxford exhibit closes.
“Continuum” features paintings by Diacon and drawings, paintings and jewelry by Harjo.
Hotvlkuce Harjo’s photograph “Stories Told Over Tobacco” is among those featured in “Continuum.” Image courtesy of Michael C. Carlos Museum.
Diacon and Harjo will take part in a residency spanning Emory’s Oxford and Atlanta campuses March 29-April 2, hosted by Emory’s Native American and Indigenous Studies.
The residency is part of a series of programs done independently and in collaboration with the College of the Muscogee Nation in Oklahoma, sponsored by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Diacon and Hotvlkuce will visit classes in American studies, the visual arts concentration, the Department of English and the Department of Music. The artists will also visit the Oxford College Organic Farm and the community forest adjacent to the Oxford campus.
On the Atlanta campus, Diacon will participate in “Carrying Muscogee Culture through Paintings,” a Creativity Conversation on Tuesday, March 31, at 5:30 p.m at Emory Center for Ethics, Room 102. The event is free and open to the public.
“It’s an exciting opportunity to showcase Muscogee artists in their homelands in 2026,” says Beth Michel, senior associate director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies. Michel adds that the exhibit and residency are rooted in the trusting relationship the center established with the artists, beginning with Diacon’s participation in a Muscogee teach-in at Emory in 2023.
“‘Continuum’ is, in fact, more than just an exhibition,” says Henry Kim, associate vice provost and director of the Carlos Museum. “It is an important collaboration between two eminent Muscogee artists and the Emory community.”
A records keeper of past and present
For 40 years, Johnnie Diacon has portrayed the everyday life of his Muscogee community in acrylic, oil and watercolor paintings.
“I’m kind of a records keeper,” Diacon says. “My gift to the Muscogee people is presenting them with images of themselves — a record of what we, as a people, are doing right now in the 20th and 21st centuries. And these are practices that we’ve done in the past.”
Diacon belongs to a generation of Indigenous artists whose work challenged stereotyped images many collectors had come to expect, which were often based on American Indigenous people of the Great Plains.
Muscogee people have their own distinct history and culture.
A painting by Johnnie Diacon depicts a Muscogee “code talker” communicating classified messages in battle using his Indigenous language. Image used with permission of artist.
His paintings depict present-day reservation life as well as other times and places.
One painting in the exhibit, “Mvskoke Code Talker — Aleutian Islands Campaign World War II,” illustrates a little-known role the Muscogee people played in world history, using their Indigenous language to transmit coded messages for the U.S. military. (“Mvskoke” is an alternate spelling of “Muscogee.”)
In the watercolor, a Muscogee man in green military fatigues crouches in the mud, speaking into a field telephone. An M1 carbine rifle leans against his knee and a mountain partially covered in snow rises behind him.
“It shows, ‘This is what our ancestors did; this is what our ancestors went through,’” Diacon says. The painting, he adds, demonstrates “that ancient warrior spirit which continues on today.”
He describes how Muscogee soldiers innovated terms to communicate concepts that didn’t exist in their language, such as “locv,” which means “turtle,” for “tank.”
It was an ingenious system, says Diacon.
“The Muscogee language is a hard language,” he explains, “and there are dialects. Unless you're fluent in it, it’s hard to understand someone. So that was pretty clever!”
This history holds sad ironies. While the U.S. military was recruiting Muscogee soldiers to the Aleutians in Alaska, they were also forcibly removing entire Indigenous Unangax̂ villages from the islands.
And Indigenous children across the country were being taken from their families and communities to attend residential schools that punished them for displaying any aspect of their culture, including language.
“So, here are these people,” says Diacon, “using this language to fight for a country that had been trying to eradicate it.”
Like all his work, this painting doesn’t represent a specific person. “Because it’s about all of us,” he notes.
Reclaiming traditions for a new generation
Hotvlkuce Harjo grew up seeing work by Diacon and other Indigenous artists. Many in Diacon’s generation worked in what’s known as the “flatstyle” school of Indigenous art — emphasizing forms with minimal perspective or shading.
“I feel really thankful that by the time I was a child, I was seeing that style of art normalized around me,” says Harjo. “It kind of planted the seeds for my generation.”
Harjo’s work documents their own community, with paintings, photographs and prints referencing living traditions like Muscogee stomp dances and subcultures like the black metal community (a kind of heavy metal music).
“Mississippian Black Metal Grl On a Friday Night,” by Hotvlkuce Harjo, denotes both contemporary youth and Indigenous tradition going back nearly 1,000 years. Image courtesy of Michael C. Carlos Museum.
In “Mississippian Black Metal Grl on a Friday Night,” for example, a young person wearing a leather jacket turns a confident gaze on the viewer. Her cheeks and chin are tattooed with sets of parallel lines. So are the fingers of both hands, which hold a drink.
The image denotes both contemporary youth and tradition going back nearly 1,000 years.
“It’s about that moment when you’re at a show on a Friday night and you walk past this person, and they are adorned [with traditional tattoos],” Harjo says. “It’s very simple, but still feels very big to me.”
In recent years, some Indigenous people have revived their cultures’ ancient practices of traditional tattooing, after white colonization nearly snuffed it out.
More than just decoration, Indigenous tattoos signify rites of passage, cultural connections and relationships with the natural world.
The makeup choices in “Mississippian Black Metal Grl” also contain traditional cultural references. The “cat-eye” style of eyeliner is de riguer for many young people going out at night.
“But in this case,” Harjo says, “it’s a forked eye, a motif that’s rooted in some Southeastern [Indigenous] imagery. So, it’s black metal make-up, but it’s also markings at the same time.”
A few years ago, putting pen to paper to sketch “Mississippian Black Metal Grl” in a notebook was a form of wish fulfillment for Harjo: They didn’t know anyone with traditional tattoos.
A rising movement to reclaim the practice means that’s changed.
About a year after drawing the piece, Harjo got their first tattoo, a chin marking referencing their Southeastern ancestors.
Then, at a recent metal show with friends, an insight dawned on them. “I realized there were, like, six, of us, and we all had face or hand tattoos,” Harjo says. “And I took a moment of pause to realize, ‘This is the version of life that I dreamt of years ago. I’m living it right now.’”
An expansive conversation
Diacon says it’s a “great feeling” to share the gallery with Harjo.
“With all these younger artists coming up behind us, it's like a race where we’re all running together,” he says. “You know, before long, you’re going to have to tag me out and carry this on.”
The exhibit’s “generational perspective” is important, says Michel. “Most tribal communities show a lot of respect and reverence to our youth, who are our up-and-coming leaders, and to our elders. And having these two artists’ work talk to each other grants us a very useful perspective.”
For Diacon, the exhibit and residency are about keeping those conversations going.
“When I bring my art, it’s bringing my people,” he says. “That spirit of our ancestors and relatives yet born are in these pieces. So, our ancestors, whose bones are still there in the ancestral homeland? They see [the art] and recognize that, ‘This is us. We’re doing all right and we’re still existing.’
“I'm really appreciative that Emory is putting out that welcome mat,” Diacon adds. “It's nice to hear, you know, ‘Come on back. Come on home. Visit with us. This is your land. Tell us about yourselves. We missed you.’”