Born on the Santa Clara Pueblo, a Native American reservation in New Mexico, Rose B. Simpson comes from a long line of Indigenous sculptors and ceramicists. Her mother, Roxanne Swentzell, is a well-regarded ceramicist and activist. Her great uncle is Michael Naranjo, “the blind sculptor” who turned to pottery after losing his sight and right hand in Vietnam. Simpson makes large-scale, humanoid sculptures, and her work is held in collections at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to name a few. Her latest project is a series of “sculptural sentinels” that will spend the summer downtown and uptown in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park and Inwood Hill Park. The sculptures pay homage to the island’s history as Manahatta, the ancestral land of the Lenape people. —Paulina Prosnitz