Ella Mahoney

Ella Mahoney (b. 1995) is a visual artist and educator whose work investigates the relationship between land and indigenous people through storytelling and continued presence and practices, specifically on the traditional homelands of her tribe, the Aquinnah Wampanoag.

Through silk painting, installation, and illustration, Mahoney explores the ways that traditional stories, personal experience, and indigenous lives today maintain deep ties to the land and establish sovereignty, even and especially through change. Through mapping, layering, and composing images with pieces of deep, ancestral time, the present day, and looking to the future, she explores how time exists for Native people in a cycle within daily life, story, and history.

Mahoney’s recent work focuses on large-scale silk installations that evoke the movement, memory, and atmosphere of North East coastal environments. She has illustrated children’s books for the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project and collaborated and shown with institutions such as the Trustees of Reservations, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Long Island Children’s Museum, Massachusetts College of Art, Sylvester Manor, Long House Reservation, Fashion Institute of Technology, Old Stone House, and Open Source Gallery, exhibiting in indoor and outdoor settings and creating works in dialogue with place.