Jamie Nakagawa Boley is a California-based artist whose work engages waterways as sites of Indigenous memory, intergenerational care, and survival. Working across painting, drawing, video, and object-based forms, she explores relationships between land, body, and history, attending to what is carried, remembered, and often left unseen.

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Her practice focuses on water as both material and metaphor—marking movement, crossing, and persistence. Through large-scale paintings and installation, she examines how histories of displacement and endurance are held within land and waterways, and how these spaces remain active sites of relation.

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Grounded in her Choctaw lineage, her work is informed by Indigenous knowledge systems and the role of care within community and family. Recurring gestures of “standing in the gap” reflect the labor of holding space for others and making a way forward across generations.

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Boley is an Assistant Professor of Art at California State University, Fresno, and has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including in Berlin, Venice, and Milwaukee. She is the recipient of multiple awards and grants in support of her work.