Yve Chavez is Associate Professor of Art History in the School of Visual Arts at the University of Oklahoma. She is a scholar of Native American and Latin American art. She is interested in the representation of Native Americans in museums and mainstream media, Native American identity, Indigenous art and material culture of California and the Southwest, and Indigenous artistic responses to Spanish colonization in the borderlands. She teaches courses in Native American art, Latin American art, and museum studies.
Professor Chavez earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, an M.A. in Art History at the University of Washington, and a B.A. in Art History from Stanford University. She curated the first major solo exhibition of the work of Santa Clara Pueblo artist Rose B. Simpson at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, NM. She has published peer-reviewed journal articles in Journal18: A Journal of Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture, Southern California Quarterly, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, and Arts. She is the author of Indigenizing California Mission Art and Architecture (University of Washington Press, 2025), and co-editor with Nancy Marie Mithlo of Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives, and Museums (University of Arizona Press, 2022). Chavez is a member of the Gabrieleno Tongva San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians.
