Melissa Melero-Moose Wins $15,000 Grant for Great Basin Art

Melero-Moose, an enrolled member of the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, translates traditional Numu stories into contemporary imagery. Her process relies on the physical landscape of the Great Basin, using gathering techniques learned while crafting a traditional cradleboard for her son. This connection to the land drives her advocacy for Native weavers who face restricted access to ancestral gathering sites—a struggle she captures in her series Access Denied, where basketry patterns collide with depictions of barbed wire.

Reid Walker, founder of the nonprofit, noted that her work belongs to the region not just as a subject, but through its very composition. Beyond her studio practice, Melero-Moose curates the Great Basin Native Artists Gallery at the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum in Carson City. She co-founded the collective in 2014 to challenge the exclusion of Great Basin creators from the mainstream art market. The foundation’s biannual grant aims to address these systemic gaps by providing funding and mentorship to Indigenous artists at critical junctures in their careers. Melero-Moose will debut the new series, supported by this funding, at a public exhibition later this year.