Native Art Department International

Hupfield is First Nations Anishinaabe Ojibwe, and Lujan is Chiricahua Apache and Mexican. Hupfield has said "It’s important for artists to generate and frame our own content so we’re not always looking at institutions to co-opt and define it outside of our awareness." Lujan told the Tacoma Art Museum website, "There is a lot of value to Native artists representing anything they want today, not just their own cultures. The field is wide open. I think artists have a lot of good things to say about anything and everything, and there is plenty of room for all of that."

In his interview of the couple about their work in the 2016 Brooklyn show "free play," Christopher Green of Hyperallergic noted the contrast between their individual styles. He described Lujan's use of the Zuni print as "graphically intense" and Hupfield's materiality as "soft." A Swedish reporter said of their subsequent show "Chez BRKLYN" in Galerie Se Konst, "The artists ... put people at the center, shrinking the world and succeeding in showing how much we are one regardless of home address. It is inspiring, rich with energy, and hopeful. We hope these Brooklyn artists return soon."

In 2015 they established a blog that documents their activities as Native Art Department and publishes interviews with artists and scholars and articles on subjects of interest such as South African magazine Chimurenga and early Japanese American photographer Frank Matsura. In addition to exhibitions, they have screened their work and curated those of others at Artists Space in New York.

Native Art Department International is a Toronto-based collaborative project of the wife-and-husband pair of artists Maria Hupfield (b. 1975) and Jason Lujan (b. 1971). Together they curate group exhibitions in which they sometimes show and occasionally make work together as a way to counter the pigeonholing of contemporary art by Native Americans and people of First Nations descent.