American Indian skateboards?

Why not. Time didn't end when the buffalo stopped roaming and the treaty ink dried. The first people of Minnesota live on, holding to traditional ways but adapting to modern urban life.

So there hangs Bobby Wilson's skateboard sculpture in the midst of "Mni Sota: Reflections of Time and Place," a handsome show of contemporary American Indian art on view through Dec. 16 at All My Relations Gallery in south Minneapolis. The show features about 50 pieces of bead and quill work, birch-bark wall sculpture and artifacts, paintings, bandolier bags, shawls and other art. While well grounded in native heritage, the objects are executed with contemporary flair and sophistication.

All 17 artists are enrolled tribal members rooted in or residents of Minnesota, a name derived from the Dakota words "mni sota," which loosely translates as "clouds reflecting in water." That link to place is an important foundation for the show, the first to be conceived and organized by the 10-month-old gallery, which aims to be the leading showplace for native arts in the Upper Midwest.

"This is the first art gallery that's native owned, managed and curated that's really showing high-quality art from the community," said Joe Horsecapture, a Minneapolis Institute of Arts curator who served as an adviser to the exhibition.

Horsecapture regularly travels nationwide to native art expos, but said he was impressed by the many new artists the show's organizers had uncovered. In particular he cited an intricately beaded bandolier bag by Cecile Taylor, a Spirit Lake Dakota affiliated with the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. The pretty floral patterns she incorporates are centuries old and probably influenced by Euro-American embroidery designs, but Taylor gave a sassy new 3-D dimension to her flowers, which protrude from a velvet background and are outlined with neon-colored beads.

The show's mix of traditional and contemporary materials -- brain-tanned moose hide and Italian silk -- may surprise, but it's not unusual, said Dyani Reynolds-White Hawk, the exhibition's curator. For native people, traditions are embedded in stories and culture, not in the materials used to express those ideas.

"Every time new material was introduced it became part of the tradition, so when beads were incorporated that was a contemporary move," she said.

Birch bark and beadwork

Now, of course, fine beadwork is a hallmark of American Indian art. Here Carol Charging Thunder depicts a Lakota buffalo hunt on white buckskin, Delina White garnishes a hide bag with graceful leaves and blossoms, and Todd Bordeaux fashions an unusual fertility sculpture that's an elegant mash-up of ancient materials -- deer antler, moose hide, horse hair -- and beaded plaques of insects, turtles, a horse.

An amazing buckskin jacket by Joe Savage has a 19th-century cut complete with fringes, beaded shoulder panels and delicately embroidered cuffs. A stand-out bandolier bag by Melvin Losh is fancifully decorated with loops of beaded fringe, flowers, snails and spider webs.

Old-time skills with birch bark and porcupine quills are also on display. Losh produced four exquisite little quill-decorated boxes made of sweet grass and birch bark, while Orvilla Longfox makes quill "paintings" that depict galloping horses and eagles in flight. Wanesia Spry Misquadace fashioned a pair of beautiful little birch-bark canisters topped with silver lids. Pat Kruse used the material for a clever "gingerbread house" that's as big as a dog house, plus two huge panels, one centered with a quilt-like star and the other covered with myriad bark leaves, flowers and insects. Birch-bark "chews" by Denise Lajimodiere are the show's most unusual and mystifying items, little designs she nips into paper-thin sheets of folded bark using her eye-teeth.

Lakota artist Francis Yellow, also known as Wanbli Koyake, cleverly updates the 19th-century ledger-book tradition in which Indian artists drew stories in shopkeepers' account books. In his "What I Learned in Boarding School" series he paints beautifully ironic and critical images on antique maps and religious manuscripts, adding images of boys being beaten with leather straps and nuns herding uniformed Indian kids into chapel.

And then there are Wilson's skateboards. A Minneapolis native, Wilson grew up with graffiti and became a muralist and skateboarder. Titled "Synthetic by Nature," his wall sculpture is a fan-shaped headdress of five skateboard decks on which he has painted colorful geometric designs that echo Euro-American quilt patterns and suggest American Indian motifs found on teepees or in beadwork. With its smart designs and pop format, Wilson's skateboard sculpture is a fully contemporary fusion of Indian tradition and modernity.