As a child, Native American artist Rochelle Kulei was nearly as nomadic as her Western Shoshone ancestors. Following the seasons for food, her ancients trekked what is today Idaho, Utah, Nevada and California.

The modern Kulei family moved not for food, but work. They traveled by car through Idaho, Utah, Oregon and New Mexico. Kulei remembers moving at least a dozen times as a child, and she attended five high schools before her 1982 graduation from Provo High in Provo, Utah.

Kulei, who now lives in Vancouver, struggled for decades to combine her deep connection to Shoshone ways with the complexities of contemporary life. When she recently sought a bachelor’s degree in fine art from Marylhurst University near Portland, Ore., Kulei knew she’d finally found a way to combine her ancient and modern selves.

“I had never really learned about art in high school,” Kulei recalled. “Then one day at Marylhurst, I was studying James Luna, a Native American artist based in California, and I learned art could be political.”

One of Luna’s better known installations included a bit of performance art. In 1987’s “The Artifact Piece,” Luna placed several of his personal documents and Luiseno tribal ceremonial items inside glass museum display cases, then donned a loincloth and lay down inside another display case moments before the show opened.

Many visitors to the Museum of Man in San Diego were literally startled to learn that the long romanticized American Indian was not dead. Rather, he lay right in front of them. His chest quietly rose and fell with each breath. And he listened as they read the interpretive cards that described how he obtained some of the more visible scars on his body. All were attributed to “excessive drinking.”

Luna’s work inspired Kulei to express herself freely, and a pair of themes quickly emerged.

One theme was Kulei’s personal struggle to integrate Native American culture with modern life. She’s used beadwork and actual weaving in her canvases to represent this effort. The results are three-dimensional, ornamental sections of canvas found in many of her paintings.

A second theme is equality for Native Americans in the United States. Can there be “liberty and justice for all,” as stated in the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag, when native people have been forced onto reservations? Kulei uses American iconography like the U.S. flag, juxtaposed with scenes of indignity suffered by her own family, to introduce this topic.

Kulei’s work gained an instant following the evening of May 27, when the Bachelor of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition opened at Marylhurst University’s Art Gym. Kulei’s instructors selected seven of her paintings to hang in the show.

Because each piece is six feet tall and five feet wide — making the human figures in them literally larger than life — the curator decided Kulei’s work should hang in a separate nook of the Art Gym.

“It was a spiritual experience for many in attendance,” Kulei recalled. Guest after guest approached her to say they felt a connection to at least one of her paintings. “Most said they felt a need to slow down when looking at my work,” Kulei said. “Each canvas contains a lot of nuance and detail.”

Though the Art Gym exhibition came down a month ago, Kulei is still focused on her future as an artist. She’s working as an intern with Marie Watt, a well-known Native American artist in Portland.

In the future, Kulei hopes to introduce a unique youth art outreach on Indian reservations to make use of the many abandoned cars commonly found there. “I want students to learn the histories, or legends, of each family, then paint them on the car or cars in the front yards. The stories will be like petroglyphs or pictographs.”

She intends to start the program at the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Southeast Idaho, where some of her extended family lives.