[1] Perkins received her General Education Development (GED) certificate[4] before studying Art History at Mills College at Northeastern University, in Oakland.
[5] Additionally, Perkins includes Navajo (or Diné) in her works, like in Cheii Knew We Were in the White World, a painting from 2022.
I work with really crude materials... pretty much just anything that I can get my hands on that's inexpensive and accessible.’"[4] Out of this DIY approach comes Perkins’s signature masks, made out of papier-mâche and chicken-wire.
[5] Perkins worked at a series of non-profit organizations for disabled artists, like the NIAD Art Centre, around the same time as she was studying at Mills College.
[12] As a part of this residency, Perkins produced Sight Sound (2019), an acrylic and spray paint work that is currently housed at the Kala Art Institute.
Their collaborative practice was as follows: Perkins mailed her father an artwork, he added to the canvas, sent it back, and the process continued until they decided the painting was finished.
[4] Perkins’s work was exhibited as part of the Material Futurity group show at the Law Warschaw Gallery at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
[2] Running Towards the Sun, an acrylic and spray paint piece, was exhibited as part of Let’s talk about sex, bb at The Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
[15] Perkins’s work was displayed as part of the Foucault on Acid exhibit at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles.
[16] Perkins’s first individual show, The Relevance of Your Data, was mounted at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Tucson, Arizona.
Through the inclusion of Navajo and objects from her personal life, Perkins seeks to challenge stereotypical portrayals of Native American peoples.
I really hope that, though, in being contemporary, we can inhabit that space in a way that feels really open-ended.’"[7] In a review of The Relevance of Your Data for Hyperallergic, Lynn Trimble dubbed Perkins "‘one of the Southwest’s most exciting emerging artists’"[17] for her work on the representation of Native American queer women of colour.
The exhibit was inspired by James Baldwin’s 1955 essay collection, Notes of a Native Son, and addressed the experience of first-generation Americans.
Similarly, Cheii Knew We Were in the White World incorporates a family photo of Perkins and her cousins, as well as a necklace that says, "Girls".
In their artists’ statement, the Collective members wrote, "When inhabiting SPACE, we reflect on relationship(s) to settler colonialism and its ongoing implications.