Indigenous New York, Artist Perspectives

Indigenous New York, Artist Perspectives presents key findings of a day-long colloquium that focuses on artistic practices. This is the third and final of three colloquia that ground the research initiative Indigenous New York, which has been developed by the Vera List Center in collaboration with artist Alan Michelson (Mohawk) and in consultation with artist Jackson Polys (Tlingit). The series facilitates collaborations and exchanges among contemporary curators, artists, critics and scholars of Native American, First Nations, and Indigenous descent and their non-indigenous colleagues that focus on indigeneity and the legacy of colonialism and position the local as evidence of concerns shared globally. 

Building on the success of the first and second colloquia, the third in this series, Indigenous New York, Artist Perspectives, focuses on contemporary indigenous artist perspectives and practices, grounded in innovative projects. These provide the launchpads and models for important dialogue and exchange around the themes of: Identity; Self-Organized Visibility; Place & Memory; and Collaboration. In the afternoon’s public presentation the following artists will dicuss the intersection of these topics and their individual artistic projects:

Richard Bell, Tent Embassy

Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan, Native Art Department International

Suzanne Kite and Nadia Myre

Cristóbal Martínez and Kade Twist, Postcommodity

The first of this series in October 2016, Indigenous New York, Curatorially Speaking examined four key inquiries: Indigenous and Non-indigenous Epistemologies and Methodologies; the Non-colonial Museum; Challenges of Collaborative Curation; and the Growing Indigenization of International art. The second colloquium, Indigenous New York, Critically Speaking, will provided opportunities for meaningful exchange between indigenous and non-indigenous critics and the public and examine how a fuller consideration of indigenous creative production might reconfigure regimes of critical writing. To this end, the discussions considered the following topics: Land Writes; Unsettling Narratives; Seeing Red: Invisibility and Opacity; and Resistance, Resurgence, and Collective Practice. 

Indigenous New York is supported, in part, by the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, members of the Vera List Center Advisory Committee, and is part of the Vera List Center’s 2015–17 curatorial programs on Post Democracy.