Honoring Our Sisters Roundtable
Presented in partnership with AMERINDA
Wednesday, March 28, 2018
6 - 8:30 PM
Please RSVP to projectspace@efanyc.org.
Honoring Our Sisters Roundtable is led by Indigenous women in conversation with guest respondents working at the intersection of art, advocacy and radical solidarity building with Indigenous peoples. Work from the exhibit will serve as a point of departure for conversation on ethical collaboration, recentering institutional power, and critical accountability to Indigenous Nations leading the movement for resurgence, decolonization, and reclamation of their homelands in North America. Participants include: Audra Simpson, Professor Anthropology Columbia University, Crystal Migwans, PhD Native Art History, Columbia University, Tarah Hogue, Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, with guest respondants Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, Senior Curator El Museo del Barrio, Jaskiran Dhillon, Assistant Professor of Global Studies and Anthropology, The New School, Carin Kuoni, Director/Chief Curator, Vera List Center for Arts and Politics, The New School, and Melissa Iakowi:he'ne' Oakes, Social Advocate and Organizer, American Indian Community House,. Moderator: Maria Hupfield, Artist.
PARTICIPANTS
Audra Simpson is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014), winner of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies Prize, the Laura Romero Prize from the American Studies Association as well as the Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society (2015). She is co-editor of Theorizing Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2014). She has articles in Theory & Event, Cultural Anthropology, American Quarterly, Junctures, Law and Contemporary Problems and Wicazo Sa Review. In 2010 she won Columbia University’s School for General Studies “Excellence in Teaching Award.” She is a Kahnawake Mohawk.
Crystal Migwans is an Anishinaabekwe of Wikwemikong Unceded First Nation, and the place she calls home is the Mahzenahzing (Painted) River. A multimedia artist by training, Crystal's path turned to research and community arts during her time as Curatorial Assistant at the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation in M'Chigeeng, Canada. She is currently in the Art History PhD program at Columbia University in New York, where she look for echoes of an Anishinaabe artistic legacy in the archives of the colonial metropolis.
Tarah Hogue is a curator and writer of Métis and Dutch Canadian ancestry. She is the inaugural Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery and was the 2016 Audain Aboriginal Curatorial Fellow at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Hogue was curator in residence with grunt gallery between 2014-2017, and has curated exhibitions at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Or Gallery, and SFU Gallery.
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado was born in Santiago de Chile. She is the Senior Curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York City, where she is working La Bienal 2018 El Museo’s biennial of emerging artists and A Brief History of (Some) Things, an exhibition exploring the persistence of Mesoamerican and Indigenous Caribbean imagery in contemporary art. She organized Presente! The Young Lords in New York, and Antonio Lopez: Future Funk Fashion, both nominated among the best exhibitions for 2015 and 2016 by numerous publications. Aranda-Alvarado teachers Contemporary U.S. Latinx Art, Modern and Contemporary Latin American art at The City College of New York. Publications include catalogue essays for the Museum of Modern Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), and El Museo del Barrio, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Art Nexus, Review, the journal of the Americas Society, NYFA Quarterly, BOMB and American Art.
Jaskiran Dhillon is a first generation academic and organizer who grew up on Treaty Six Cree/Métis Territory in Saskatchewan, and an Assistant Professor of Global Studies/ Anthropology, The New School New York. Her first book Prairie Rising: Indigenous Youth, Decolonization, and the Politics of Intervention (2017), provides a critical account of settler state violence in the lives of Indigenous Youth.
Carin Kuoni (M.A. University of Zurich; B.A. Sorbonne) is director/chief curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and teaches at The New School. A founding member of the artists' collective REPOhistory, Kuoni has curated and co-curated numerous transdisciplinary exhibitions on issues such as contemporary Native American identity and colonial, 19th-century portraiture; democratic, participatory processes; artistic and social networks; new notions of transient and temporary spaces; or agency. Kuoni is the recipient of a 2014 Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship, directed SITAC XII: Arte, justamente in Mexico City in 2015, and is a Travel Companion for the 57th Carnegie International in 2018.
Melissa Iakowi:he'ne' Oakes is a Mohawk woman, Snipe Clan. She resides in Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, where she was born and raised, and New York City. She has trained in northern and southern tribal art, fashion, business, politics, leadership and studied in Montréal, NYC, Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong. At an early age, she experienced Canadian Army tanks in her backyard, blockades on her street, and no school due to military occupation on her reservation territory for months at a time. Activism is a central part of Iakowi:he'ne' life experience from the Oka Crisis, to Idle No More, the Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign, and NoDAPL to the Mohawk Warrior Society.
Maria Hupfield is martin clan, Anishinaabe and a member of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, based in Brooklyn NY. Her solo traveling exhibition The One Who Keeps on Giving premiered at The Power Plant in 2017 and was featured in Art in America. She is the first Indigenous Artist Resident at ISCP 2018, has performed and exhibited at Site Santa Fe Biennale 2016 and is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptures Award. She is a member of Social Health Performance Club and co-owns Native Art Department International with artist Jason Lujan.
COMMUNITY PARTNER
Established in 1987, American Indian Artists Inc. (AMERINDA) is a community-based multi-arts organization that works to empower Native Americans and foster intercultural understanding of Native culture. Located in New York, AMERINDA is the only Native American multi-arts organization of its kind in the U.S., and has been widely recognized for its artistic and cultural integrity. In addition to curated exhibitions of contemporary art, AMERINDA’s new non-fiction volume, No Reservation: New York Contemporary Native American Art Movement, distributed by D.A.P., reveals a previously hidden history of contemporary Native American art in New York City. The publication marks the first time that a diverse group of Native visual and performing artists, filmmakers and writers has been defined and given a name. The encounter of Native practices and influences with mainstream art in New York City, created a community in which relationship between art and indigenous sensibility was recognized and nurtured. The Movement is the only such movement of its kin outside of Santa Fe, NM and and important part of American history.
This event takes place in conjunction with #callresponse (March 23 - May 5, 2018).
