Indigenous New York, Artist Perspectives, Part I
Friday, November 17, 7-9 pm
Westbeth/Ramscale Studio

Indigenous New York, Artist Perspectives kicks off its culminating public program of the series with an exciting event at Ramscale Studio in the historic Westbeth artists’ building, featuring performances by artist Nadia Myre (Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinaabeg First Nation), artist Suzanne Kite (Oglala Lakota), and musician and composer Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache). Drinks and refreshments will be served.

Indigenous New York, Artist Perspectives, Part II
Saturday, November 18, 4-6 pm
The New School, Starr Foundation Hall

Indigenous New York, Artist Perspectives, Part II, 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 co-organized with advisor, 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 launch pads 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 discuss the intersection of these topics and their individual artistic projects:

Richard Bell, Tent Embassy, and Wanda Nanibush
Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan, Native Art Department International
Suzanne Kite, Everything I Say Is True, and Nadia Myre, A Casual Reconstruction
Cristóbal Martínez and Kade Twist, Postcommodity

The panel and discussions are followed by a reception.

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, provided opportunities to 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, the members of the Vera List Center Advisory Committee, and is part of the Vera List Center’s 2015-17 curatorial programs on Post Democracy.

Following the Vera List Center’s panel and reception, we encourage our audience to attend the opening of Unholding, an exhibition and series of public programs at Artists Space that feature multiple generations of Indigenous artists.