May 12th, 2010
I hope you can make it to the Original Green art exhibit at Mill City Museum. The exhibit is curated by Heid Erdrich of All My Relations Arts and will feature some of my artwork as well as the amazing work of Gordon Coons, Gwen Westerman, and Bobby Wilson. The opening reception is May 20th 6-8pm, and the event is free and open to the public. If you can't make it to the opening, the exhibit will be up until November 21st, 2010.
This will be an interesting exhibit because it invites American Indian perspectives on the St. Anthony Falls District. The falls have been important to American history because they helped to establish Minneapolis as a major industrial center of the United States. The St. Anthony Falls District is currently so densely populated and overlaid with concrete, bridges, and buildings that it is difficult to imagine what the area would look like in its natural state. Even the falls themselves are no longer natural as they are reinforced by an apron, and more recently, a lock and dam system was installed to extend navigation. When an area like St. Anthony has been so firmly claimed as American territory, I think it can be easy to forget about its history prior to Euro-american settlement.
It is wonderful that the Mill City Museum is inviting American Indian artists to participate in this exhibit because it opens a dialogue between an American perspective and a Native American perspective. The Native American perspective has been too long ignored and overlooked, and the opening of this dialogue allows the pain caused by colonization to heal.
Opening of the Original Green art exhibit, May 20th 6-8pm
Original Green at the Mill City Museum May 20th through November 21st, 2010
Mill City Museum 704 South 2nd St. Minneapolis, MN 55401 (612)341-7555
http://events.mnhs.org/calendar/Results.cfm?EventID=4239
http://www.millcitymuseum.org
March 12th, 2010
I just got back from Tulsa this past Monday and am trying to play catch-up on where I left off in my life in Minnesota. I have had some time to reflect on my experience in Tulsa, and I now realize how amazing it was. I was working with Emily Johnson of Catalyst on curating an art exhibit called This is Displacement: Native Artists Consider the Relationship Between Land and Identity. The exhibit was inspired by Emily Johnson's multi-disciplinary performance of dance, storytelling, and music called The Thank-You Bar. Both the exhibit and the performance are responses to displacement. Emily--of Yup'ik descent--moved from Alaska to Minnesota 15 years ago to attend the University of Minnesota. Through the performance of The Thank-You Bar, she deals with her experience with displacement by asking the question "what is a true home?" The Indigenous peoples of North America have a unique and interesting perspective on displacement. Realizing this, Emily thought it would be interesting to see how this issue could be addressed through an art exhibit, hence This is Displacement. I was excited to co-curate this exhibit, not only because I knew Emily would be a great person to collaborate with, but because as a woman of Navajo descent who was born and raised in Minnesota, I too have struggled with feelings of displacement.
The exhibit was originally meant to be shown only once at the premiere of The Thank-You Bar at Out North in Anchorage this past October 2009. The Out North exhibit was very small with only ten works by ten artists, and it did not receive much publicity. The bulk of the audience was acquired by those who were attending The Thank-You Bar. After the premiere, Emily and I decided we would like the exhibit to tour with The Thank-You Bar as a companion piece, but we also thought that the exhibit should be able to stand alone and receive its own funding and marketing strategies. Then the project began to snowball, and we decided that we also needed to create an exhibit catalog, and we especially needed to expand the exhibit, and this is where the amazing experience in Tulsa comes in.
Earlier this year, we were invited to bring This is Displacement along with The Thank-You Bar down to Tulsa for the Living Arts Center's New Genre Festival. Being that we did not have the time, energy, or funding to expand the exhibit nor was it possible to have the exhibit up for longer than a few days, we still decided to bring This is Displacement down to Tulsa, and I am glad we did. The space that was available for the exhibit was much too big for only ten works, but Steve Liggett, a wonderful man who works for Living Arts and who also helped us extensively in preparing for both the exhibit and performance, connected Emily and I to a group of Oklahoma-based American Indian artists who are collectively called oklaDADA. Richard Ray Whitman, an activist/actor/poet/artist/curator of Yuchi/Creek descent, gathered many pieces of artwork from this group. Their artwork fit into the concept of our exhibit so perfectly. It was the most impressive group exhibit I have seen and it was hung in a matter of an hour or two thanks to Richard and two other wonderful artists, Tom Fields and Jill Primeaux. I was in a state of awe as I saw the artwork that Emily and I had gathered, which was primarily Minnesota-based artists, merge with the artwork from Oklahoma. I haven't yet counted, but if I had to take a guess there were at least 15 different tribal nations represented. There was something very beautiful about it that I can't quite articulate.
The connections we made to the Native artists in Oklahoma was a blessing, and each and every one of these artists were not only incredibly talented, but they were all so generous, humble, and kind. Emily and I are now making plans to drive back down to Tulsa to pick up some of these pieces that were a part of this short-term exhibit, so that they can travel as a part of the new, improved, and expanded This is Displacement. Both the exhibit and performance are scheduled to open November 2010 in Minneapolis, March 2011 in Austin, and may possibly show in New York City in the Spring of 2011. I will keep you updated. Click on "contact" to send me a message, and make sure to include your e-mail address if you would like e-mail updates.
http://okladada.publishpath.com