Indigenous A&E: LAND artist, storytellers, and Native films
Sandra Hale Schulman
October 26, 2023
The latest: A noted Alaskan artist takes the spotlight with a new exhibition, storytellers take the stage, and the Red Nation Film Festival is set for November.
ART: Nicholas Galanin launches new show
Acclaimed Indigenous artist Nicholas Galanin has been on a cross-country tear lately — giving talks, opening a new show, and accepting a 2023 Joan Mitchell Fellowship of $60,000.
The whirlwind tour comes after his string of installations that included “Never Forget” in Palm Springs, California, for Desert X, and “In Every Language There is Land/ En Cada Lengua hay una Tierra,” in Brooklyn.
Galanin, Tlingit and Unangax̂, was the keynote speaker with architecture professor Ronald Rael at The Convening in Cincinnati on Oct. 20-21, a special series of public talks and performances that featured artists, critics, and curators in a partnership between FotoFocus and Creative Time.
Artist Nicholas Galanin, Tlingit and Unangax̂, at right, was the keynote speaker with architecture professor Ronald Rael at The Convening in Cincinnati on Oct. 20-21, 2023, a special series of public talks and performances that featured artists, critics, and curators in a partnership between FotoFocus and Creative Time. Rael is chair of the department of art practices at the University of California Berkeley.
In his talk, he showed images of his land-based thematic artwork and spoke about how his family life in Sitka, Alaska, where he hunts seals, fishes salmon, and hand-carves totems and canoes, keeps him grounded in more ways than one. Rael is chair of the department of art practices at the University of California Berkeley.
His latest show, Interference Patterns, at Site Santa Fe, is a solo exhibition rooted in his relationship to land, Indigenous visual language and thought. Working in materials that range from deer hide to neon, Galanin merges conceptual and material practices in his creative approach. The exhibition opened Oct. 6 and runs through Feb. 5, 2024.
With sculptures, installations, and videos informing Indigenous knowledge and the ongoing effects of colonization and occupation, the exhibition includes a newly commissioned interactive installation, “Neon American Anthem (red)” that invites audiences to participate in an aural and breathing exercise related to violence and oppression inside and outside U.S. borders.
Another work, UnconvertedConverted, shows a deerskin affixed to a wall next to a pixelated version, forcing a comparison of the natural versus digital worlds.
“My process of creation is a constant pursuit of freedom and vision for the present and future,” Galanin said in a statement. “I use my work to explore adaptation, resilience, survival, dream memory, cultural resurgence, and connection and disconnection to the land.”
THEATER: Indigenous storytellers in the WORLD spotlight
Native voices feature prominently in Season 7 of “Stories from the Stage,” the WORLD storytelling series that finds ordinary Americans on stage recounting their extraordinary tales.
Seven Native storytellers are in three of the upcoming episodes in time for Native American Heritage Month in November.
The episode On Sacred Ground, which first aired Oct. 23, includes three storytellers from Lincoln, Nebraska: award-winning journalist Kevin Abourezk, Rosebud Lakota Nation and deputy managing editor at ICT; artist Colleen New Holy, Oglala Sioux Tribe of Pine Ridge, South Dakota; and beading teacher Valery Killscrow Copeland, Oglala-Lakota Sioux Tribe.
Beading teacher Valery Killscrow Copeland, Oglala-Lakota Sioux, is among seven Native people featured in Season 7 of Stories from the Stage, the WORLD storytelling series that finds ordinary Americans on stage recounting their extraordinary tales. She is featured in the episode “On Sacred Ground,” which aired Oct. 23, 2023. (Photo by Patricia Alvarado, courtesy of WORLD)
Abourezk details his work to rally his Native community to oppose a massive housing development on tribal land in Lincoln. New Holy details the judgment heaped on traditional healing through stories of her mother, noted activist and educator Reneé Sans Souci, and her work as an educator preserving Native culture.