Currents and Protocols: Indigenous Feminism's in Contemporary Art

Catalog description

In this seven-week course, we will build an understanding of contemporary Indigenous art and feminisms (post-1960s) through extended engagement with the practices of six artists working in North America: carver Freda Diesing (Haida); painter Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee); cultural worker Jaune Quick-To-See Smith (Salish-Kootenai); filmmaker Shelley Niro (Kanienkehaka); dancer Mique’l Dangeli (Tsimshian) and/or multidisciplinary artist Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke); performance artist Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabekwe). This course will expand on their techniques for claiming and refusing space in the art world through citation, relational work, and acknowledgment of Indigenous and non-Indigenous predecessors - glossed here as “currents” and “protocols” to signal both mediation and the setting of boundaries with and disentanglement from canonical art histories. Throughout, we will consider how theories of contemporaneity and cultures of display in North America owe a deep and largely unacknowledged debt to Indigenous art, knowledge, and social movements. In addition to secondary scholarship on each artist, we will also learn from catalogs and other documentation of recent exhibitions of work by Indigenous women, Two-Spirit, and queer artists and feminisms, including Hearts of Our People and the Contingencies of Care virtual residency. Students will also be expected to attend the concurrent Critical Indigenous Studies speaker series (2-3 public lectures).