Editor's note: The Duane Slick lecture “A Human from Earth,” originally scheduled for March 26, has been postponed until the 2020-2021 academic year.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Native artists from North America will talk about their work and contemporary visual culture in a new Native Artist Series that begins Thursday at Krannert Art Museum.
Four visiting artists and a curator will give talks and screen a film in events this month. They include Naomi Bebo, of the Menominee and Ho-Chunk nations; Andrea Carlson, of the Ojibwe Nation; Raven Chacon, of the Diné Nation; Candice Hopkins, of the Tlingit First Nation; and Duane Slick, of the Meskwaki Nation.
The conversations will take place in the context of Native presence and absence – an issue central to land-grant institutions such as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, curator of modern and contemporary art Amy L. Powell said.
“Krannert Art Museum has a particular responsibility to take up Native issues in the visual arts because of the role that images and dispossession have played in the history of the university. To ensure that Native artwork is given space to thrive here is something that’s increasingly central for us,” Powell said.
“The series will show a very strong Indigenous presence at a time when Native rights and activism and issues are growing, including on this campus,” said Dustin Tahmahkera, the interim director of the American Indian Studies program who will participate in one of the discussions in the Native Artist Series. “It’s ensuring the space for Native artists to gather and help lead the conversation, rather than be talked about by others from outside the community.”
The series begins with a conversation on “Native North American Art Now” with artists Bebo and Carlson and curator Hopkins, at 5:30 p.m. Thursday in the KAM Auditorium.
Bebo applies Native American beading traditions to gas masks used in war, calling attention to uranium mining and refining that disproportionately contaminate Native lands. Her work is included in the exhibition “Hot Spots: Radioactivity and the Landscape,” currently on view at KAM.
Carlson makes large-scale paintings and drawings that incorporate Indigenous futurism, traditional storytelling and assimilation metaphors. Her work questions the authority of museums to possess and display Native objects.
Hopkins is a leading curator of Native art from North American and most recently co-organized the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art. In 2015, she curated “An Evening Redness in the West,” an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, N.M., that included art by Bebo and Carlson.
“I love seeing artists and curators in conversation about the questions they are asking and the challenges they are working through,” Powell said. “At KAM, we are interested in building relationships between artists and researchers. Specifically, this series will continue to inform our choices about a range of museum projects, including acquisitions and exhibitions.”
Powell will moderate Thursday’s conversation with Jenny Davis, an anthropology and American Indian Studies professor and the Chancellor’s Fellow of Indigenous Research and Ethics.
KAM will screen the 2017 film “Through the Repellent Fence” at the second event in the series, at 5:30 p.m. March 9 in Room 331, Art & Design building. The film is about the creation of a 2-mile floating art installation of balloons across the U.S.-Mexico border by the interdisciplinary Indigenous artist collective Postcommodity.
“Instead of making art that would potentially disrupt the land, the scare-eye balloons hover temporarily over the border. By having them go over the border from Arizona to Sonora, Mexico, and back, you can’t tell where the border begins and where it ends, and that’s the point,” said Tahmahkera, who wrote a curriculum guide to the film. “Indigenous people were already here, before the border. There’s an adage, ‘We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.’ Indigenous homelands are on both sides of someone else’s constructed border.”
Chacon, a composer, sound artist and, as a member of Postcommodity, one of the creators of “Repellent Fence,” will talk with Tahmahkera following the film screening.
“As so many good artists do, he really helps challenge and deconstruct boundaries in ways that question why we even have them,” Tahmahkera said.
The project is a critique of land art made by white artists in the 1960s and 1970s on Indigenous lands without acknowledgement or regard for whose land it was, he said. The art project and the film “are ensuring Indigenous people’s narratives are at the center, instead of being erased or marginalized.”
“The community effort involved in making this piece is a great example of the engaged activism and public art-making that we hope our students produce as part of their future practices in art, design and educational work,” said Melissa Pokorny, an art professor and executive associate director of the School of Art and Design.
Chacon will be on campus for a weeklong residency, meeting with students in music, art and design, and American Indian Studies.
The final event in the spring series, “A Human from Earth,” features a talk by painter and storyteller Slick, a professor of painting at Rhode Island School of Design, at 5:30 p.m. March 26 in the KAM Auditorium.
“Duane Slick’s work is deeply engaged with issues of legacy and cultural awareness,” Pokorny said. “He asks critical questions regarding the tensions of being a contemporary Native artist, including tribal identity in the face of a dominant culture driven by individualism, the conflict between market ethics and values and tribal ethics and values, and the role of the sacred and the secular.”
While the work highlighted in the series is Native, it isn’t confined to that category, Tahmahkera said.
“It doesn’t have to check certain boxes,” he said. “The emphasis is on the now, showing Native people making and sharing art now, showing where their art is coming from and where it is going in the future.”