Writing Relations, Making Futurities: Global Indigenous Art Criticism Residency

Dr. Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) an academic, author, and Associate Head of School, Mātauranga Māori, at the University of Auckland.

Dr. Stephen Gilchrist (Yamatji) curator, writer, and academic specializing in Indigenous Australian art. Currently an Associate Lecturer at the University of Sydney, he has curated major exhibitions for institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, British Museum, and Harvard Art Museums.

Dr. Liisa-Rávná Finbog (Sámi) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Mediated Arctic Geographies at Tampere University and Co-Curator of the Sámi Pavilion for the Biennale di Venezia – Arte (2022).

Dr. Lana Lopesi (Sāmoa) is an author, art critic, editor and Assistant Professor in the department of Indigenous Race and Ethnic Studies, University of Oregon.

Dr. Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee) is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University, Lenapehoking / New York City.

Dr. Jolene Rickard (Skarù:ręˀ / Tuscarora) is an Associate Professor at Cornell University in the departments of History of Art and Art, and the former Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program 2008-2020 (AIISP). She is a visual historian, artist and curator interested in the intersection of Indigenous art, cultural theory and the forces of settler colonialism. Her research centers on the expression of multiple sovereignties within Indigenous art and culture globally.

Lagi-Maama is a cultural academy and consultancy organisation based in Aotearoa New Zealand, set up by Toluma’anave Barbara Makuati-Afitu, of Samoan heritage, and Kolokesa Uafā Māhina-Tuai, of Tongan heritage. Toluma’anave has a background in stakeholder management and community engagement and Kolokesa in Art History, Social Anthropology and Museums and Heritage Studies. As an academy Lagi-Maama are involved in knowledge production by privileging Indigenous ways of knowing and seeing, and as a consultancy they implement by way of knowledge application through privileging Indigenous ways of doing!

Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi (Sāmoan, Persian, Cantonese) is a visual artist, writer, curator and researcher who works between Australia and Canada. Ia intervenes in display territories to centre Indigenous kin constellations, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial- political practices. Through performance, moving image, writing and installation, ia engages with Indigenous futurities as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that once erased faʻafafine-faʻatane people from kinship and knowledge structures. Eshrāghi has made new commissions for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Sharjah Biennial 14, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center among other group and solo presentations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Eshrāghi has lectured at gatherings Creative Time, Hawaiʻi Contemporary Art Summit, Experimenter Curators’ Hub, March Meeting, Dhaka Art Summit, Pacific Arts Association, and Asia Pacific Triennial, as well as at universities in Antwerp, San Juan, London, Melbourne, Yogyakarta, Montreal, Honolulu, Auckland and Victoria. Ia contributes to growing international critical practice across the Great Ocean and North America through residencies, exhibitions, publications, teaching, and rights advocacy.

Lois Taylor Biggs (Cherokee Nation/White Earth Ojibwe) is a Chicago-based writer, curator, and art historian. Biggs is interested in Indigenous abstraction, art historical practice, and frameworks for memory, desire, and fragmentation. She is currently the Rice Curatorial Fellow in Native American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago and the curator-in-residence at Center for Native Futures. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University, an MA in Social History of Art from the University of Leeds, and won C Magazine’s 2022 Indigenous Art Writing Award for her essay “Archives, Bones, and Polaroids.”

Lou Cornum, born in Arizona in 1989, is a writer, scholar, and editor interested broadly in Indigenous Cultural Studies, conversations across Black and Indigenous Studies, and decolonial theory. Currently, they are the Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Native American Studies at Wesleyan University where they are working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Skin Worlds: Speculative Geographies across Black and Indigenous Literatures. Published writing can be found in The New Inquiry, Real Life, Art in America, Canadian Art, Frieze, and Pinko: A Magazine of Gay Communism. They are an enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation and come from a family of Diné and white settler backgrounds. While based in Brooklyn for the past ten years, they now ping pong between New York and Connecticut. 

Emily Critch is a Mi’kmaw and settler curator, artist, and writer from Elmastukwek, Ktaqmkuk Territory (Bay of Islands, NL). Her recent curatorial projects include these are our monuments (2021) with the Owen’s Art Gallery, mitsujuk | kussikuashu | kpitni’sewet | they sew with the Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador (2019-20), and Visiting: Logan MacDonald at Grenfell Art Gallery (2018). Critch has published exhibition texts, reviews, and essays with several venues including Eastern Edge, The Rooms, Eyelevel, and Visual Arts News. Emily is currently based in St. John’s, NL working remotely as the Program Coordinator with the Indigenous Curatorial Collective/Collectif des commissaires autochtones, and the Adjunct Curator at the Owens Art Gallery. 

Nicole Kuʻuleinapuananiolikoawapuhimelemeleolani Furtado is Kanaka Maoli from Nānākuli, Hawaiʻi and a PhD student in English with a Designated Emphasis in Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She received her BA in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and her MA in English at UC Riverside. Her current research interests are Indigenous Studies, Speculative Fiction, Digital Art, Disability Studies, Science & Technology Studies, and Decolonial Futurities. Nicole’s love for studying and writing Speculative Fiction has led her to becoming a Research Scholar for the The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity Fall Thematic in 2020 and an on-going collaboration with the University of California Speculative Futures Collective. In summer 2021, Nicole created a virtual seminar, titled “Visual Sovereignty: Indigenous Studies for Artists,” with Human Resources Los Angeles (a performance-based museum) that catered to cultivating conversations regarding the field of Indigenous Studies with artists and art-workers based in California, the US, and internationally. Her article “Wandering the World’s Most Isolated Metropolis: Structured Dispossession & Post-Apocalyptic Stress Syndrome in the Film Waikiki” has been published in the Science Fiction Research Association’s journal, and she has a forthcoming sci-fi short story, “Across Lewa & Kikilo,” in the anthology The Fantastic in the Pacific. 

Indigo Gonzales is a Two-Spirit (Southern Ute, Non-Enrolled) Afro-Indigenous artist, educator, and medicine practitioner based in Columbus, OH. After graduating from The Ohio State University with a BA in East Asian Art History in 2017, Indigo has been committed to her totemic medicine and art practices through freelance artwork commissions, community ceremony, as well as various speaking engagements. While holding various spaces of learning via artist talks, guest speaking in university classrooms, and as a panel participant, she remains rooted in the development of her pedagogical practice through indigenous ways of knowing while holding space for all peoples. In doing so, she maintains her Two-Spirit duty as a sacred witness for all relations and as a Good Ancestor for the next seven generations to come.

Anna Freeman (Andean descent) is a Ph.D. student in the Arts Administration, Education, and Policy program at The Ohio State University. Her research interests include Indigenous contemporary art, institutional critique, and community-based outreach. Anna is currently a graduate teaching assistant and is involved in several programs with the K’acha Willaykuna: Andean and Amazonia Indigenous and Humanities Collaboration. She works alongside students, known as kawsay waqaychaqkuna in the Andean and Amazonian collection. This Quechua term translates to those who safeguard, keep, and preserve with care. Anna has also worked as a research assistant and an elementary substitute teacher. 

Emma Hassencahl-Perley is Wolastoqew from Neqotkuk (Tobique First Nation), New Brunswick, Canada. She currently resides in Fredericton (NB) and Tobique and is pursuing a Master’s in Art History from Concordia University. Emma maintains a visual art practice, she is an emerging curator and writer in affiliation with the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, and she teaches Indigenous Art History in Contemporary Culture at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design. Emma is the co-author of Wabanaki Modern: The Artistic Legacy of the 1960s “Micmac Indian Craftsmen,” Alexandrya Eaton: Everything in Between and Psi kekw kəti mewi · Tout va bien aller · Everything is gonna be fine · Wela’sitew na, a volume assessing the New Brunswick Art Bank on its fiftieth anniversary. Her work has been featured in CreatedHere Magazine and BILLIE – Visual Culture Atlantic Magazine.

Emily Laurent Henderson is a Kalaaleq (South Greenlandic Inuk) and Settler writer, consultant arts administrator, and community organizer based in Toronto, ON. Currently the Executive Assistant at the Indigenous Curatorial Community Collective, she was a staff writer for the Inuit Art Quarterly from 2019 to 2021, and the co-editor of the first all-Inuit produced issue of the Quarterly, IAQ 32.5 Special Issue Venice. A University of British Columbia 2020 graduate with a BA Anthropology, Emily is also an active member within the Indigenous community in Toronto, and formerly served on the Board of Directors for Toronto Inuit Association and is a founding member of the Indigenous community gardening program, Tkaronto Plant Life. Emily’s work has been featured in the Inuit Art Quarterly, C Magazine, Studio Magazine, and Inuktitut Magazine, along with textual and audio contributions to ImagineNATIVE Film Festival and WAG-Qaumajuq. 

Siera Hyte is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She is an artist, writer, and assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Colby College Museum of Art. Hyte holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. She lives with her family on unceded Wabanaki territory in Waterville, Maine.

Alexandra Nordstrom is a Montréal-based cultural worker, curator, researcher, and art historian. Her work explores Indigenous knowledge systems, with a focus on Cree worldviews, land-based learning, and creative practice. She is co-curator of the Poundmaker Museum and Gallery and co-director of Sarasa Performance Laboratory (formerly Miyawata Culture Inc.). Her writing has appeared in Room, C Magazine, Canadian Art, the exhibition catalogue for the Contemporary Native Art Biennial – 6th edition, and RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review.

Alaina Perez is a member of the Tahltan Nation and was born and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia on unceded Sḵwx̱wú7mesh [Squamish], Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh [Tsleil-Waututh] and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm [Musqueam] Territory. She currently lives in Montreal, Quebec [Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang] where she is completing the last year of her undergraduate degree in Art History at Concordia University. Alaina has just submitted her Masters Degree application for the Individualized Program at Concordia University. She will be engaging with the aesthetics of Indigeneity and how alternative curatorial configurations can be used as an aesthetic tool of communication for the Indigenous experience.

Marina Perez is a descendant of the Sierra Madre Occidental peoples of West Mexico and is currently a guest on unceded Tongva lands. As a graduate student of the American Indian Studies program at UCLA, her scholarship addresses emerging themes in archival studies, oral histories and contemporary Indigenous arts. She is a member of Indigenous Honeys, a zine collective dedicated to cultivating creative spaces for Indigenous voices and experiences. Marina has extensive experience leading self-publishing and multimedia workshops for youth in community, carceral and academic spaces. She currently works as an arts educator and cultural worker with Meztli Projects in Los Angeles.

Jennifer Smith is a Métis curator, writer and arts administrator from Treaty 1 Territory/Winnipeg. She works as the Executive Director for National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition, alongside her practice as an independent curator and art writer. Jennifer’s research focuses on exploring the ways we make things that range from traditional methods of making to exploring new digital technologies that tell our stories. In 2018 she was the Indigenous Curator in Residence at aceartinc. in Winnipeg, and most recently co-curated the exhibition Sovereign Intimacies with Nasrin Himada for Plug In ICA and Gallery 1C03. Her writing has been published in Studio Magazine, Galleries West, and Paperwait. Jennifer has written about exhibitions for galleries, most recently for Jaime Black’s exhibition between us at the Kniznick Gallery at Brandeis University, and Casey Koyczan’s installation Ełexiìtǫ ; Ehtsʼǫǫ̀ / Connected ; Apart From Each at Urban Shaman.

Yvonne N. Tiger [Cherokee (enrolled), Seminole, and Muscogee Nations of Oklahoma] is a PhD student in the Cultural, Social and Political Thought Program at the University of Lethbridge in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. A first-generation college graduate, Tiger holds a BA from Smith College, and two MAs from the University of Oklahoma, in 20th c. U.S. History, and in Native American Studies—Native American Art History and Curating, studies conducted within OU’s department of art history. She teaches Indigenous Studies courses at ULeth. She has published in First American Art Magazine, World Art Journal, and, most recently, wrote an exhibition catalogue essay for Sean Chandler: One Defined to be No One for the Missoula Art Museum. She was a 2021 Native American Fellow at the Peabody-Essex Museum, and a 2021/2022 Cobell Scholar.