Rosalie Favell, Richard Ray Whitman (Facing the Camera: The Santa Fe Suite), 2012-13 – courtesy of the artist

Métis artist Rosalie Favell’s series, Facing the Camera (2008 – present), is a growing suite of photographic portraiture that documents individuals from a growing Indigenous arts community. Through these images, Favell sees the photograph as a performance space where identity is constantly worked and reworked, represented, and perhaps hidden.

Facing The Camera: The “Santa Fe Suite” was realized through her residency with the Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI) in August 2012. At this time, she photographed artists and the arts community at the SFAI residency and at MoCNA’s artist studio during the annual Indian Market.

About the artist: Rosalie Favell is a photo-based artist born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, whose significant work has received international recognition for her mapping of self and community within a global society. She holds an MFA from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and has studied and taught extensively at the post-graduate level including the Institute of American Indian Arts. She currently lives and works in Ottawa, Canada.

Tanya Lukin-Linklater, In Memoriam (still), 2013 – Courtesy of the artist

Stands With A Fist is a multi-disciplinary art exhibition that is a unique platform for cultivating, celebrating and declaring a continual presence of visual expression created by contemporary Native women artists. The exhibition demonstrates the ways that women boldly fit into, redefine, or turn upside down the usual categories of art and art-making, while re-interpreting and drawing from their rich cultural heritage. Collectively, their work expresses a unique Indigenous relationship to the land, contemporary worldview, and sense of obligation to their culture.

In bringing these artists together, Stands With A Fist bears witness to the strength of diverse cultural influences, individual experiences and the intellectual and creative activism expressed by Native women artists working today.

In conjunction with Stands With A Fist: Contemporary Native Women Artists, MoCNA has commissioned artist Nanibah ‘Nani’ Chacon to create a new mural in the Allan Houser Art Park.

About the artists:

Melanie Yazzie is a printmaker, painter and sculptor whose work draws upon her rich Diné (Navajo) cultural heritage. Her work follows the Diné dictum “walk in beauty”- literally, creating beauty and harmony.

Merritt Johnson is a multidisciplinary artist. Her work grapples with marginalization from the perspective of an Indigenous woman; currently manifesting as an exploration of monsters, decoration and disguise.  Additionally, her practice considers material limitation, mediation of experience, clumsiness of being, and the meanness of survival.  

Gina Adams work focuses primarily on her mixed heritage of Ojibwe and Lakota, Lithuanian, and Irish bloodlines. Her work involves much research and travel, where she places herself in landscapes that are both ancient and modern.

Tanya Lukin Linklater originates from the Native Villages of Port Lions and Afognak in the Kodiak archipelago of southwestern Alaska. Based in northern Ontario, her practice spans experimental choreography, performance, installation, text, and video. Her work often engages with notions of revitalization through deconstructive and reconstructive performative practices.

Lindsay Delaronde, a Mohawk woman, born and raised on the Kahnawake reservation, is an emerging multi-disciplinary artist who constructs Indigenous perspectives within Western society to bring forth truth and reconciliation through the act of creation and visual understanding.

Natalie Ball is a Modoc/Klamath Portland-based artist. Her genealogy informs her attempts to unsettle old foundations by loosening ideological attachments belonging to race and experience by moving history outside of hegemonic discourses. Her work invites participation in a new auto-ethnographic narrative, a new history and a new manifestation for a critical way to understand America.

Nanibah “Nani” Chacon is a Diné (Navajo) and Chicana artist. She uses an archetype of female characters to explore ideas of feminism, sexuality, form, shape, design, color, subtlety, softness and power, culture, traditionalism and modernism, encompassed in what could only be the attributes of a woman.

Curator: Ryan Rice

Kade L. Twist For Instance, the Land Beneath Your Feet (still), 2010-2011- Courtesy of the artist

Kade Twist’s solo exhibition, For Instance, Look at the Land Beneath Your Feet, examines the language and rhetoric of real estate, commerce, development and commodification of space within the context of the recent financial crisis. The media-based work is comprised of a series of dialogues and monologues delivered by two real estate professionals. The installation explores linguistic synchronicities of volume, tone, lexicon, repetition and narrative, as well as physical synchronicities of gesture, expression, movement, composure and loss of composure. The installation comprises a metanarrative of place, value and identity within the vastly developing desert southwest, and builds from meditation into overlapping, interruptive cacophony, creating a symphony of voice, intonation and individual will.

About the artist:  Kade L. Twist is a multi-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, sound and text. Twist’s work combines re-imagined tribal stories with geopolitical narratives to examine the unresolved tensions between market-driven systems, consumerism and American Indian cultural self-determination. Mr. Twist is also a member of Postcommodity, a transdisciplinary artist collective. Twist received his MFA in Intermedia from the Herberger Institute School of Art at Arizona State University. Twist is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

Guest Essay

Directed by Nanna Dalunde
in collaboration with Douglas Miles/Apache Skateboards
41 minute video

“The paint brush, the camera, the loom — these are the new weapons.” – Lynette Haozous

Apache Chronicle is an experimental documentary film about the life and art and the art of life of five bold women – Melissa Cody, Razelle Benally, Rebekah Miles, Lynnette Haozous and Tasha Hastings – who are skateboarders and/or artists connected to the collective Apache Skateboards.

Veronica Ayala | Terry Yazzie Begay | Derek Brown | Madelynn Boyiddle
Brandee Caoba | Carolyn Conley | McKeon Dempsey | Teresa Fields
Crystal Worl | Teresa Kaulaity Quintana | Moira Garcia | David Pecos
Jessica Manko | Betty Jean Parker | Sonsee’rae Sells | Saeko Yamada
Brian Shemayme | Cameron Tafoya | Rhiannon Tafoya | Judith Vicenti

The Museum of Contemporary Native Arts is proud to present the annual Institute of American Indian (IAIA) Arts BFA Student Exhibition. This year’s BFA exhibition celebrates the class of 2012-13 and showcases a diversity of styles that combine traditional skill and contemporary
vision. The exhibition features a wide-range of works selected by a jury, and include photography, painting, sculpture, installation, printmaking and jewelry.

Closing reception:
Saturday, May 11
2:00 – 4:00pm

For more information contact:

Helen Hardin Media Gallery

The 45 minute video runs continuously throughout the day.

Moccasins and Microphones: Modern Native Storytelling through Performance Poetry, a documentary film by Cordillera Productions, explores the fascinating world of a dynamic team of indigenous youth writers from the Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS) in New Mexico. Led by teacher and poet Timothy P. McLaughlin, the SFIS Spoken Word Program empowers its student members to create and perform original poems centered in Native philosophies. Over an eight-year history, the exquisite artistry of this ever-evolving team has been highly recognized through numerous awards, a bevy of media appearances including in The New York Times and on The PBS News Hour, and performance tours throughout the United States and to the Baltic nations in Eastern Europe.

This beautifully crafted documentary film journeys with the SFIS Spoken Word Team as they prepare and present a theater production of their finest poems woven with traditional and contemporary songs and dances. The young SFIS poets will enchant your heart and enliven your spirit as they continue the ancient tradition of Native storytelling through the powerful new medium of performance poetry.

To learn more about the Santa Fe Indian School Spoken Word Program visit:

www.sfisspokenword.org

To View trailer – http://vimeo.com/37979242

Photo credit: Kate Russell

Hall Gallery

Quadriplegic Hualapai and Paiute artist, Tyree Honga, has created a new portrait series for his exhibition at MoCNA titled, “Images of Life.”  Using mostly Bic pens, Tyree has drawn new portraits of Native leaders and friends, famous individuals Pink and Pi, as well as big game animals from his home country at the Grand Canyon.   

Guest Curator: Megan Tamati-Quennell
South Gallery

Spyglass field Recordings: Santa Fe is a solo exhibition of work by leading contemporary Maori video, photography and installation artist Nathan Pohio. The exhibition title is taken from an ongoing series Pohio continues to develop that refers to instruments used for observation and includes new works he developed during a residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute.

Nathan Pohio is increasingly being recognized for his dynamic and quirky work that combines his sophisticated and wide-ranging knowledge and love of cinema, filmmaking, the technologies of film, photography and optical devices and their relationship to painting, 70’s popular culture – the era he grew up in, Indigenous politics and oblique Maori, and more specifically Ngai Tahu tribal signifiers and views of the world.

The exhibition title is taken from an ongoing series Pohio has and will continue to develop. It refers to instruments used for observation both visual and audio so is an epithet for this show – an exhibition of Pohio’s recordings and observations and a meditation on the nature of perception and reality. 

The field recordings part of the title is a term used for an audio recording produced outside of a recording studio.  In that context it often involves the capture of ambient noises that are low level and complex. In the context of this exhibition, as well as holding those meanings, field recordings is also used as a reference to being elsewhere.

The exhibition will be made up of recent works that show the diversity of Pohio’s practice including a series of new photographs made this year while on a month long residency at the Sante Fe Art Institute, a work that documents his time in two cities in Australia and recordings of images from his home.  His use of old and new photographic and film technologies will also be expressed within this exhibition.

Sound field recordings: Santa Fe is Pohio’s first international solo show and the first show of contemporary Maori art to be shown at MoCNA.

About the artist: Nathan Pohio is an artist working in video and other photo media. Pohio works with found and gifted objects that are rendered into
material for artworks and installations.  He has been focusing on the history of cinema and the relationship of that history to painting and optical devices. He works from the perspective of his Maori ancestry as an interface with the world and wonder’s what it is to be
human when confronting the inherent dualities of being of Maori and European decent, Pohio has realized a beauty within the conflict.

About the curator: Megan Tamati-Quennell is the Curator of Contemporary Maori, Indigenous Art at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.  A position she has held since 2005.  She is of Te Atiawa, Ngati Mutunga, Ngai Tahu, Kati Mamoe and Waitaha descent. Over the past 24 years, Tamati-Quennell has worked as a Curator, Arts facilitator and Arts writer and is one of three Indigenous Art Curators in New Zealand who specialises in contemporary Maori and Indigenous art.  She has been at the forefront of many developments in contemporary Maori arts practice which she describes as ‘art made on the margin between the indigenous and the mainstream’.

Guest Essay by Megan Tamati-Quennell

Jason Lujan, Summer Burial (Catlin, 01), 2012

North Gallery

The collected works and ideas behind Summer Burial references Eastern visualities in order to comment on Native American allegories and contemporary realities. Utilizing themes such as portraiture, adaptations of pattern, and historical crossover, the artist appropriates such diverse elements as origami paper patterns, military toys and models, and product packaging. For the solo exhibition, Lujan continues his use of digital process hybridized with conventional media.

About the artist: Jason Lujan is originally from Marfa, Texas and has lived in New York City since 2001. His previous exhibitions and performances include Fancy Dance Good Luck Lion at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; and National Museum of the American Indian, NY, NY; The Muhheakantuck in Focus, Wave Hill Glyndor Gallery, Bronx, NY; and the solo installation Blood is the New Black at St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY. He has participated in residencies at The Center for Book Arts, New York, NY; Vermont Studio Center, Johnston, VT; and Triangle Artist Association, Brooklyn, NY.

Guest Essay by Brian Boucher

For more information on Jason Lujan visit:

http://www.iaia.edu/museum/vision-project/artists/jason-lujan/

http://www.jasonlujan.com/

Artists: Brenda Croft, Tom Jones, Greg Staats, Anna Tsouhlarakis
Curated by Nancy Marie Mithlo and Ryan Rice

The Museum of Contemporary Native Arts invited four photo/mixed media-based artists   Brenda L. Croft, Tom Jones, Greg Staats and Anna Tsouhlarakis to address the complexities of family, biography, and race that intersect through blood and memory. Portraiture, family photo albums, documentary film, private and public archives and performance offer a rich platform to explore manifestations of Indigenous knowledge that negotiate ideas of “blood” as metaphorical and racial/biological measures for family and communal relations.

Autobiography often connotes a concern only with one’s personal genealogy and the nuclear family. Thicker Than Water recognizes a broader understanding of communal ideologies that extends into and then past this western construct of individualism to encompass Indigenous references of community, clan, and nation. An awareness of these various levels of belonging enable conversations where the imaginary and the real intersect, co-mingle and create space for a more comprehensive understanding of Indigenous realities in global contexts. The selection of artists from Canada, the US and Australia facilitate this more expansive conversation on what the notion of “belonging” means in a globalized 21st century.

“Blood memories” and Indigenous worldviews serve as powerful political tropes that bear witness to the legacies of colonialism. Memory in this sense engages trans-generational experiences as a means of upholding the persistence of communal knowledge. Our stories and the visual representations of our ancestors become the language of remembrance, belonging and place across borders and time. The body acts as a potent reminder of all that has occurred over the past centuries via acculturation, death, disease and survival. Our blood, ever thicker than water, continues to instruct, remind and renew us as we move into new territories, imagine new stories and continue to create in the ever-evolving ways of our ancestors.

The exhibition is supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.