Adam and Zack Khalil, still from INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place./it flies. falls./], 2016
Pena Bonita; Demian DinéYazhi’ with Natalie Diaz, Sonia Guiñansaca and Julian Talamantez Brolaski; G. Peter Jemison; Adam and Zack Khalil with Jackson Polys; Alan Michelson; Native Art Department International (Maria Hupfield, Jason Lujan) and Christopher Green; Laura Ortman; Jolene Rickard; Kay WalkingStick; Kathleen Ash-Milby; Diane Fraher, Athena LaTocha, David Martine and Jaune Quick–to–See Smith; Candice Hopkins; Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds and Zoya Kocur
November 19, 2017 – January 21, 2018
Opening Saturday, November 18, 6 – 8 p.m.
Wednesday – Sunday: noon – 6 p.m.
Monday and Tuesday closed
Artists Space
55 Walker Street
New York, NY 10013
Artists Space is accessible via elevator from street level, welcomes assistance dogs, and has wheelchair accessible non-gender-segregated toilet facilities. For access inquiries please contact Artists Space at info@artistsspace.org or 212 226 3970.
Unholding Exhibition Supporters:
The Friends of Artists Space, The Artists Space Program Fund, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature
Artists of Indigenous heritage have, for many decades in New York City, developed their practices in self-initiated contexts while endeavoring to extend the reach and visibility of their work to broader publics. Even as progressive art discourse celebrated an emergent multicultural outlook in the late 1980s, narratives around Native American art, culture, and experience remained simplified. Inspired by curator and artist Lloyd Oxendine’s American Art Gallery, founded in SoHo in the early 1970s, institutions such as the American Indian Community House (AICH) and American Indian Artists Inc. (AMERINDA) opened urban spaces for Indigenous representation which thrived outside of conventional value systems. Cultural and operational experimentation abounded and the roles of artist, curator, historian and activist were regularly blurred: G. Peter Jemison, whose early paintings were exhibited by Oxendine, served as the first gallery director of the AICH, while Jolene Rickard, whose photographs complicate separations between Native and American iconographies, is an acclaimed curator and a leading scholar in Indigenous visual history.
Two exhibitions organized by Jean Fisher and Jimmie Durham in the 1980s notably brought this work into dialogue with institutional and academic contexts: Ni’Go Tlunh A Doh Ka (We Are Always Turning Around on Purpose) at SUNY Old Westbury’s Amelie A. Wallace Gallery in 1986, and We the People at Artists Space in 1987. These exhibitions presented a generation of artists to a wide audience and scrutinized the hegemonic white American gaze by addressing questions of inclusion, framing, containment, and viewership. Artworks such as Pena Bonita’s photo-collage series of a car stalled on a reservation road pierced the buoyant postmodern image with a wry political realism. Kay WalkingStick initiated the powerful double visions of her diptychs to complicate how iconography and materiality commingle in landscape painting. Curator and writer Candice Hopkins has noted that, “foregrounding Native artists’ voices rescued their aesthetic legacy from the clutches of modernism, rife as it was with misinterpretation, unequal power relations, and exoticism, and firmly positioned them within the contemporary.” So too, these artists questioned some of the implicit settler colonial assumptions in the contemporary, from linear temporality to the naturalization of economic growth, and carved critical spaces of aesthetic sovereignty.
Constructing ties between this history and the present, recently produced works such as poet Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS (Graywolf Press, 2017) and Adam and Zack Khalil’s INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place./it ies. falls./] (2016) offer profound reckonings with cultural mythology and treaty while deeply experimenting with artistic form. For younger artists such as these, a sense of dexterous porosity and shapeshifting often propels their work, and many are active outside the traditional mediums of visual art, working in film, sound, performance, and text. Self-organization may take the form of applied corporate entities (Native Art Department International), vehement collaboration (Laura Ortman), and close engagement with one’s own artistic networks (Demian DinéYazhi’ and others). In each case, the Indigenous voice is more than foregrounded, but defines the context and conditions of its presence.
Unholding will be accompanied by a print publication that includes commissioned texts by Candice Hopkins and Christopher Green, alongside a reprint of an essay by Jean Fisher. Judith Barry and Ken Saylor will contribute a graphic and a web-based project that revisits their collaboration with Jean Fisher on the design for the exhibition We the People.
Artists Space acknowledges the rich tapestry of Indigenous activity occurring in New York City. Among concurrent events that involve participants in Unholding, on November 15, Adam and Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys present in Culture Capture: A Screening of The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets at The James Gallery. On November 18, Alan Michelson and Jackson Polys host the third colloquium in the Vera List Center’s Indigenous New York program at the New School, where Maria Thereza Alves, Seeds of Change: New York–A Botany of Colonization is on view from November 3 – 27. Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound, curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby and David Garneau, is on view at the National Museum of the American Indian from November 10, 2017 – January 6, 2019. Maria Hupfield’s work is included in the exhibition Studio Views: Craft in the Expanded Field at Museum of Arts and Design from October 24 – December 17. This will be expanded into a public performance staged by Hupfield in DoublePlus, a shared program with Dr. Mique’l Dangle and Mike Dangeli curated by Emily Johnson at Gibney Dance from December 7 – 9.