Strange Fire

All artists included here identify with indigeneity and/or address indigeneity in their work.

Sebastián Calfuqueo Aliste
From Mapuche origin, their work appeals to their cultural inheritance in order to propose a critical reflection on the social, cultural and political status of the Mapuche subject in the contemporary Chilean society and Latin America. Their Work includes installation, ceramics, performance and video art with in order to explore the cultural similarities and differences as well as the stereotypes produced from the cross between indigenous and western ways of thinking. Their work has also the purpose of making the problems feminism and sexual dissidence movements present visible.

Pete Sands
Pete Sands is a Navajo singer-songwriter, musician, filmmaker, and actor. Sands was born and raised on the Navajo-Indian reservation in southern Utah. His current projects include being featured in the television show Yellowstone as an actor and singer-songwriter, a documentary film on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, and a new album with his band Pete Sands and the Drifters on the way.

Kiliii Yuyan
Kiliii Yuyan is a Nanai (Siberian Native) and Chinese-American photographer whose award-winning work chronicles indigenous and conservation issues. Kiliii’s mission is to present collaborative new narratives of indigenous culture. He is fascinated by the essential relationship between humans and the natural world. Kiliii’s photography presents an alternative vision of humanity’s greatest wealth—community, culture, and the earth.

Astro
Astro (María Escudero, b. 1988) was born and raised in Ecuador, South America. They are an interdisciplinary artist experimenting with image-making in Chicago. Their work focuses on reviewing history to make omissions around the body and intimacy more apparent. To do so, they use agricultural staples, personal objects, and bodily extensions as incantations to connect with the past.

Tarrah Krajnak
Krajnak was born in Lima, Peru in 1979. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at the SUR Biennial in Los Angeles, Honor Fraser Gallery, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Center for Photography Woodstock, San Francisco Camerawork, Philadelphia Photographic Arts Center, Filter Photo Festival, Art London, Art Basel Miami, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Columbus Museum of Art, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, and Ampersand Gallery & Fine Books. 

Rob Fatal
Rob Fatal is a Queer / Latinx / Native American filmmaker, writer and photographer whose work explores de-colonial aesthetics and the queer archive. Their work has been screened at film festivals worldwide, including the British Film Institute's Flare Festival, Fringe! Queer Film and Art Festival (London), Toronto Queer Film Festival, and First Nations Film Festival (Chicago).

Hearts of Our People: Centering Collaboration in Museum Work
On September 3rd, 2020, the UNM Art Museum hosted a conversation with artist Teri Greeves, Dakota Hoska, Assistant Curator of Native Arts at the Denver Art Museum, and Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Associate Curator of Native American Art at Minneapolis Institute of Art. Centering the talk around the landmark exhibition “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists,” Greeves, Hoska, and Yohe will share their perspectives on the collaborative work that was pivotal to the exhibition’s development, which included the formation of an Exhibition Advisory Board. The panel of 21 Native artists and Native and non-Native scholars from across North America provided insights from a wide range of nations at every step in the curatorial process. Highlighting the unique nature of this kind of museum work, Greeves, Hoska, and Ahlberg Yohe will speak to the productive markers, the challenges, and the key takeaways from such an endeavor.

Indigenous Interventions: Reshaping Archives and Museums
November 13, 2020 - A symposium co-hosted by the Field Museum, Northwestern University, and the Newberry in which artists, archeologists, curators, and scholars will discuss how Native people engage with and challenge archives and museums through art, community-based practice, scholarship, and curation. Taking the hosting institutions as a starting point, participants will specifically consider the materials donated by Edward E. Ayer, whose collection of Indigenous cultural material is a significant portion of the Field Museum’s and the Newberry Library’s holdings. While most scholarly research has focused on highlighting Ayer’s contributions in “salvaging” Indigenous culture, Indigenous activists, visual artists, anthropologists, musicians, writers, and leaders have also intervened in the use of and access to these collections throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. This symposium privileges these interventions, highlighting how Indigenous peoples have reshaped archives and museums to reflect the needs and interests of their communities rather than those of public institutions.

Museums and Their Legacies, Meranda Roberts PhD
Meranda Roberts, PhD is Northern Paiute and Mexican-American. She earned her PhD at the University of California, Riverside in Native American Studies. Her doctoral work focused on how several Native women basket weavers have used basketry to express their sovereignty. Meranda is at the Field Museum as Post Doctoral Fellow for the Native American Hall renovation. She is working on curating stories that could be told in the new hall, as well as provide feedback on how the museum can work more seamlessly with Indigenous people. Meranda is dedicated to having Native people tell their own stories and to fix the inaccurate portrayals that people have about our communities. This talk focuses on the work that museums must do to remain relevant, especially for BIPOCQ people.

PUBLICATIONS

Aperture: Native America
Guest edited by Wendy Red Star, this Fall 2020 issue of Aperture Magazine looks into the historic, often fraught relationship between photography and Native representation, while also offering new perspectives by emerging artists who reimagine what it means to be a citizen in North America today. Associated remote events will take place between September 10th and October 8th, 2020.

Minneapolis Institute of Art: Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists
Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists explores the artistic achievements of Native women and establishes their rightful place in the art world. This landmark book includes works of art from antiquity to the present, made in a variety of media from textiles and beadwork to video and digital arts. It showcases artists from more than seventy-five Indigenous tribes to reveal the ingenuity and innovation that have always been foundational to the art of Native women. Beautifully illustrated and enriched by the personal reflections, historical research, and artistic insights of leading scholars and artists in the field, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists pays tribute to the vital role and creative force of Native women artists, now and throughout time. Jill Ahlberg Yohe is associate curator of Native American art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Teri Greeves (Kiowa) is an independent curator.

ARTICLES

Decolonizing Photography: A Conversation with Wendy Red Star, Abaki Beck for Aperture, 2016
Navigating Alterity: Lessons From The Jessup Archive, InHae Yap for Strange Fire Collective, 2020
Notions of Land, Wanda Nanibush for Aperture, 2019

heather ahtone
heather ahtone, PhD is the senior curator at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, OK. Her primary research interest examines the intersections of tribal knowledge and Contemporary Art, as well as a desire to broaden discourse surrounding indigenous contemporary art globally.

Abaki Beck
Abaki Beck, MPH, is a writer and researcher. Her writing focuses on Indigenous feminisms, Indigenous science and knowledge, and gender-based violence in Native communities. She is the founder and editor of POC Online Classroom, a website that curates social justice readings, resources, and syllabi. She is also co-founder of the STL Reentry Fund, a mutual aid fund managed by formerly incarcerated people and allies in St Louis, Missouri.

Sandra Benites
Sandra Benites is a doctoral candidate in social anthropology at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. She has taught indigenous language and culture in indigenous schools in Brazil. She is the first indigenous curator hired by any museum in Brazil. Her current curatorial interest is using art to bridge the gap between Indigenous Brazilians and those from other backgrounds, looking to represent many of her country’s 305 ethnic groups in “Indigenous Stories,” a yearlong exhibition of global indigenous art set to take place at MASP in 2021.

Yve Chavez
Yve Chavez, PhD is an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests include: art and visual culture of the Indigenous Americas and Latin America; visual and material culture of Native California; and the art and architecture of the California missions and Spanish colonial borderlands.

Mique’l Dangeli
Mique’l Dangeli (née Askren), PhD is a scholar, educator, author, and dancer. Her research interests focus primarily on indigenous cultures of the Northwest Coast of North America. She has written on language, dance, and photography.

Regan De Loggans
Regan De Loggans is a two-spirit agitator, art historian, curator and educator based in so-called Brooklyn, New York, on Lenape land. Their work relates to decolonizing, indigenizing, and queering institutions and curatorial practices. They are one of the founding members of the Indigenous Kinship Collective: NYC. They have staged actions at the Whitney Biennial, American Museum of Natural History and on the MTA Subway in response to continued settler colonialism and institutionalized racism and violence.

Lara Evans
Lara Evans, PhD is an artist, scholar, and curator at the Institute of American Indian Art (IAIA). She specializes in contemporary Native American art history, and is the program director for the IAIA Artist-in-Residence program. She has written on performance art, photography, and other aspects of contemporary Native art.

Ryan Flahive
Ryan Flahive is the archivist at the Institute of American Indian Art, and author of Celebrating Difference: Fifty Years of Contemporary Native Arts at IAIA, 1962-2012. The collection at IAIA aims to collect, preserve, interpret, and provide access to the documentary history of IAIA, the contemporary Native art movement, and American Indian Education. 

Chelsea M. Herr
Chelsea M. Herr is working towards her PhD in Native American Art History at the University of Oklahoma. She has written on Indigenous Futurism, photography, agency, and the politics of visual consumption.

Tatiana Lomahaftewa Singer
Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer is the Curator of Collections at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. Her work has engaged with modern and contemporary Native arts and culture from various visual media.

Michelle S A McGeough
Michelle S A McGeough, PhD, is an art historian and educator. Her research interests include: Native gender, sexuality, and performance; Two-Spirit identity; Native knowledge production as artistic expression; feminism; and Indigenous educational and research methodologies.

Nancy Marie Mithlo
Nancy Marie Mithlo, PhD, is an educator, curator, and art advocate. Her curatorial work includes North American venues and the Venice Biennale. Her research interests reside at the intersections of race and representation in visual arts, popular culture, and museum studies, with an emphasis on American Indian and First Nations peoples and institutions in global contexts.

John Paul Rangel
John Paul Rangel, PhD, is an artist, scholar, and writer. His areas of research interest include contemporary Native art and cultural representation, Native art theory, Indigenous aesthetics, and Indigenous research methodologies.

Dyani Reynolds-White Hawk
Dyani Reynolds-White Hawk is an artist and scholar. Her recent work in performance, video, and photography focuses on issues of Indigenous language, women’s rights, and the necessity of nurturing cross-cultural relationships. She has written for and been featured in numerous publications.

Jolene Rickard
Jolene Rickard, PhD, is an artist, curator, visual historian, and educator at Cornell University. Her research is primarily focused on Indigeneity in a global context, as well as Indigenous aesthetic practices. She was one of a select group of curators who helped to design the permanent exhibitions at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, which opened in 2004.

Meranda Roberts
Meranda Roberts, PhD, is a Numu/Xixanx historian, curator, and advocate. Her work surrounds indigenizing museums and making them more inclusive, as well as dismantling the idea that Museums are neutral ground.

Jessie Ryker-Crawford
Jessie Ryker-Crawford, PhD, is a visual culture scholar, anthropologist, and educator at the Institute of American Indian Art (IAIA). Her research focuses on the indigenization of the museum field. She has presented material on her studies at various conferences including the International World Archaeological Congress.and the National Congress of the American Indian.

Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote
Jenny Tone-Pah Hote, PhD, is a scholar and educator at UNC Chapel Hill. Her research interests center upon American Indian history, material, and expressive culture. She holds particular interest in Kiowa culture and practices, as well as American Indian social history, sovereignty, and autonomy in the 20th century though an interdisciplinary lens.  It also examined Native artists, cultural leaders, athletes, and others participated in the lives of their communities and American popular culture. 

Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie
Hulleah Tsinahjinnie is an artist and writer whose work focuses on the interruption of historical narratives and disruption of stereotypical representations of American Native peoples. Her research interests include visual sovereignty, photography, video, serigraphy, and traditional Native American techniques.

IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico

First Americans Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, Pendleton, Oregon

Indigenous Arts Institute, Rio Rancho, New Mexico

Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, New York City, New York

Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia

Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana

Museo De Arte Indígena, Sucre, Bolivia

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), Acton, Australia

Newberry Library’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies and Consortium in American Indian Studies, Chicago, Illinois

American Indian Center of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

2022

Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Oct 30, 2022 - Jan 22, 2023

2020

Indelible Ink: Native Women, Printmaking, Collaboration
University of New Mexico Art Museum, Feb 7 - Oct 17, 2020

2019

Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Jun 2 - Aug 18, 2019

Indigenous Photograph
From their mission statement: “Indigenous Photograph is a space to elevate the work of Indigenous visual journalists and bring balance to the way we tell stories about Indigenous people and spaces. Our mission is to support the media industry in hiring more Indigenous photographers to tell the stories of their communities and to reflect on how we tell these stories. Our database consists of working storytellers on Turtle Island (North America) and is available to photo editors, creative directors, and those who routinely hire photographers. Please reach out to us for a complete electronic database of our members, which includes detailed information regarding geographical areas of expertise, languages spoken, and contact information.”

Indigenous Kinship Collective (KIN) New York City
From their mission statement: “We are a community of Indigenous womxn, femmes, and gender non conforming folx who gather on Lenni Lenape land to honor each other and our relatives through art, activism, education, and representation. We, as matriarchs and knowledge keepers, center our intersectional narratives by practicing accountability with community and self-determination. We uplift intergenerational Indigenous voices and welcome mixed race, non-enrolled, Indigenous femme, non-binary, trans, two-spirit people. We denounce colonial power structures of leadership and blood quantum. We are circular and work in harmony with each other. We are defined by those who came before us.”

The 400 Years Project
From their mission statement: “The 400 Years Project looks at the evolution of Native identity, rights, and representation, centering the Native voice. Composed of photo essays, a digital Library of Native Photographers from the mid-1800s to the Present, and texts, the project provides a narrative of Native empowerment while recognizing the devastating effects of colonization. Moving forward, 400 Years will continue to commission original photo stories and texts, license established work, and add contemporary and historic photographers to the library. Along with helping storytellers document their own communities and providing avenues for the stories to reach broad audiences, our goal at 400 Years is to create a groundbreaking pictorial collection of Native America by Native artists and allies.”