FALL 2021 EVENTS:
2021 Fall Forum A Collaboration with Pratt’s Center for Teaching & Learning and Project Third (P3), Fine Arts: Decolonial Art Pedagogies
Focus on presenting several ongoing collaborative initiatives – currently underway within Pratt – that consider repairing and rebuilding learning environments, institutional structures and social politics through the lenses of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, and
disability.
Friday September 24
9am – 4:30pm EDT
Saturday September 25
10am – 12:30pm EDT
Please register in advance here
LIVE PERFORMANCE by LAURA ORTMAN: WILD WALKS SING
THURSDAY, October 7, at 6pm, (Duration 45 minutes)
Online at Pratt Fine Arts’s Instagram Live: @prattfineart
IN PERSON outside at Dekalb Gallery, Pratt Campus for the Pratt community. Laura will perform inside the gallery and the audience will gather outside the gallery where the sound will be amplified. The event is open to the Pratt community. RSVP here
WILD WALKS SING is a customized 35-minute performance for amplified violin, field recordings, and megaphone.
A soloist and vibrant collaborator, LAURA ORTMAN (White Mountain Apache) works across recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and pedal steel guitar, often sings through a megaphone, and is a producer of capacious field recordings. She has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Toronto BIennial in Ontario, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, and Europe.
Spring 2021 Events:
ARTIST TALK: MANIFEST EXCESS BY JACKSON POLYS
Thursday, April 15, 6pm, Online, RSVP here
Jackson Polys examines paths of interdisciplinary work that target aporias formed by desiring indigeneity — confronting expectations of arts imperative to ingest and overstep, to navigate often conflicting urges toward the decolonial appeal.
A multi-disciplinary artist belonging to Tlingit territory, Jackson Polys lives and works between what are currently called Alaska and New York, who examines negotiations toward the limits and viability of desires for Indigenous growth. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from and Columbia University where he has since taught. He was recipient of a 2017 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Mentor Artist Fellowship. He is a core contributor to the New Red Order (NRO). His individual and collaborative works have appeared at the Alaska State Museum, Anchorage Museum, Artists Space, Burke Museum, eflux, HKW Berlin, Images Festival, MIT, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Modern Art, Park Avenue Armory, Sundance Film Festival, Union Docs, the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art, Walker Art Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art, including the Whitney Biennial 2019.
ARTIST TALK with LAURA ORTMAN: WOODS THAT SINGS
Monday, March 15, 7pm, Online, RSVP here
LAURA ORTMAN recollects highlights of the endless entwinement of her immersive music and art worlds as an innovative soloist, composer, and vibrant collaborator.
A soloist and vibrant collaborator, LAURA ORTMAN (White Mountain Apache) works across recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and pedal steel guitar, often sings through a megaphone, and is a producer of capacious field recordings. She has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Toronto BIennial in Ontario, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, and Europe.
Fall 2020 Events:
Kinstillations, Consent, and Resistance:
A Dialogue with Emily Johnson, Joseph M. Pierce, Karyn Recollet, and Susan Blight
Friday, November 20, 11am-1pm
Online — RSVP required here
A dialogue between four writers, scholars, artists, and body movers, this gathering will focus on sharing orientations towards the kinstillatory. Drawing on Indigenous feminisms, the work of queer and two-spirit kin, and the constellations of consenting intimacy that span across ruptures of time and space, this conversation will explore recent work by Recollet and Johnson, Pierce, and Blight, together, in dialogue about what futures become possible through Indigenous practices of transformation and resistance.
How do we gather now, in this moment, and at the same time include our more-than-human-kin in consensual acts of change? How do we enact co-presence and co-corporeality, as both an emergent possibility and a series of interventions grounded in ancestral futurity?
Participants:
Emily Johnson (Yup’ik Nation) is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land and water protector and an activist for justice, sovereignty and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, she is based in Lenapehoking / New York City. Emily is of the Yup’ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions, they engage audienceship within and through space, time, environment, and place. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present and future. Emily hosts monthly ceremonial fires on Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center and Karyn Recollet. She was a co-compiler of the document, Creating New Futures: Guidelines for Ethics and Equity in the Performing Arts and is part of an advisory group, with Reuben Roqueni, Ed Bourgeois, Lori Pourier, Ronee Penoi, and Vallejo Gantner – developing a Global First Nations Performance Network.
Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the forthcoming special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” Along with SJ Norman (Koori, Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds.
Karyn Recollet (Cree, born in Sturgeon Lake First Nation, SK, Canada; lives in Toronto, ON, Canada) is an urban Cree scholar/artist/and writer whose work focuses on relationality and care as both an analytic and technology for Indigenous movement-based forms of inquiry within urban spaces. Recollet works collaboratively with Indigenous dance-makers and scholars to theorize forms of urban glyphing. Recollet is in conversation with dance choreographers, Black and Indigenous futurist thinkers and Indigenous and Black geographers as ways to theorize and activate futurist, feminist, celestial and decolonial landing relationships with more-than-human kinships, and each other.
Susan Blight (Anishinaabe, Couchiching First Nation) is an interdisciplinary artist working with public art, site-specific intervention, photography, film and social practice. Her solo and collaborative work engages questions of personal and cultural identity and its relationship to space. In August 2019, Susan joined OCAD University as Delaney Chair in Indigenous Visual Culture and as Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and School of Interdisciplinary Studies.