You're Welcome: Conversation with Paul Farber, Cannupa Hanska Luger, and Ozi Uduma

For this episode of Broken Boxes I am joined by Monument Lab Director Paul Farber, University of Michigan Museum of Art Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art Ozi Uduma and artist Cannupa Hanska Luger. We gathered together in Ann Arbor Michigan in late September 2023 at the University of Michigan’s Media Center during the opening week of the monumental project and accompanying exhibition by Luger titled, You’re Welcome was developed over the course of two years between Cannupa, Monument Lab and the University of Michigan Museum of Art. This podcast conversation was a chance for the three creatives to speak vulnerably to the process of taking on such a large endeavor and how much care and energy goes into the creation of a project of this magnitude. We learn about the three primary components to the presentation including GIFT, an experimental, time-based, commissioned work by Luger on the front facade of UMMA’s Alumni Memorial Hall which challenges institutional memory and the whitewashing of history. GIFT is accompanied by two indoor installations: Meat for the Beast in the museums Irving Stenn, Jr. Family Gallery, which delves into Luger’s artistic practice and the relationship between museum collections and resource extraction; and Monument Lab: Public Classroom in the Art Gym, which examines formal and informal modes of memory. Moving through the conceptual application of this work, Paul, Ozi and Cannupa break down the larger themes of whiteness, language and time, and unpack the anchoring question of the project, How do we Remember?. The three offer their personal and professional reflections on implementing a project of this magnitude and it’s unknown long term impact. And in speaking to GIFT and the larger constellation of exhibiting works, Paul reflects,  “This is an art project that doesn’t quite have a precedent. And that’s the point. It has cousins and kin and points of inspiration and citation, but this work is actually seeking to do something that has never been done in this way.”  Over all, You’re Welcome explores the relationship between the Museum’s historic building, the land it stands on, and a long history of colonial narratives deeply embedded in public structures. It supports critical dialogues about the responsibilities of public institutions as cultural history makers and stewards, and it is a key component of UMMA’s ongoing efforts to challenge its history and practices to create an institution more reflective of its community and honest in its explorations of art, culture, and society.

LEARN MORE

HOW DO WE REMEMBER?

How do we remember on this campus? This is the central question asked in You’re Welcome, a dynamic three-part exhibition. The result of a multiyear collaboration with artist Cannupa Hanska Luger and nonprofit public art and history studio Monument Lab, You’re Welcome examines the foundational narratives of the land occupied by the University of Michigan and both national and global discourse on nationalism, land sovereignty, militarism, colonialism, and sites of memory.

GIFT

The centerpiece of the You’re Welcome exhibition, Cannupa Hanska Luger’s GIFT, is an experimental, time-based, commissioned work, responding to and challenging the University of Michigan’s origin story and the stewardship of the land it occupies. 

In September 2023, Luger, a multidisciplinary artist and enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota), painted the word “GIFT” in white porcelain clay slip on the columns of Alumni Memorial Hall, a neoclassical war memorial erected in 1910 that now houses UMMA. His point of departure is the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs, in which Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi tribes “gifted” land to the University that was then sold to found its endowments. 

MEAT FOR THE BEAST

Meat for the Beast comprises two works by the multidisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger: This is Not a Snake and The One Who Checks and The One Who Balances. An enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota), Luger was born and raised on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. This is Not a Snake was created there, in the aftermath of the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests. The “snake” is a serpentine monster made of riot gear, ceramics, fiber, steel, oil drums, concertina wire, ammunition cans, trash, beadwork, and other found objects. Interspersed within the creature’s body are artworks from UMMA’s collection selected by Luger and the exhibition’s curators to reflect on the historical and contemporary destruction and extraction of land as an expendable resource.

By positioning the “snake” as if it’s ingesting objects from the museum’s collection, Luger compares the damage done by extractive industries on Indigenous lands to that of museums, which have historically extracted objects and culture from Indigenous communities. 

MONUMENT LAB: PUBLIC CLASSROOM

How do we remember on this campus? In addressing this central question of the exhibition You’re Welcome, Monument Lab, a nonprofit public art and history studio, worked with lead artist Cannupa Hanska Luger, University of Michigan Museum of Art staff, and University students, staff, and faculty to gather hundreds of responses. Using 121 of these compiled responses as a starting point, this “classroom” acts as an exploration of memory itself—how we remember, the physical and ephemeral forms memories take, and how they come to constitute the campus itself. This classroom includes a broad range of ways we remember—instances of personal, collective, ancestral, speculative, and institutional approaches to memory. 

Featured song: A Tribe Called Red Ft. Hellnback - The Peoples\' Champ

An Indigenous Present: Conversation with Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter

In this episode I had the honor to sit down with artist Jeffrey Gibson joined by curator and co-editor of An Indigenous Present, Jenelle Porter. We were given space at SITE Santa Fe in Director Louis Grachos office to have a long and generative conversation while we celebrated the book's launch over Indian Market weekend. We talk about Jeff’s practice and his journey to this moment and the Artist shares the vulnerable, complicated, difficult and joyous path of choosing to be an Artist, offering reflection from what he has learned along the way, understanding how the practice and studio has evolved in the 20 some years of being a working Artist. We then dive in with both Jeff and Jenelle to speak on Jeff’s thought process behind An Indigenous Present, learning about the years of care and intention behind the project, which is, as Jeff reflects, an “Artist book about Artists”.  We round out our 2 plus hour chat with the excitement and work that has come with Jeffrey being named the artist to represent the U.S. at the 60th Venice Biennale. As we end our chat, both Jeff and Jenelle share important and practical insight on how to navigate the art worlds and art markets and Jeffrey reminds us all that “Artists do have the power to set precedence in institutions”. 

Featured song: SMOKE RINGS SHIMMERS ENDLESS BLUR by Laura Ortman 2023
Broken Boxes introduction song by India Sky
More about the publication: An Indigenous Present

Jeffrey Gibson:

Jeffrey Gibson’s work fuses his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and experience of living in Europe, Asia and the USA with references that span club culture, queer theory, fashion, politics, literature and art history. The artist’s multi-faceted practice incorporates painting, performance, sculpture, textiles and video, characterised by vibrant colour and pattern.

Jeffrey Gibson. Photo by Shayla Blatchford 2023

Gibson was born in 1972, Colorado, USA and he currently lives and works in Hudson Valley, New York.

The artist combines intricate indigenous artisanal handcraft – such as beadwork, leatherwork and quilting – with narratives of contemporary resistance in protest slogans and song lyrics. This “blend of confrontation and pageantry” is reinforced by what Felicia Feaster describes as a “sense of movement and performance as if these objects ... are costumes waiting for a dancer to inhabit them.” The artist harnesses the power of such materials and techniques to activate overlooked narratives, while embracing the presence of historically marginalised identities.

Gibson explains: “I am drawn to these materials because they acknowledge the global world. Historically, beads often came from Italy, the Czech Republic or Poland, and contemporary beads can also come from India, China and Japan. Jingles originated as the lids of tobacco and snuff tins, turned and used to adorn dresses, but now they are commercially made in places such as Taiwan. Metal studs also have trade references and originally may have come from the Spanish, but also have modern references to punk and DIY culture. It’s a continual mash-up.”

Acknowledging music as a key element in his experience of life as an artist, pop music became one of the primary points of reference in Gibson’s practice: musicians became his elders and lyrics became his mantras. Recent paintings synthesise geometric patterns inspired by indigenous American artefacts with the lyrics and psychedelic palette of disco music.

Solo exhibitions include ‘THE SPIRITS ARE LAUGHING’, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2022); ‘This Burning World’, Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, California (2022); ‘The Body Electric’, SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2022) and Frist Art Museum, Nashville (2023); ‘INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE’, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts (2021); ‘To Feel Myself Beloved on the Earth’, Benenson Center, Art Omi, Ghent, New York (2021); ‘When Fire is Applied to a Stone It Cracks’, Brooklyn Art Museum, Brooklyn, New York (2020); ‘The Anthropophagic Effect’, New Museum, New York City, New York (2019); ‘Like a Hammer’, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin (2019); Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington (2019); Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, Mississippi (2019); Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado (2018); ‘This Is the Day’, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas (2019); Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, New York (2018) and ‘Love Song’, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts (2013). For the Toronto Biennial 2022, Gibson presented an evolving installation featuring fifteen moveable stages at Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Other recent group exhibitions include ‘Dreamhome’, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2022); ‘Crafting America’, Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, Arkansas (2021); ‘Monuments Now’, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, New York (2020); ‘Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois (2020) and The Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, New York (2019). Works can be found in the collections of Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado; Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, New York, amongst others. Gibson is a recipient of numerous awards, notably a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2019), Joan Mitchell Foundation, Painters and Sculptors Grant (2015) and Creative Capital Award (2005).

Jenelle Porter:

Jenelle Porter is a curator and writer living in Los Angeles. Current and recent exhibitions include career surveys of Barbara T. Smith (ICA LA, 2023) and Kay Sekimachi (Berkeley Art Museum, 2021); Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design (ICA/Boston, 2019); and Mike Kelley: Timeless Painting (Mike Kelley Foundation and Hauser & Wirth, New York, 2019). She is co-editor of An Indigenous Present with artist Jeffrey Gibson (fall 2023), and a Viola Frey monograph (fall 2024).

From 2011 to 2015 Porter was Mannion Family Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, where she organized Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present and Figuring Color: Kathy Butterly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roy McMakin, Sue Williams, as well as monographic exhibitions of the work of Jeffrey Gibson, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Dianna Molzan, Christina Ramberg, Mary Reid Kelley, Arlene Shechet, and Erin Shirreff. Her exhibitions have twice been honored by the International Association of Art Critics. As Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2005–10), Porter organized Dance with Camera and Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay, the first museum surveys of Trisha Donnelly and Charline von Heyl, and numerous other projects.

From 1998–2001 Porter was curator at Artists Space, New York. She began her career in curatorial positions at both the Walker Art Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

She has authored books and essays including those on artists Polly Apfelbaum, Kathy Butterly, Viola Frey, Jeffrey Gibson, Sam Gilliam, Jay Heikes, Margaret Kilgallen, Liz Larner, Ruby Neri, and Matthew Ritchie, among others.

Long Con: Sterlin Harjo & Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ep 5

Long Con is a series of conversations between Director Sterlin Harjo and Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger about life, art, film, history and everything in between - informally shared from the lens of two contemporary Native American artists and friends actively participating in the record of the 21st century.

This episode is the fifth conversation between Harjo and Luger on Broken Boxes, and the artists dive right in, chatting about conspiracy theories, aliens, AI, Indigenous ceramic practices, the current state of the film industry and the writers strike, how creating sanctuary for producing big ideas is important and how everyone's creative process is different, so it’s about finding what your groove is. They also speak about fatherhood, the importance of storytelling, and of course the final season of Reservation Dogs - Season 3 - which premieres August 2nd, just days after this episode airs. Sterlin shares why he decided to complete the series after three seasons and reflects on his adventures of being a showrunner for a production that has changed the face of television for Indigenous people, and how making this work has, in turn, changed him. I am excited to see what comes next for our dear friend Sterlin. Broken Boxes will continue to produce these long conversations between the two artists and also we are so excited for Sterlin’s podcast The Cuts to activate again, please go listen to his podcast archive If you have not yet!

Sterlin Harjo is an award winning Seminole/Muscogee Creek filmmaker who has directed three feature films and a feature documentary all of which address the contemporary Native American lived experience. Harjo is a founding member of the five-member Native American comedy group, The 1491s. Sterlin’s latest project Reservation Dogs, is a television show created in collaboration with Taika Waititi, now available to watch on FX. 

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multidisciplinary artist who creates monumental and situational installations and durational performance and often initiates community participation and social collaboration. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota descent. 

Music featured: 25 and Wastin’ Time by Vincent Neil Emerson
Broken Boxes intro track by India Sky

Instructions For A Future: Conversation with Amaryllis R. Flowers

Nine years after our first conversation on Broken Boxes Podcast, I got to circle back with one of my besties, and the incredible artist now known as Amaryllis R. Flowers. Amaryllis works across materials from drawing to video, to performance to clay, creating a visual language paying attention to the spaces in-between categories, and revering those that know the trouble and pleasure there. It was a warm early summer day and we sat outside in the clover fields at the Rockefeller Brothers Estate in New York where Amaryllis was an artist in residence at the Pocantico Center. 

In our conversation, Amaryllis reflects on her journey in claiming and reframing what the term Artist can mean, how it can evolve. She gives us a glimpse into the adventures and miseducation of the formal art school path and how her experiences in academia have had lasting effects on her life and practice, both positive and negative. Amaryllis takes some time to speak vulnerably about mental health and how stigmatized certain diagnoses still are in our society. She shares her own path of healing over the past few years and provides tangible resources and support systems she has gleaned in finding wellness. We speak to her current experience of reclaiming her way as Artist, as she reforms a more balanced and generative relationship with her practice and the artworld. 

Amaryllis R. Flowers is a Queer Puerto Rican American Artist living and working in upstate New York. Raised between multiple cities and rural communities across America in a constantly shifting landscape, her practice explores themes of hybridity, mythology and sexuality. Drawing inspiration from visual systems of communication such as comics, cartoons, codices, Egyptian scrolls, sympathetic magic, Caribbean Surrealisms, and alchemical diagrams for transformation, Amaryllis  creates non-linear symbol sets that buck colonial notions of how to navigate and describe our world. Where taste has been constructed by these notions, she aims to create work of questionable taste, utilizing color and material classed as “femme” and casting it to the center of the circle. Illuminated with fluorescents, metallics, and iridescence, these images refuse a naturalizing aesthetic of the universe.

Amaryllis earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2019 and her BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in 2014. She is the recipient of the 2023 Pocantico Prize from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a 2022-2027 Joan Mitchell Fellow, and a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including at the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo Del Barrio (New York), The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), MoCADA (Brooklyn), and SOMArts (San Francisco). 

Artist Website
Featured Song: Goin’ Looney by Big Freedia

Relative Arts: Conversation with Korina Emmerich & Liana Shewey

In this episode of Broken Boxes we sit down with Relative Arts founders Korina Emmerich and Liana Shewey. We chat about their long and collaborative friendship, the powerful impact and also social harms that can often accompany radical collective advocacy within mutual aid and direct action work. We speak to the growing pains and collective strength of community organizing and how Korina and Liana recently launched Relative Arts with an urgency to create a contemporary Indigenous artist-run community shop, showroom, artist studio / education and event space in Manhattan's East Village. We speak to the community care that is woven throughout Relative Arts, how the space has become a destination stop for Indigenous folks in New York to find community, connect and bond over art and fashion and so much more. We hear how in their experience the most important advice for community organizing, movement building and revolution is not to look to the person taking up the most space but how it is in autonomy that we are able to find true intersection, to change and to hear other perspectives. The overall theme of our conversation echoing throughout is that “We are nothing without our community.”

Relative Arts is a new brick-and-mortar community space, open atelier, and shop displaying contemporary Indigenous fashion and design. Our mission is to provide a peer-run space in New York City to celebrate and foster the advancement of Indigenous futurism in fashion through representation and education. We are Indigenous owned and operated by Korina Emmerich (Puyallup) and Liana Shewey (Mvskoke).

Located at 367 E 10th St, NY, NY 10009, we are open Thursday - Sunday 12pm - 6pm. Visitors will be able to shop from a curated collection of over 20 Indigenous artists from across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico including EMME Studio, Copper Canoe Woman, Quw’utsun' Made, Mobilize, Ginew, Teton Trade Cloth, and more. 

www.relativeartsnyc.com
@relativeartsnyc

Korina Emmerich 

Artist and designer Korina Emmerich founded EMME Studio in 2015 and co-founded Relative Arts, NYC in 2023. Her colorful work celebrates her patrilineal Indigenous heritage from The Puyallup tribe while aligning art and design with education. With a strong focus on social and climate justice, Emmerich's artwork strives to expose and dismantle systems of oppression in the fashion industry and challenge colonial ways of thinking.

Her work has been featured in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Moma PS1, The Denver Art Museum, Vogue, Elle, Instyle, Fashion, Flare, New York Magazine, and more notable publications. She has presented her collections in Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week, Indigenous Fashion and Arts, Santa Fe Indian Market's Couture Runway Show, and New York Fashion Week.

She most recently co-founded the new atelier, gallery, showroom, and community space Relative Arts NYC. Located in the East Village, the space celebrates Indigenous and subversive art and fashion.

Liana Shewey

Liana Shewey (Mvskoke) is the Programming Director at Relative Arts. Shewey is a committed educator and community organizer who has led teach-ins and speak-outs to create awareness around missing and murdered Indigenous relatives (MMIR), the damaging effects of fossil fuels, and Indigenous liberation. She has also worked in music and event production for more than 15 years and brings those skills and relationships to Relative Arts to host events featuring artists of all forms, and to develop progressive educational programming.