Sunday, March 25, 2018
1 - 3 PM
The High Line - 14th Street Passage
(Between W. 13 & W. 14)
Rain location: EFA Project Space
Please RSVP to projectspace@efanyc.org.
Ursula Johnson invites Tuscarora singer Jennifer Kreisberg and Brooklyn-based violinist Laura Ortman to collaborate and create a song from and for the land. Ke’tapekiaq Ma’qimikew: The Land Sings is a series of ongoing performances or “visitations” inspired by Indigenous song lines—singing the land—as a navigational and relational practice. For this iteration Johnson and Ortman will use duration performance, song, violin and drum to enact their relations and responsibility to the land and waters of Lenapehoking / New York. Sited on The High Line, an elevated greenway built on a repurposed rail line, the New York visitation highlights the way humans have impacted the landscape, displacing the voices of Indigenous peoples.
PARTICIPANTS
Ursula Johnson is the winner of the 2017 Sobey Art Award. She is an interdisciplinary artist and an enrolled member of the Eskasoni First Nation Mi’kmaq Community on Cape Breton Island based out of Dartmouth NS. Active in Mi’kmaw language revitalization and descendent from a long line of esteemed basketmakers, her nationally touring solo show Mi'kwite'tmn (Do You Remember) considers the consumption of traditional knowledge within colonial institutions. Johnson was awarded The Hnatyshyn Foundation Reveal Indigenous Art Award 2017.
Jennifer Kriesberg (Tuscarora, North Carolina) comes from four generations of Seven Singing Sisters through the maternal line. Kreisberg opened the Women’s March in Washington DC. She is an accomplished singer, composer, producer, teacher, activist and member of the critically acclaimed Native women's trio Ulali. Frequently called upon to guest lecture and conduct vocal workshops throughout the United States and Canada, Kreisberg has worked in film and television and toured extensively internationally. Performance venues include Carnegie Hall, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, The Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American Indian, The Olympics, and elsewhere.
An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Laura 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 Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless venues in the US, Canada, and Europe. Ortman founded the Coast Orchestra in 2008, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble performing a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American cast. She is the recipient of the Jerome Foundation Fellowship 2017, Art Matters 2016, Native Arts and Cultural Foundation Fellowship 2016, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Resident 2015 and the 2014/15 Rauschenberg Residency.
This event takes place in conjunction with #callresponse (March 23 - May 5, 2018).
