CURATOR BIO

Christopher Green is a writer and art historian based in New York. His research and writing focus on modern and contemporary Indigenous art and primitivisms of the historic and the neo-avant-garde. His criticism, essays, and reviews have appeared in Aperture, Art in America, Frieze, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other publications, and he has contributed catalog essays to the Heard Museum, New Museum, Artists Space, the James Gallery. His scholarly research has been published in ARTMargins, Winterthur Portfolio, ab-Original, and BC Studies, and in 2019 he co-edited issue 11 of SHIFT: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, “BLOOD AND EARTH AND SOIL. His research has been supported by the Dedalus Foundation, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, the International Council for Canadian Studies, the Sealaska Heritage Institute, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He holds a PhD from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of art history at the University of North Texas.

ARTIST BIOS

Demian DinéYazhi´ (born 1983) is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulative, exploitative, and supremacist nature of hetero cis gender communities post colonization. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center its politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land they occupies and refuses to rightfully give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail. @heterogeneoushomosexual

Nicholas Galanin (b. 1979) Tlingit/Unangax̂/Multi-Disciplinary Artist Nicholas Galanin’s work engages contemporary culture from his perspective rooted in connection to land. He embeds incisive observation into his work, investigating intersections of culture and concept in form, image and sound. Galanin's works embody critical thought as vessels of knowledge, culture and technology - inherently political, generous, unflinching, and poetic. Galanin engages past, present and future to expose intentionally obscured collective memory and barriers to the acquisition of knowledge. His works critique commodification of culture, while contributing to the continuum of Tlingit art. Galanin employs materials and processes that expand dialogue on Indigenous artistic production, and how culture can be carried. His work is in numerous public and private collections and exhibited worldwide. Galanin apprenticed with master carvers, earned his BFA at London Guildhall University, and his MFA at Massey University, he lives and works with his family in Sitka, Alaska.

Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University, Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, and a 2019 Trudeau Scholar. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video & sound installations. Devin Ronneberg is a multidisciplinary artist born, raised, and living in Los Angeles, working primarily in sculpture, sound, image-making, networking, engineering, and computational media, his work is currently focused on the unseen implications of emergent technologies and artificial intelligence, information control and collection, and the radiation of invisible forces. Ronneberg’s work has most recently exhibited at MoCNA, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Imaginenative 2019. Ronneberg co-founded the Los Angeles underground imprint Private Selection Records, and produces, djs, and performs live under the Aerial moniker. He holds a BFA in music technology from California Institute of the Arts and is an experimental aircraft designer / builder at Berkut Engineering.

Alan Michelson is an internationally recognized New York-based artist, curator, writer, lecturer and Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River. For over thirty years, he has been a leading practitioner of a socially engaged, critically aware, site-specific art grounded in local context and informed by the retrieval of repressed histories. Recent exhibitions include Wolf Nation, Whitney Museum of American Art, Volume 0, Zuecca Projects, Venice, and Citizenship: A Practice of Society, MCA Denver. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. His essays have recently appeared in Frieze and October. Public art is also part of his diverse practice, and Mantle, his large-scale monument honoring Virginia’s Indian nations was dedicated at the capitol in Richmond in 2018. Michelson is co-founder and co-curator, with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, of the groundbreaking Indigenous New York series.

New Red Order (NRO) is a public secret society with a rotating and expanding cast, facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys. Working with an interdisciplinary network of Informants, the NRO co-produces video, performance, and installation works that confront desires for Indigeneity and obstacles to Indigenous growth and agency. New Red Order has exhibited work at the Whitney Biennial 2019; Toronto Biennial 2019; Artists Space; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; among other institutions.

Unicorn Riot is a decentralized, educational 501(c)(3) non-profit media organization of artists and journalists. Their work is dedicated to exposing root causes of dynamic social and environmental issues through amplifying stories and exploring sustainable alternatives in today’s globalized world. Born from the Internet in 2015, their commercial-free platform operates non-hierarchically, independent of corporate or government control. Unicorn Riot spans across multiple cities including Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Durban, South Africa.

Haisla artist Lyle Wilson was born in 1955 in the community of Kitamaat Village. The name Kitamaat means “People of the Snow,” and Lyle’s exposure to his cultural roots nurtured a conscious appreciation of Haisla art and its importance in his cultural traditions. He attended the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr College of Art and Design, from which he graduated with a diploma in printmaking in 1986. Lyle’s graphic works have since been exhibited broadly in Canada and the United States. In 1987, Lyle collaborated with the UBC Museum of Anthropology’s graphic designer, Bill McLennan, on the image-recovery project The Transforming Image. He was subsequently involved in the Native Longhouse Project, for which six longhouses, representing six different tribal groups and designed to respect historical architectural forms, were installed in the Grand Hall of the Canadian Museum of History (formerly the Canadian Museum of Civilization). In the decades since then, Lyle has continued to create stunning works of art inspired by his cultural heritage. He has since expanded his repertoire to include wood carvings and jewelry. Lyle also became the first Northwest Coast artist to have his work collected by the Canada Council Art Bank Collection in Ottawa, Ontario. Today Lyle’s work can be found in prominent public, corporate, and private collections in Canada, Europe, and Asia.