Emily Johnson / Catalyst (NYC)
Umyuangvigkaq: PS122 Long Table and Durational Sewing Bee
Co-hosted with Emily Johnson/Catalyst and Ace Hotel New York
Umyuangvigkaq is “a place to gather ideas”. Let’s create a just and equitable world. Let’s spend some good time together doing so. Let’s chew our words, share them, listen. Let’s be okay when we don’t know. Let’s be supple and
brave in our questions and our findings.
We will stitch together a quilt of conversation, ideas, and fabrics. Here we will recognize indigenous people, artists, art methods, and audiences as we indigenize the performing arts and the world at large.
Come with ready hearts. Come all day or for a stitch. Every 75 minutes we’ll shift a conversation to a new critical topic engaging the intersections of the Indigenous with contemporary American culture. This durational Sewing Bee underpins a large-scale experiment in public engagement and sewing culminating in an all-night, outdoor performance event in 2017, Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars, created by Emily Johnson/Catalyst.
Click here to see a list of recommended readings shared by the provocateurs of the day.
Sun Jan 8 – 11:30am-6pm
at Ace Hotel New York,
20 West 29th Street, Mannahatta (Manhattan)
Conversations will be led by thinkers and practitioners around topics at designated times throughout the day:
11:30am Breakfast is served and Welcome to Country
12:00pm This is Lenapehoking: Countering Perceived Invisibility
1:30pm Indigenizing the Future: The Continuance of Aesthetic, Invention, Ceremony
3:00pm My Dad Gives Blueberries to Caribou He Hunts: Indigenous Process and Research as Ceremony
4:30pm Radical Love: Indigenous Artists and our Allies
This Long Table Durational Sewing Bee is open to all indigenous people, artists and allies. Don’t know if you’re an ally? Come discuss.
Emily Johnson/Catalyst’s Sewing Bee events support the upcoming Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars, a multi-year project dedicated to building an all-night, outdoor performance gathering. The work includes in equal measure: making quilts, performance, storytelling, song, ground and sky. It relies upon people coming together to voice intentions, witness, work, experience time, rest and imagine.
Set to premiere in 2017, this phase of the project focuses on building a series of 84 hand sewn quilts (4000 sq. ft.) to be used in the final presentation of the piece. The quilts are designed by textile artist Maggie Thompson, sewn by volunteers from across the country, and are imbued with responses and reactions to the discussions highlighted throughout each of the quilting events. Umyuangvigkaq is just one of many Sewing Bee events throughout the project. www.catalystdance.com
Ace Hotel New York reinvents the urban hotel for the people who make cities interesting. With a sense of curiosity and respect for the history and culture of New York City, the 12-story hotel lives in a historic, turn-of-the-century building in Midtown Manhattan. The space serves up engaged fashion retail, a Michelin-starred restaurant and eloquent, mischievous and interesting answers to the travel experience.
www.acehotel.com/newyork
Lee-Ann Tjunypa Buckskin is a Narungga, Wirangu, Wotjobaluk woman and is South Australia. Lee-Ann is well known throughout the Australian Indigenous and arts communities and has worked across many major Festivals and events within Australia including Adelaide Fringe, Adelaide and Brisbane Festivals. She has produced Blak Nite South Australia’s leading Indigenous Youth Arts Festival as part of the 2005, 07, 09 and 11 Come Out Festivals, The Australian Festival for Young People. Lee-Ann’s held a position for more than ten years with Carclew Youth Arts in Adelaide as Manager of the Community Program as well as the Aboriginal Arts Development Program. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from the University of South Australia. In 2005, she was awarded the prestigious internationally recognised Sidney Myer Facilitator Prize. The Prize recognises Lee-Ann’s tremendous contribution to Indigenous arts in this country. She is the recipient of two Ruby Awards in South Australia. She designed the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander War Memorial, for South Australia which was opened by the Governor General Quentin Bryce in Adelaide 10 November 2013. The project won the Ruby Award for Best Work. In 2016 she won the Geoff Crowhurst Memorial Ruby Award for her sustained contribution to the arts and community cultural development in South Australia. Lee-Ann is the newly appointed Deputy Chair of the Australia Council for the Arts. She is the Co-chair of Tarnanthi the Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Visual Arts Festival, Adelaide. Lee-Ann currently is the Executive, for Aboriginal Screen Strategy for the South Australian Film Corporation. Furthermore, she is also a member of the National Museum of Australia’s Aboriginal Advisory Committee.
Vicki Van Hout is of Dutch and Wiradjuri descent (with a few other cultures mixed in for good measure) and is a graduate of NAISDA Dance College (Australia’s premier Indigenous tertiary training institution) and the Martha Graham Sc. of Contemporary Dance NY, NYC. Van Hout returned to Australia after an invitation by Director Stephen Page to perform with Bangarra Dance Theatre, for the New Horizons Asian Tour of the groundbreaking ballet, Ochres (1996/7). Since returning from New York (almost 20 years to this day)Vicki has utilized her dance as a vehicle to explore other art forms including film and set design, as seen in her major works; Briwyant where she created a river of over 2,000 playing cards to emulate both her ancestral homeland country and the art of repetitious dot painting, Long Grass whereby Van Hout created another intricate set environment emulating the quick growing tall grasses of the Northern Territory, utilizing large scale live indigenous weaving techniques, crafted from contemporary materials and as Director/co designer of playwright Jane Harrison’s well-trodden Stolen, creating a readymade morphing Dreaming-scape from scraps of recycled cardboard. After over 30 years as a performer Vicki regards her inclusion in the historic Aboriginal opening of parliament, preceding the National Apology to the Stolen Generations in 2007, one of the most memorable highlights.
Born and raised on the Annette Island Indian Reserve, Sm Łoodm ’Nüüsm (Dr. Mique’l Dangeli) is of the Tsimshian Nation of Metlakatla, Alaska. She is a dancer, choreographer, curator, activist, and Assistant Professor of Alaska Native Studies at the University of Alaska Southeast. Her work focuses on Northwest Coast First Nations and Alaska Native visual and performing arts, art history, protocol, politics, sovereignty, language revitalization, and decolonization. Mique’l served for eight years as the Director of her community’s museum in Metlakatla. For the past thirteen years, she and her husband artist and carver Mike Dangeli (Nisga’a, Tsimshian, Tlingit, and Tsetsaut Nations) have share the leadership of Git Hayetsk, an internationally renowned Northwest Coast dance group who was recently featured performers at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. She is an artist-in-residence at the Scotiabank Dance Centre in Vancouver and a Protocol Consultant for the Indigenous Performing Arts Alliance in Toronto.
Karyn Recollet is an Assistant professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Karyn is an urban Cree, residing in the traditional territories of the Petun, Wendat, Mississauga’s of the New Credit, Dish with One Spoon treaty territory. Karyn’s research explores the various intersections of Indigenous artistic activations rooted in the multiple layered Indigenous territories that are urban spaces. Karyn’s focal points are choreographic fugitivity, Indigenous futurities, and decolonial love. Karyn’s publications include articles Glyphing Decolonial love, Gesturing Indigenous futurities, and has coedited alongside Eve Tuck, Native Feminist Texts (a special edition of English Journal). Karyn is currently working on a manuscript entitled Urban glyphs: fugitivities, futurities, and radical decolonial love.
Featured Image by Chris Cameron.