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Archives: Shows
Native Visual Sovereignty: A Reader on Art and Performance Book Launch with Candice Hopkins and special presentations by Spiderwoman Theater and Jeffrey Gibson (Movement) | Forge Project x OPEN ROOM
Join us for an evening of readings, performance screenings, and discussion on occasion of the launch of the new publication Native Visual Sovereignty: A Reader on Art and Performance.
With 48 contributors, newly commissioned essays and artist notes, 20 reprinted critical texts, and oral history interviews with leaders of the field, Native Visual Sovereignty is the first reader on contemporary Native art to use performance and performativity as its praxis. The book seeks to make the case that there is now a shift from sovereignty in a visual sense, to sovereignty in a performative sense. A reading by book editor, Candice Hopkins (Citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation), a conversation with Muriel Miguel (Rappahannock and Kuna) of the legendary Spiderwoman Theater, and a screening of DON’T MAKE ME OVER starring Arielle Twist (Nehiyaw [Cree]), the first theater work of Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw and Cherokee), are the basis of the evening.
The book takes its impetus from a modest yet significant document—a 1969 treatise named Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Progress, published by the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Each text, be it a script, a song, or a note, is positioned by the authors as a possible framework or idea for performance: as the texts make clear, all were intended to be tested on stage. It is the first known attempt to define “New Native Theater,” and with this, it sparked the contemporary Native theater movement. The treatise was published on the eve of the Self-Determination Era, initiated by another form of activist performance, the Indians of All Tribes occupation of Alcatraz Island in November 1969 for nineteen months. Their move, which was broadly covered in mainstream and alternative media, ushered in mainstream awareness for Native rights not just to land and water, but self-determined education, food justice, language, and culture. Little known is that many of the leaders of this groundshift, came to the movement having practiced radical street theater.
Native Visual Sovereignty is co-published by Dancing Foxes Press, in association with the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Forge Project; MacKenzie Art Gallery; and SITE SANTA FE on occasion of the touring exhibition Indian Theater: Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, curated by Hopkins and originating at the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College in 2023.
The publication will be available for purchase in-person on November 11 at Performance Space New York. They are additionally available online via Dancing Foxes Press.
Drew Kahu’āina Broderick and Lana Lopesi in dialogue (Relation) | Forge Project x OPEN ROOM
Drew Kahu’āina Broderick and Lana Lopesi discuss collaborative practice, intellectual genealogies and the complexities of being in relation across diverse and interrelated waters. Convened for the international Indigenous art criticism residency, Confluence, this conversation builds upon intimate, community-wide, and expansive sites of engagement.
Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick is an artist, curator, educator, and writer from Mōkapu, Kailua, Koʻolaupoko. Raised in a matriarchy on the windward side of Oʻahu, his work is guided by the multigenerational efforts of queer folk and Native Hawaiian women—especially his mother, aunties, and maternal grandmother—who have devoted their lives to art, culture, education, healing, and community in Hawaiʻi. Drew is a founding member of grassroots film initiative kekahi wahi (2020–) along with filmmaker Sancia Miala Shiba Nash. kekahi wahi is committed to documenting transformations across the Hawaiian archipelago and sharing stories of the greater Pacific through time-based media.
Lana Lopesi (Sāmoa) is a writer and academic from Tamaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Currently she works as an Assistant Professor in the department of Indigenous Race and Ethnic Studies, at the University of Oregon. There she teaches across her research areas of Pacific studies, Indigenous feminisms and contemporary art. Her research draws on Indigenous feminist thinking and focuses on Samoan diasporic subjectivity and specifically how Samoan moving image reveals distinct Samoan subjectivities made in relation. She is the author of False Divides, Bloody Woman, and Pacific Arts Aotearoa. Lana is co-editor of Towards a Grammar of Race: In Aotearoa New Zealand and Pacific Spaces: Translations and Transmutations.
a story, a river, a mirror, a map
a story, a river, a mirror, a map: Forge Project Reading Room opens with a celebration in the courtyard at Performance Space New York, with food from La Morada (BX), homemade salsas, and music by HEAVY PLEASURE, alongside karaoke, exchange, and a shared table to visit as part of Forge Project’s residency at Open Room in PSNY. Guided by a map of the Mahicannituck and where its tributaries meet the sea, a story, a river, a mirror, a map is similarly a space of exchange of distinct but connecting waters, narratives, and bodies of thought.
Theatrical
Organized and curated by Sarah Schulman, First Mondays prioritizes one of the great advantages of living in New York City: hearing new ideas as they are being created, long before they are published and on the shelves.
For five years, this free event has given audiences access to our most exciting established and emerging writers as they present new, unpublished work-in-progress. In a relaxed atmosphere, a vibrant community is being built as audience members, often writers and artists themselves, return every month to deepen their knowledge of contemporary literature as it is being born.
This year’s First Mondays features dynamic new work from playwrights, composers, novelists, poets, critics, biographers, scholars, memoirists, performance artists and beyond with well loved writers. This month features Karen Malpede, Phoebe Legere, and M Lamar.