Contemporary Indigenous Arts Research Papers (original) (raw)

This is a story about images and their meaning. This is a story about stories and a story about beings. It is about pipes and pipelines. It is about oil and not about oil paintings. It is fragmented and disjointed. It is a needed... more

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- Native American Studies, Art History, Indigenous Studies, Metis Studies
- by Andrea L Ferber
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- Indigenous Studies, Contemporary Art, Printmaking, Contemporary Indigenous Arts

Pour la première fois, une publication en français invite le public à s’immerger dans un univers cinématographique aussi riche que varié et original. Cet ouvrage collectif sur les cinémas autochtones s’affranchit tout autant des frontières chronologiques, géographiques (que ce soit pour la provenance des articles publiés ou des sujets traités) que des genres afin de célébrer ensemble le pouvoir des créateur·trice·s cinématographiques autochtones d’hier, d’aujourd’hui et de demain !

Conocí a Rember Yahuarcani hace cinco años, cuando él tenía diecinueve y acababa de mudarse a Lima por primera vez sin otro recurso financiero que lo que podía ganar vendiendo sus pinturas. Autodidacta, descendiente por su abuela paterna del clan Aymenu del pueblo uitoto, se crió en Pebas, a orillas del Amazonas, donde cursó la primaria y la secundaria. Hoy día es uno de los jóvenes artistas plásticos más prometedores del Perú. Con trece exposiciones individuales, veintitrés exposiciones colectivas, ganador de la segunda Bienal intercontinental de arte indígena (Quito, 2008), y del primer Concurso de cuentos ilustrados Carlota Carvallo de Núñez (Lima, 2009), ha sabido entrar en espacios nunca antes abiertos a un indígena amazónico

This paper presents Tapiskwan, a project focused on developing design workshops for indigenous artisans that aim to encourage their empowerment by bridging tradition and innovation. Developed in partnership with members of the Atikamekw First Nation (Québec, Canada), this approach to design workshops is the result of a long-term commitment to community-based social innovation. Our design team has been collaborating with artisans, artists and community leaders since 2011 to address the challenge of producing crafts as a source of socioeconomic development. Our main activity has been the organization of intergenerational workshops to create contemporary products based on Atikamekw traditional iconography. Over the last four years, we developed an approach that motivates the participants and enhances their creativity, self-confidence and autonomy, and, at the same time, increases the participants' appreciation of their cultural heritage. This paper describes Tapiskwan's guiding principles, which could inspire similar initiatives within other indigenous communities. We suggest that such projects should be conceived as processes of collective discovery, in which designers and artisans learn together the challenges, opportunities and resources available, therefore aligning the intentions of several different stakeholders to the creation of a common vision.

- by Renata Leitao
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- Design, Product Design, Empowerment, Contemporary Indigenous Arts

This essay is a chapter in the exhibit catalogue for Bonnie Devine's exhibit "The Tecumseh Papers" , curated by Srimoyee Mitra, Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario. The essay situates Shawnee war chief Tecumseh within the Western Confederacy of Nations allied with Great Britain prior to, and during, the War of 1812. The essay focuses on various wampum belts delivered by the British to the member nations (formerly called tribes) of the Western Confederacy.

- by Alan Corbiere
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- Contemporary Indigenous Arts, War of 1812, Indigenous Warfare, Tecumseh
- by Andrea L Ferber
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- Art History, Indigenous Studies, Contemporary Art, Modern Art
- by Rosanna Raymond
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- Economics, Globalization, Indigeneity, Postcolonial Theatre

The early ethnological works of Alfred Métraux are analysed bearing in mind his first fieldwork trip to the Chiriguano, in 1929. The paper discusses personal, academic and professional features of Métraux’s ethnological experience, the nature of the 1929 trip and his concrete relationships with the Chiriguano groups and individuals. Next, we analyse his ideas on material culture as a privileged means of understanding the synthesis of Andean, Chaco and Amazonian cultural influences. Finally, the dilemmas and limitations of his analytical approach regarding Créole cultural influence and social and cultural change are discussed. [Key words: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, material culture, change.]
Se analiza la etnología temprana de Alfred Métraux a la luz de su primer viaje de campo a los chiriguanos, en 1929. Se discute el perfil personal, académico y profesional de Métraux, las peculiaridades de su trabajo de campo en 1929 y sus relaciones concretas con los indígenas chiriguanos en el terreno. Se examinan luego sus ideas sobre la cultura material como campo experimental privilegiado para rastrear procesos de síntesis de influencias culturales andinas, chaqueñas y amazónicas, así también sus dilemas y límites a la hora de interpretar el factor de la influencia criolla y el proceso de cambio social y cultural en un sentido amplio. [Palabras clave: Alfred Métraux, Chané, Chiriguano, cultura material, cambio.]

- by Diego Villar
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- Religion, Cultural History, Ethnohistory, Sociology
- by Mark Watson
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- Art History, Indigenous Studies, Contemporary Art, History and Memory
- by James Caruso
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- Textile and Fiber Art, Contemporary Indigenous Arts, Guatemalan Art

This presentation was written for a PhD course in the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba. It discusses Alfred Young Man's written contribution to the exhibition Indigena, by drawing on other Indigenous art critics.

- by Cathy Mattes
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- Contemporary Indigenous Arts

The project Mira! Contemporary Visual Arts of the Indigenous Peoples was born with the aim of bringing together the many world views of the native peoples of the immense pan-Amazonian region. The project Mira!, with the exhibition of 125 works of indigenous artists (paintings, sculptures, digital art), seeks to show to the public that, alongside the aesthetics of the Western world, there are other ones that have arisen from other environments. Fifty four indigenous artists from Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are participating in the Mira! Exhibition. Some of these artists were invited to expose their thoughts and to debate about their visions in a seminar that took place in Belo Horizonte in June 2013, when Mira! was inaugurated.

- by Revista Mundo Amazónico
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- Anthropology, Contemporary Indigenous Arts, Visual Arts, Antropología

After introducing the Smithsonian's collection of Masferré’s photographs, and the traveling exhibition drawn from it and shown in Madrid in 1998, this paper examines that collection for keys to interpreting this photographer's work. Though Masferré’s photography is inextricably bound to this distinctive group of highland Philippine tribal peoples, Masferré himself was both linked to, and somewhat marginalized from, the cultures he depicted. His own story reflects many impinging foreign circumstances and historical intrusions that seem absent from the highland Luzon peoples that he chose to portray.

- by Paul Michael Taylor
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- Visual Anthropology, Indigenous Studies, Photography, Philippines

A summation of some of the themes
that were raised in a presentation held at the Evergreen
gallery on August 8, 2017. The speakers included the
artists who led each of the workshops—Jim Denomie
(painting,) Denise Wallace (jewelry,) Nora Naranjo
Morse (clay,) Marwin Begaye (printing), Larry McNeil
(photography), Dan Friday (glass), and Dempsey
Bob (carving). In addition, other speakers included
Linley Logan, who co-curated the exhibition that
accompanied the gathering; Marques Marzan, who
spoke about the role of Hawaiian artists at these
gatherings; June Grant and Sandy Adsett reflected on
the Māori role in the origination and success of these
ongoing events; Trudy Marcellay, who reflected on
her family’s participation and the key role played by
her late mother, Hazel Pete, in leading the weaving
workshop at the previous gathering; and, of course,
Lillian Pitt, who shared her anecdote of how her
engagement with the Māori eventually inspired Tina
Kuckkahn-Miller to plan a gathering at the Longhouse
in 2001.

- by Mario A Caro
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- Native American Studies, Indigenous Studies, Contemporary Art, Native American

Nesta resenha, busco descrever e analisar a exposição ReAntropofagia, ocorrida no Centro de Artes da UFF (Niterói) de 24 de abril a 26 de maio de 2019, assim como cada uma das obras ali presentes. Trata-se da primeira exposição em solo... more

- by Daniel Dinato
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- Contemporary Indigenous Arts, Antropología
- by María Regina Firmino-Castillo and +1
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- Art, Indigenous Knowledge, Sculpture, Indigenous artists
- by Dylan AT Miner
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- Indigenous Studies, Indigenous Peoples, Contemporary Indigenous Arts, Mexico
- by Andrea L Ferber
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- Native American Studies, Art History, Indigenous Studies, Contemporary Art

Depuis plusieurs décennies, les peuples autochtones de par le monde exigent le respect de leur droit à l’autoreprésentation et à l’expression directe, selon leurs propres termes. L'histoire longue et tumultueuse de la représentation des peuples autochtones à l’écran est l’histoire d’un art en mouvement et d’une lutte pour reconquérir une identité, pour filmer et diffuser ses propres histoires afin de rétablir des vérités et de s’octroyer le droit à l’imagination créative et innovante. "Cinéastes (autochtones) : La souveraineté culturelle en action" est le premier livre francophone à s’intéresser de manière globale et transversale à la façon dont les peuples autochtones à travers le monde ont été représentés à l’écran (des origines du cinéma à nos jours) et surtout à démontrer à quel point l’autoreprésentation et l’expression audiovisuelle des artistes autochtones sont essentielles afin de soutenir leur souveraineté culturelle.

Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye was on display between 22 August and 12 October 2008 at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. With approximately 100 examples of Emily Kame Kngwarreye works, the exhibition gives an overview of the almost 3000 artworks Emily painted in the last eight years of her life. The exhibition begins with a film and leads the visitor through various phases of her artworks to the back room, which contextualises her art practice, back through the phases to the film room at the beginning.

- by Elizabeth "Betsy" S . Hawley
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- Contemporary Art, Gender, Feminism, Contemporary Indigenous Arts
- by Matthew Ryan Smith
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- Indigenous Studies, Museum Studies, Canadian History, Canadian art
- by Cathy Mattes
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- Contemporary Indigenous Arts

This paper addresses the work of the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto in collaboration with members of the Huni Kuin people, creating art installations in Brazil, Spain and Austria. It deals with the arrival of Brazilian Indians both into the urban circuit of ayahuasca and into art institutions. These new forms of shamanism and ayahuasca circulate through national and international urban networks showing the great vigor and adaptability of indigenous contemporary traditions. On the other hand, they raise controversial issues, linked to the respect of collective and ancient intellectual property and to the stereotyped representation of Others. Further, the consumption of ayahuasca in Brazil is limited to certain settings and abroad is often illegal. It will be argued that both the expansion of ayahuasca use and the insertion of indigenous arts in museums and galleries, point to a creative and fertile intercultural dialogue, but also raise issues about cultural “authenticity,” appropriation, and commodification.

- by Ilana Goldstein
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- Art History, Anthropology Of Art, Sociology of Arts, History of Art
- by Matthew Ryan Smith
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- Art History, Art Theory, Contemporary Art, Canadian art

Parody has been a strategy within cultural production since the ancient Greeks: “paraodia” referred to a song sung alongside the main narrative thread of a dramatic work; the prefix “para-” also signifies “against.” In A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-century Art Forms, Linda Hutcheon offers this core definition: parody is “a form of repetition with ironic critical distance, marking difference rather than similarity … [with] tension between the potentially conservative effect of repetition and the potentially revolutionary impact of difference” (xii). This and other aspects of Hutcheon’s theory guide my interpretations of works by three contemporary artists working in Canada: Sybil Lamb’s novel I’ve Got a Time Bomb; Ursula Johnson’s (Mi’kmaq) three-part exhibition Mi’kwite’tmn (Do You Remember); and Kent Monkman’s (Cree and Irish) exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience.
I argue that the presence of parodic elements in these artists’ works enables them to do two things: to claim spaces that enable recognition of their subject positions, and to critique an aspect of hegemonic norms in contemporary society. I read Lamb’s novel as a critique of the heteronormative gender binary via parody of the picaresque genre and of heteronormative discourse/language. Certain pieces in Monkman’s exhibition parody the epistemological and display strategies of traditional Eurocentric anthropological museums and archives, as can Johnson’s work; her sculptural-installations may also be read as parodying the traditions of Mi’kmaw basket-making. The work of both artists critiques colonial narratives that sought (and may still seek) to denigrate and/or erase Indigenous peoples; such narratives of cultural genocide were both tacitly and directly propagated by museums. I analyze these three artists’ works, considering key features of parody (ambiguity; irony and “double-voicedness”; trans-contextualization; and humour), and their effects (defamiliarization; ontological instability; complicity; and laughter). Parody challenges the post-structuralist emphasis on the “decoder,” (viewer/reader) reinstating the “encoder” (artist/author) as agent. Decoders recognize their complicity within the context of the hegemonic narrative, whether the heteronormative gender binary or colonialism, and may come to shift perception – as per Hutcheon’s “potentially revolutionary impact.”

- by Jane Affleck
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- Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Museum Studies, Canadian History
- by Andrzej Rozwadowski
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- Indigenous Studies, Cultural Heritage, Contemporary Art, Visual Culture

“La identidad está en el sentimiento y el pensamiento”1. Con estas palabras Rember Yahuarcani, pintor de 22 años, nacido a orillas del río Amazonas en el Perú, explica la fuerza de convicción que lo lleva a narrar por medio de la pintura las historias antiguas que escuchó de su abuela paterna. Proveniente de Pebas, cerca de la frontera con Colombia y Brasil, Rember es el producto del mestizaje entre los grupos étnicos y las nacionalidades del lugar. Uitotos, Cocamas, Tikunas, colombianos, brasileños y peruanos, todos estos ancestros convergen en él. Su pintura también materializa esta confluencia de vidas y culturas arrojadas por la historia a lo largo del gran río que hoy las une. De su abuela materna, concibió el deseo de contar la memoria de los Aymenu, un clan uitoto2 originario de la Chorrera en el Caquetá Colombiano, que fue desplazado hacia el Perú en los tiempos del caucho, bajo el mando de la Casa Arana3.

- by luisa belaunde
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- Peruvian History, Contemporary Indigenous Arts, Amazonian Ethnology, Uitoto

Under capitalism, a hierarchical system of organizing individual and societal time, we even name our non-working time as " free time. " Accordingly, we understand free time as those intervals of time spent—itself a capitalist term for exchange—without monetary remuneration. As artists and cultural workers, much of our time is unpaid, even if nowhere near free time. Under capitalism, time is linear and moves forward in a developmentalist and unidirectional manner. For all intents and purposes, how we live our lives— whether Indigenous, settler, or arrivant—has been colonized by temporal and societal mechanisms. We envision that time is precious, not because it is fleeting or because our human-to-human and human-to-non-human relationships are essential; rather, time is precious because it has become monetized.

- by Dylan AT Miner
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- Critical Theory, Contemporary Art, Capitalism, Contemporary Indigenous Arts

Indigenous art is inherently political. As Anishinaabe curator Wanda Nanibush (2014) recently stated, “Our art forms are never separate from our political forms.” Indigenous art thus occupies a unique space within settler colonialism: both as a site for articulating Indigenous resistance and resurgence, and also as a creative praxis that often reinscribes indigeneity within aesthetic and commodity forms that circulate in the capitalist art market. Against colonial erasure, Indigenous art marks the space of a returned and enduring presence. But this presence is complicated by its fraught relationality to the persistence of settler colonialism, which always threatens to reappropriate, assimilate, subsume/consume and repress Indigenous voicings and visuality, their forms and aesthetics, within its hegemonic logic of domination. Indigenous art disrupts colonial hegemony by fracturing the sensible architecture of experience that is constitutive of the aesthetic regime itself - the normative order, or ‘distribution of the sensible’ - that frames both political and artistic potentialities, as such.

- by Jarrett Martineau
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- Critical Theory, Indigenous Studies, Indigenous Politics, Colonialism

From "Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast," edited by Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse and Aldona Jonaitis

[Book chapter:] Pp. 22-23 (+ integrated photo credits, p. 144) in: "Visual Art" ed. by Dr. Hilda Soemantri [vol. 7 in series:] "Indonesian Heritage" (Sian Jay, General Editor). Singapore & Jakarta: Editions Didier Millet. 1998.
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In traditional societies of Indonesia, there is little or no art for art's sake. Instead, we can say that beauty (aesthetics) follows function, because the aesthetic quality of an object helps it carry out its function. Traditional artists from throughout Indonesia have imbued functional objects - those made for purposes other than being aesthetically pleasing - with aesthetic value. Yet it is difficult to identify any traditional Indonesian object that was made solely as 'art ', that is: to elicit an aesthetic response.
Indonesia 's traditional artworks often embody remarkable aesthetic uses and modifications of materials, and today many are recognised as great works of art with high art-market values. Yet, deciding whether particular objects are 'works of art' (let alone separating 'art' from 'craft') is only problematic for art markets or museums. These questions do not correspond to the thinking that originally created the objects, and these distinctions have never been important to the artists.
Throughout Indonesia, we find strong emphasis on the divinely regulated or moral aspects of aesthetics and the notion that violation of these canons will negate the social function of the object. Rather than creating a functional object then adding decorations, the maker includes the decorations as fundamental elements of an object - the absence of which would impair its ability to function.

- by Paul Michael Taylor
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- Aesthetics, Indigenous Studies, Indonesian Studies, Indonesia

The Philippine Exposition was held in Madrid in 1887 with the aim of increasing commercial and economic relation between the archipelago and the metropolis, but also with the objective of showing its indigenous population to the Spaniards. In this sense, one of the exposition sections was devoted to the fine arts of the Philippines. Assessment of artistic quality of works of art exhibited was the subject of very disparate interpretations. For conservative Spanish critics -and even for some liberals-, the low level of the woodcarvings was presented as a consequence of the inhrerent Filipinos abilities of the Filipinos, and this circumstance was explained exclusively in ethnic terms. However, for some liberal Spanish critics and, above all, for members of the Filipino intellectual elite -the ilustrados-, the responsibility for this artistic underdevelopment lay with the Spanish colonial system, and more specifically with the Spanish regular clergy, whose educational strategy was basically aimed at the repression of Filipino intellect.

- by Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez
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- History, Self and Identity, Southeast Asian Studies, Social Identity
- by Els Lagrou
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- Contemporary Art, Contemporary Indigenous Arts, Amazonian Ethnology

This research explores the role of Anishinabe photographs as distinct material things, in Anishinabeg memory production. Through the materialization and transformation of six (6) photographs of her ancestors, the author as an Anishinabekwe (Ojibwe) artist/researcher, draws upon performative and embodied aspects of Anishinabeg ways of knowing, emphasizing the agency of the materials worked with in the process of meaning-making. Research findings stress the importance of conceptualizing Anishinabeg memory as a visceral, relational, intuitive, creative, and sensorial experience to strengthening relationships to the ancestral past, now and into the future. By locating Anishinabeg photographs as distinct Indigenous things—things that can be worked with as opposed to simply " read " — the author transcends ontological and methodological limitations often associated with photographs in order to trace or " stitch " through the different relationships between actuants made visible, sensible and knowable through a material and phenomenological oriented approach that is informed her identity and cultural teachings.

An illustrated booklet on Judy Watson's evocative artwork along the path beside Kingsford Smith Drive: the key artery of transport between Brisbane's port and Airport and the CBD. This booklet includes numerous women's biographies by Professor Kay Saunders, Gaja Kerry Charlton and other writers, and a historical essay by Ray Kerkhove about the Indigenous history of the area.

- by ray kerkhove and +1
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- Indigenous or Aboriginal Studies, Women's Studies, Road Transport, Aboriginal History in Australia