History Is Present: A Conversation with Alan Michelson and Chrissie Iles

For more than thirty years, New York–based artist Alan Michelson has produced evocative, influential works that excavate colonial histories of invasion and eviction. A Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, Michelson uses photography, painting, video, and installation to create dynamic spaces of visual and auditory immersion. In this discussion, Michelson sits down with Chrissie Iles—who cocurated his 2019 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art—to discuss his career and the power of contemporary Indigenous art.

In a series of public programs that accompany the fall issue of Aperture magazine, “Native America,” photographers, historians, and writers discuss the historical relationships between and new perspectives on photography and Native representation.

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, 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.

Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her curating, collection-building, and research is focused on decentering the white subject in contemporary American art, particularly in time-based, moving-image work. She is a member of the graduate committee at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; faculty member at the School of Visual Arts; member of the integrated media arts advisory board at Hunter College; and professor at Columbia University. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in art history by her alma mater, the University of Bristol, England, in 2015. 

Image: Alan Michelson, Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer), 2018. HD video and bonded stone Houdon replica bust, with sound by members of the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. Courtesy the artist

Lead support of the “Native America” issue of Aperture magazine is provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Henry Luce Foundation. Further generous support is provided by the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Significant support of Aperture magazine is provided by The Kanakia Foundation. Additional lead support is provided by Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović.