Native America: In Translation | Curatorial and Artist Talk

Join the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum for a conversation with exhibition curator, Wendy Red Star, and artists Marianne Nicolson and Koyoltzintli to discuss themes and approaches to indigenous visual sovereignty in reclaiming cultural identity. The conversation will be moderated by USF Curator of Public Art and Social Practice, Sarah Howard.

Native America: In Translation, curated by Wendy Red Star, considers the wide-ranging work of photographers and lens-based artists who pose challenging questions about land rights, identity and heritage, and histories of colonialism. With essential contributions from Rebecca Belmore and Jacqueline Cleveland, the exhibition and accompanying Aperture publication look into the historic, often fraught relationship between photography and Native representation, while also offering new perspectives by emerging artists who reimagine what it means to be a citizen in North America today.

Advance registration is required. Please register here.

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Wendy Red Star (born in Billings, Montana, 1981) is an Apsáalooke artist based in Portland, Oregon. She holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Saint Louis Art Museum; and IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe. Red Star guest edited Aperture magazine’s Fall 2020 issue, “Native America.”

Marianne Nicolson is an artist activist of the Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nations. She is trained in both traditional Kwakwaka’wakw forms and culture and contemporary gallery and museum-based practice. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1996), a Master of Fine Arts (2000) from the University of Victoria, as well as a Master of Arts (2005) in Linguistics and Anthropology and a PhD (2013) in Linguistics and Anthropology with a focus on space as expressed in the Kwak’wala language. Nicolson works as a Kwakwaka’wakw cultural researcher and historian, as well as an advocate for Indigenous land rights. Exhibitions include the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia; Vancouver Art Gallery; National Museum of the American Indian in New York; Nuit Blanche in Toronto, Ontario; Museum Arnhem, Netherlands; and many others.

Koyoltzintli (Karen Miranda Rivadeneira) was born in New York City, in 1983, and raised in both the United States and Ecuador. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts and holds a postgraduate degree for her studies in photography at the Danish School of Journalism. Nominated for Prix Pictet in 2019, her work has been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, the United Nations, and the Photographic Museum of Humanity, among others. Her first monograph Other Stories/Historias Bravas was published in 2017 by Autograph ABP. Her work was featured in the “Native America” issue of Aperture magazine in Fall 2020, and is included in Latinx Photography in the United States by Elizabeth Ferrer.

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Image Credit: Wendy Red Star, Hawate (One), from the series A Float for the Future, 2021; from Wendy Red Star: Delegation (Aperture, 2022). © Wendy Red Star, Courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters and Nicholas Knight

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