Natalie Diaz describes the horizon as, “a place of perceptual exchange … a width of a line … a wilderness. […] Its immeasurability, the largeness of its perspective and sensuality, have been things non-Indigenous people have felt the need and fear to try and contain with a boundary, a line marking up and down, light and day, eventually all meaning good or bad.” Together artist Maria Hupfield and poet Natalie Diaz will present a live interdisciplinary work-in-progress based on language, movement, sound, and identities as Indigenous women — Anishinaabek (Ontario, Canada) and Mojave (Arizona, US) respectively — to pose horizons as impossibility and ask whether a thing which is impossible can be possible. Diaz’s writing focuses on social justice issues and her Mojave and Latina heritage. Hupfield’s hand-sewn industrial felt creations are multidimensional; further activated in live performance and video they function as radical forms of collaboration, craft, and Indigenous futurity.

Meet us in the horizon.

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave, an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe and a 2018 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. Diaz’s poems and essays are published in Narrative Magazine, Guernica, Poetry Magazine, the New Republic, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner. A Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow, she was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, and a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. She splits her time between the East Coast and Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she works to revitalize the Mojave language.

Maria Hupfield is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist and member of the Anishinaabek Nation from Wasauksing First Nation, in Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada. She is a recipient of the 2018 Mid-career Award in Visual Arts, Hnatyshyn Foundation. Her first major traveling solo exhibition The One Who Keeps on Giving opened the thirtieth anniversary season of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto in partnership with Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal; Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, Halifax; and Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris. Her work was presented in Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, and recently in New York at BRIC, The Museum of Arts and Design, Minus Space, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She is co-owner of Native Art Department International with Jason Lujan and is the 2018 ISCP Indigenous Artist in Resident in Brooklyn. Hupfield has an upcoming solo at The Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, in December 2019 and is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau in Montreal.