Indigenous New York, Critically Speaking presents key findings of a day-long colloquium that focuses on newly commissioned texts by nine writers of different backgrounds. This is the second of three colloquia that ground the research initiative Indigenous New York, which has been developed by the Vera List Center in collaboration with artist Alan Michelson (Mohawk) and in consultation with artist Jackson Polys (Tlingit). The series facilitates collaborations and exchanges among contemporary curators, artists, critics and scholars of Native American, First Nations, and Indigenous descent and their non-indigenous colleagues that focus on indigeneity and the legacy of colonialism and position the local as evidence of concerns shared globally.

The first of this series in October 2016, Indigenous New York, Curatorially Speaking examined four key inquiries: Indigenous and Non-indigenous Epistemologies and Methodologies; the Non-colonial Museum; Challenges of Collaborative Curation; and the Growing Indigenization of International art. Building on the success of the first colloquium, the second colloquium examines how a fuller consideration of indigenous creative production might reconfigure regimes of critical writing. To this end, the following topics are addressed through the newly commissioned writings as well as the public presentations that can now be viewed on our Vimeo.

Land Writes — Citing Territory
Cheyanne Turions: (Settler and Indigenous Ancestry), Independent Curator, Artistic Director of Trinity Square Video and Director of No Reading After the Internet
Sadia Shirazi: Independent Curator, Writer and Architect. Ph.D. student in Art History and Visual Studies, Cornell University

Seeing Red: Invisibility and Opacity 
Crystal Migwans (Anishinaabe), Ph.D. student in Art History, Columbia University
Anne Spice (Tlingit), Ph.D. student in Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center, New York
Randy Kennedy: Journalist, The New York Times

Resistance, Resurgence, Collective Practice 
Karyn Recollet: (Urban Cree), Ph.D., Associate Professor, Women & Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto
David Levi Strauss: Scholar, Writer, Critic; Chair of the MFA Art Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, New York

Unsettling Narratives
Jolene Rickard: (Tuscarora), Ph.D., Director, American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program; Associate Professor, Departments of History of Art / Visual Studies and Art Department, Cornell University
Hrag Vartanian: Editor-in-chief, Hyperallergic

Their writings, along with a new text by Richard William Hill (Cree), are available in the catalogue here.

A festive reception follows the presentations.

Indigenous New York is supported, in part, by the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, members of the Vera List Center Advisory Committee, and is part of the Vera List Center’s 2015-2017 curatorial programs on Post Democracy.