News

The Vera List Center Expands Support for Indigenous Artists with the Inaugural Borderlands Fellowship

New School News, March 4, 2021

Carolina Caycedo’s acclaimed artworks, which include her “Water Portraits” series, and her “Cosmotarrayas” series of vibrant hanging sculptures made from fishing nets, both inspire and challenge audiences to think of water not simply as a mineral or renewable resource, but as a living entity with a soul. Maria Hupfield’s recent exhibition at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, featured the gallery as a site for bodies filled with ongoing live performance art, and a range of pieces made using industrial felt, an approach that strips away essentialist readings to focus on Indigenous art as contemporary, inventive, living, and relevant to the present moment!

Recently, Caycedo and Hupfield were named Borderlands Fellows, a new Fellowship presented in partnership between the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University. The Fellowship supports research projects that create communities across different geographical, cultural, and political landscapes, and will focus on the relevance of place, thus seeking to explore and apply an Indigenous lens to reflect on the topic of borderlands.