Conversation

In an expansive conversation, Cree artist Kent Monkman joins Nathan Young, a member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, revisit some of the foundational narratives of the so-called United States of America, centering Indigenous figures, events, and narratives that have been erased or denied as part of the settler-colonial project.

Drawing on their own artistic, political, and scholarly work, including Monkman’s widely exhibited paintings that inject themselves into and disrupt the canon of Western European and American art history, and Young’s Nkwiluntàmën, a site-specific, sound-based installation in the landscape surrounding Pennsbury Manor, a reconstruction of the home of Pennsylvania founder William Penn. Their conversation reckons with the processes of colonial erasure, and the making and unmaking of history. Indigenous visual and sonic agency contends with these processes, the trope of “discovery,” and the complexities of historical and contemporary Indigenous experiences. VLC Borderlands Curatorial Fellow Larissa Nez (Diné) introduces and moderates the conversation to ask: How can artists and historians correct or produce a “correct” record of Indigenous histories? How can historical scholarship and artistic practice work in tandem to reenvision Native pasts and futures?

This program launches the VLC Forum 2024: Correct History* and includes a festive reception.