Thirza Cuthand, 2013-2021, digital video
Plains Cree/Scots artist Thirza Cuthand explores queer sexuality, Indigenous identity, and forms of personal and collective crisis in her defiantly DIY videos, performances, and autobiographical writings. For this program, Cuthand will appear in person to introduce and discuss her "NDN Survival Trilogy,” a recent series of videos that address the impacts of colonialism, resource extraction, and climate change through the artist’s distinctly intimate and irreverent voice.
Presented in conjunction with Northwestern’s Art, Theory and Practice department, the Climate Crisis and Media Arts working group, and One Book One Northwestern.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, November 17, 7:00pmat BLOCK CINEMA
BLOCK MUSEUM OF ART
40 ARTS CIRCLE DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL, 60208
Sky Hopinka: Channeling Indigenous Histories
The multidimensional work of artist Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) employs video, photography, music, and poetry as different pathways approaching Indigenous experience. In his two-channel video installation, Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer (2019) – on view alongside Who Says, Who Shows, What Counts: Thinking about History with The Block’s Collection – image, sound, and text together tease out legacies of colonial oppression and Native resistance. In this program, Hopinka will discuss the many facets of his practice, joined in conversation by Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts Michael Metzger.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, November 10, 6:00pmat BLOCK CINEMA
BLOCK MUSEUM OF ART
40 ARTS CIRCLE DR
EVANSTON, IL 60208
Visiting Artist Talk: Lauren Bon
Lauren Bon is an environmental artist from Los Angeles, CA. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Some of her works include: Not A Cornfield, which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in downtown Los Angeles into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle; 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Her studio’s current work, Bending the River Back into the City, aims to utilize Los Angeles’ first private water right to deliver 106-acre feet of water annually from the LA River to over 50 acres of land in the historic core of downtown LA. This model can be replicated to regenerate the 52-mile LA River, reconnect it to its floodplain and form a citizens’ utility.
To attend this virtual event, please contact sara.medlin@northwestern.edu.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Thursday, April 22, 5:00pmat ZOOM MEETING
Visiting Artist Talk: Christopher Lew
CHRISTOPHER Y. LEW is the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lew oversees the emerging artist program at the Museum and was co-curator of the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Working with Ambika Trasi, he is co-curator of Salman Toor: How Will I Know. Lew has also organized Pope.L: Choir (2019), Kevin Beasley: A view of a landscape (2018), and mounted the first US solo exhibitions for Sophia Al-Maria, Rachel Rose, and Jared Madere. He also organized Lucy Dodd’s large-scale installation that was part of the exhibition Open Plan (2016) and was co-curator of the group show Mirror Cells (2016). Prior to joining the Whitney, he was Assistant Curator at MoMA PS1 and organized numerous exhibitions there. Lew has contributed to several publications including Art AsiaPacific, Art Journal, Bomb, Huffington Post, and Mousse.
To attend this talk, please contact Sara Medlin.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Wednesday, May 12, 12:00pmat ZOOM MEETING
Visiting Artist Talk: Ligia Lewis
Ligia Lewis (b. 1983 Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) works as a choreographer, director, dancer, and performer. Through choreography and an embodied practice, she develops expressive concepts that give form to movements, speech, affects, thoughts, relations, utterances, and the bodies that hold them. Her choreographic work slides between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Held together by the logic of interdependence, disorder, and play, she creates space(s) for the emergent and the indeterminate while tending to the mundane. In her work sonic and visual metaphors meet the body, materializing the enigmatic, the poetic, and the dissonant.
Her recent performance trilogy includes Water Will (in Melody) (2018), a gothic tale set in black and white; minor matter (2016), a poetic work illuminated by red; and Sorrow Swag (2014), presented in a saturated blue. Her other works include: Sensation 1/This Interior (High Line Commission, 2019); so something happened, get over it; no, nothing happened, get with it (Jaou Tunis, 2018); Melancholy: A White Mellow Drama (Flax Fahrenheit, Palais de Tokyo, 2015); $$$ (Tanz im August, 2012); and Sensation 1 (sommer.bar, Tanz im August, 2011 and Basel Liste, 2014). She recently produced her latest work, deader than dead (2020), for Made in LA Biennial at the Hammer Museum, where Lewis created a film as a document of her latest performance piece.
Lewis is the recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants Award (2018); a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production for minor matter (2017); a Factory Artist residency at tanzhaus nrw (2017-19); funding from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe (2017-18); and a Prix Jardin d’ Europe from ImPulsTanz for Sorrow Swag (2015). Lewis’ stage works are managed and produced, in part, by HAU Hebbel am Ufer Theater. In 2019, Lewis was the Alma M. Hawkins Memorial Chair at UCLA's World Arts and Cultures Department for the Fall Quarter. Lewis’s work continues to be presented internationally.
Lewis is currently developing her latest stage work, Still Not Still, with a premiere in Spring 2021.
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Friday, January 15, 12:00pmat ZOOM MEETING
LINK PROVIDED UPON REQUEST
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Tuesday, November 10, 5:00pmat ZOOM MEETING
