This live conversation features artists Gerald Clarke and Cannupa Hanska Luger and Desert X Co-curator Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas and took place March 29, 2025 at the Thompson Hotel in Palm Springs, CA as a part of the Desert X 2025 program.

This lively discussion between these two Indigenous artists unfolds reflections around land ownership, maintenance of culture and respect for place. Both Gerald and Cannupa have exhibited for Desert X, yet each chose different paths towards sharing their Indigenous views through their projects. Desert X Co-Curator Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas thoughtfully guides the conversation into deep considerations around what it means to create public art in an accessible way, where the audience is left to interpret the artist's ideas on their own terms and in their own time. As Desert X Artistic Director Neville Wakefield notes in the introduction to this conversation, “ Desert X operates on the legacy of Land Art, and one of the questions that legacy leaves unanswered is—‘whose land is it and what are our responsibilities to it?’.

Gerald Clarke is a visual artist, educator, tribal leader, and cultural practitioner whose family has lived in the Anza Valley for time immemorial. Gerald was a featured artist in Desert X 2023 and presented “Immersion”, a monumental artwork based on Cahuilla basket weaving knowledge while also embedding a game-like quality to the  installation in order to educate our current generations on Indigenous knowledge and language of the region. 

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multi-disciplinary artist and recurring host for Broken Boxes Podcast. Cannupa is featured in Desert X 2025, presenting a multi-pronged project titled G.H.O.S.T. Ride (Generative Habitation Operating System Technology), an evolving speculative fiction project which includes a mobile art installation, a poetic billboard triptic, and a new short film building upon ideas from his Future Ancestral Technologies series.

Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas is Co-curator of Desert X 2025, on view March 8–May 11, 2025 at sites across the Coachella Valley, California. Garcia-Maestas is a part of the curatorial team under the leadership of Artistic Director Neville Wakefield and Executive Director Jenny Gil.

This special live program took place on November 2, 2024 and featured a screening of Sterlin Harjo's documentary Love & Fury, a film where Sterlin follows Native artists for a year as they navigated their careers in the US and abroad. Love & Fury explores the immense complexities each artist faces in regards to their own identity as Native artists, as well as pushing Native art further into a post-colonial world. 

Following the film screening, the program included a live Long Con series episode with Sterlin Harjo and artist Cannupa Hanska Luger. This is the first time Long Con was presented in front of a live audience, and the conversation was anchored in themes drawn from the film, Love & Fury, and in the spirit of Long Con, Sterlin and Cannupa also shared vulnerable and hilarious reflections of their life as two friends sharing what it feels like to be contemporary Native American artists actively participating in the record of the 21st century.

This episode continues our series of live recordings from the exhibition program which accompanied Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue at the Albuquerque Museum.

Sterlin Harjo is an award winning Seminole/Muscogee Creek filmmaker who has directed three feature films and a feature documentary all of which address the contemporary Native American lived experience. Harjo is a founding member of the five-member Native American comedy group, The 1491s. Sterlin’s latest project Reservation Dogs, is a television show created in collaboration with Taika Waititi, now available to watch on FX. 

Cannupa Hanska Luger is an award winning multidisciplinary artist who creates monumental and situational installations and durational performance and often initiates community participation and social collaboration. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. 

Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue, curated by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez, features large-scale installation, sculpture, video, and a robust programming line-up celebrating the work and ideas of 23 artists who have contributed to Dunnill's Broken Boxes podcast. The exhibition celebrates ten years of the podcast of the same name and amplifies the collective strength of contemporary artists.

https://www.cabq.gov/artsculture/albuquerque-museum/exhibitions-1/broken-boxes-a-decade-of-art-action-and-dialogue

More about the film, Love & Fury: https://arraynow.com/project/love-and-fury/

Featured Song: Part-Time Indian by Mato Wayuhi

This episode features an inspiring panel conversation with members of the Planting Justice project and continues our series of live recordings from the exhibition program which accompanied Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue.

Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue co-curator Josie Lopez introduces this conversation with members from the Oakland, CA based project Planting Justice. This panel conversation took place live on October 17 2024 at the Albuquerque Museum. Broken Boxes founder and exhibition co-curator Ginger Dunnill joins Josie Lopez in conversation with artist Kate DeCiccio and Planting Justice members Covonne Page and Sol Mercado. 

This conversation touches on the important work taking place at Planting Justice with formerly incarcerated community members and expands on the act of gardening as a form of justice and healing. This conversation covers community advocacy, social justice, and long-term actionable care. 

Shout out to artist Chip Thomas and his work with the Painted Desert Project. Chip was slated to be a part of this panel conversation but was not able to make it in person. 

Episode Image: Planting Justice workshop. Photograph by Kate DeCiccio
Featured song: AMERIKKA by Xiuhtezcatl & Jaiia Cerff

More about Planting Justice:

“Our purpose is to empower people impacted by mass incarceration and social inequities with the skills and resources to cultivate food sovereignty, economic justice, and community healing. We are working toward economic and environmental justice by building a network of sustainable land–based social enterprises. We counter systemic oppression, violence, and inequity by creating good jobs with nature-based work, a healing environment with holistic community support, and real opportunities for personal growth.”

https://plantingjustice.org/

More about artist Kate DeCiccio:

"I’m an Oakland based artist, educator & creative strategist. My work centers portraiture for counter narrative, community storytelling & cultural strategy on behalf of abolition and collective liberation.  I’m from Central Massachusetts where I grew up on occupied Nipmuc territory on my family’s 4th generation farm. I’m the 3rd generation of my Polish and Italian ancestors and descends from 11 generations of English colonizers. Before working as an artist full time I was a mental health and substance abuse counselor and taught art at San Quentin Prison,  St Elizabeths Forensic Psychiatric hospital &  Leadership High School. The intersections of creativity, mental illness, addiction and ancestral investigation have been driving themes in my art practice since I was a teenager. I’m committed to repairing the harm of my inherited legacy and working to heal our collective imagination by learning how to stand squarely in truth, accountability, renewed resilience and unknown possibility."

https://www.katedeciccio.com/

More about the exhibition Broken Boxes: A decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue:

Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue, curated by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez, features large-scale installation, sculpture, video, and a robust programming line-up celebrating the work and ideas of 23 artists who have contributed to Dunnill's Broken Boxes podcast. The exhibition celebrates ten years of the podcast of the same name and amplifies the collective strength of contemporary artists.

https://www.cabq.gov/artsculture/albuquerque-museum/exhibitions-1/broken-boxes-a-decade-of-art-action-and-dialogue

Broken Boxes is pleased to present the audio from a very special site specific experimental music performance by award-winning artists and longtime collaborators Raven Chacon and Laura Ortman. 

This episode continues our series of live recordings from the exhibition program which accompanied Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue.

The performance was held on the occasion of the exhibition Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue at the Albuquerque Museum. Curated by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez, the exhibition featured large-scale installation, sculpture, video, and a robust program celebrating the work and ideas of 23 artists who have contributed to the Broken Boxes podcast over the past 4 years.

Raven Chacon and Laura Ortman performed live September 19th 2024 at the Albuquerque Museum.

RAVEN CHACON, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, is known for his solo and collaborative works in contemporary art and music. His compositions range from highly experimental sound art to chamber music. His works have been featured at major museums and venues including the Whitney Biennial and documenta 14. Chacon has mentored over 300 Native American high school composers since 2004.

LAURA ORTMAN, a member of the White Mountain Apache tribe, is a musician and composer whose work spans albums, performances, and multimedia. As a soloist, Ortman performs on amplified violin, vocals, piano, electric guitar, and keyboard. She has performed at prominent venues like MoMA and the Whitney Museum and received the United States Artists Fellowship in 2022.

This episode kicks off a mini-series celebrating our six months of live programming which accompanied the 10 year anniversary exhibition, BROKEN BOXES: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue. 

On September 7, 2024 the opening program of the exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum included an artist roundtable featuring exhibiting artists Tanya Aguiñiga, Jeremy Dennis, Amaryllis R. Flowers and Guadalupe Maravilla in conversation with Broken Boxes hosts Ginger Dunnill and Cannupa Hanska Luger. 

The artists reflect on their respective practices as contemporary artists working to shift paradigms within the larger art world while upholding localized efforts of care. We hear about the work they each do and their values around community building, solidarity and the tools they use to enact survival as artists. Co-curator Josie Lopez opens the conversation with remarks and introductions. 

More about the artists featured in this conversation:

TANYA AGUIÑIGA, raised in Tijuana, creates work reflecting her binational identity using traditional and innovative materials. Focused directly on the US-Mexico border, she has activated spaces to confront contemporary issues of immigration. Founder of AMBOS, she collaborates on community-based projects and has received numerous awards. Her work is in major museum collections including LACMA and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. 

JEREMY DENNIS, a Shinnecock Indian Nation photographer, explores Indigenous identity and cultural assimilation. His work examines the unique experience of living on a sovereign Native American reservation and addresses contemporary Indigenous issues. He holds an MFA from Pennsylvania State University. 

AMARYLLIS R. FLOWERS, a queer, Puerto Rican-American artist based in upstate New York, examines hybridity, mythology, and sexuality through her vibrant, non-linear visual narratives. Her visual language uses symbol sets as a form of mapping to challenge colonial notions of how to navigate and describe our world. Her work has been showcased in significant national and international venues. She earned an MFA from Yale University and has received numerous prestigious awards.

GUADALUPE MARAVILLA, a Salvadoran artist, creates works that address migration and healing. His art serves as an impetus for healing through sound and is included in the collections of major institutions including MoMA and the Guggenheim. Maravilla has received

numerous fellowships and his work has been featured in significant international biennials.

More about the exhibition:

BROKEN BOXES: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue, curated by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez, features large-scale installation, sculpture, video, and a robust programming line-up celebrating the work and ideas of 23 artists who have contributed to Dunnill's Broken Boxes podcast. The exhibition celebrates ten years of the podcast of the same name and amplifies the collective strength of contemporary artists. Focusing on interviews over the past four years, each of the featured artists engages their own cultural experience and elevates activism within diverse communities. 

Music featured by India Sky

Over the next several months Broken Boxes will be releasing recordings from live programming which took place at the Albuquerque Museum in relation to the 10 year celebration exhibition, Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue, curated by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez. The exhibition is currently on view until March 7 2025 and features the work of 23 artists who have been featured on the podcast over the past 4 years. The exhibition included a robust monthly program which featured artist talks, performance and film screenings. 

To start off this live series, Broken Boxes is sharing the sound installation compiled from interviews over the past 4 years with the featured artists. This audio plays throughout the exhibition on hyper-directional speakers and is also currently broadcasting from participating artist Autumn Chacon's illegal broadcast frequency from the museum out into the city of Albuquerque. 

Following this episode Broken Boxes will release the recordings from each live program that coincided with the exhibition. There is just a couple months left to see this special exhibition, so go catch it if you can!

Artists featured on this audio mix in order of appearance:

Ginger Dunnill • Saya Woolfalk • Raven Chacon • Sterlin Harjo • Amaryllis R. Flowers • Tsedaye Makonnen • Natalie Ball • Autumn Chacon • CASSILS • Laura Ortman • India Sky Davis • Elisa Harkins • Guadalupe Maravilla • SWOON • Christine Howard Sandoval • Kate DeCiccio • Tanya Aguiñiga • Joseph M. Pierce • Mario Ybarra Jr. • Chip Thomas • Jeremy Dennis • Marie Watt • Katherine Paul (Black Belt Eagle Scout) • Cannupa Hanska Luger

End track: Rise Up//Make Waves by DJ Béeso

More about the exhibition: https://www.cabq.gov/artsculture/albuquerque-museum/exhibitions-1/broken-boxes-a-decade-of-art-action-and-dialogue

In this episode we speak with Portland based multicultural Kānaka Maoli singer songwriter, Isabeau Waia'u Walker.

Originally from Wailuku, Maui, Isabeau is a firm believer in the power of stories shared through song and aims to address the mind and heart in everything she creates. Her voice, her lyrics, her melodies and harmonies are both raw and refined, intimate yet relatable, memorable and haunting.

In this conversation Isabeau shares her relationship to place—how growing up on Maui surrounded by music through family, school and extended community impacted her own style of songwriting and shed light onto her originality and different way of approaching the craft. She shares about moving off island to Portland Oregon and her experiences of balancing being a teacher and a recording artist. We talk about the various themes in her two albums to date, her first full length album, Body, and her most recent record, Heavyweight, which was released in October of 2025. We end the chat with some solid tips for the creative toolkit and she shares with us the phrase “con placer” or “with pleasure”, a sentiment imparted to her by one of her musician friends and a reminder to always enjoy the process of creativity. Isabeau reminds us that success is subjective, and urges artists to always follow your own map of what success means for you.

Featured song: Wahine by Isabeau Waia'u Walker from the album Heavyweight


More about the latest album, Heavyweight:

Heavyweight is personal; the soundtrack for a heavy heart shored up with gratitude and tenderness. It is a gentle hand over yours, a head resting lightly on your shoulder, a mutual scream into the abyss. Isabeau writes to satisfy an internal tension. Her music is Bright Gloom, joy adjacent songs and stories from The Land of Broken and Demented Toys. Recorded by Ryan Oxford at The Center for Sound, Light, and Color in Portland, Oregon, Heavyweight owns up to flaws, admits to confusion and confesses failure but it is not a surrender. In contrast to her previous LP, Body, these songs are her individual bout with love, sacrifice and loss.  It is the wily smile and bruised cheekbone still standing in the next round; the bottoming out and a heartfelt, heartfull return. Heavyweight marks the first time Isabeau has recorded a project with a band, with her band of weird and talented brothers. Having the whole gang present throughout the process made room for real time collaboration. Her songs found their most mature form in her band community. Ryan and Isabeau have carved out a new groove in their artistic alliance and their friendship hosts a safe space to orchestrate songs as they mean to be. She is a lyric forward songwriter with stories reminding that while the worst has happened it didn’t take you out…if anything, it emboldened your heart, your love, your resolve. You are now sharper while more tender. Heavyweight is personal, but for all who have met grief. Heavyweight is hers, but also yours. These songs can hold your weight. “Take your heaviness / and give it back to the earth’s own weight / the mountains are heavy, the oceans are heavy.” - Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Poetry of Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

In honor of the opening weekend of Movements at SITE SANTA FE, exhibiting artist Cassils engages in a wide-ranging conversation with cultural critic Gayatri Gopinath on how their exhibition represents a departure from their earlier work, what it means to create trans* representation at this particularly fraught political moment, and the specificity of the New Mexico landscape in relation to the questions of time, space, historical memory, and embodiment that are central to their practice. This conversation was introduced by SITE SANTA FE curator Brandee Caoba and coordinated by Matthew Contos. 

About the Presenters: 

Cassils is a transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils's art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, survival, empowerment and systems of care. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils's work excavates historical contexts to examine the present moment. Cassils exhibits internationally and is an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Integrated Practices in the Fine Arts Department at PRATT INSTITUTE.

Gayatri Gopinath is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of two monographs: Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke University Press, 2005), and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2018). She has published widely on queer visual art and culture in anthologies and journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, and Social Text, as well as in art publications such as PIX: A Journal of Contemporary Indian Photography, Tribe: Photography and New Media from the Arab World, and ArtReview Asia.

Movements exhibition at SITE SANTA FE:

Movements transposes the live choreography of Cassils’s debut contemporary dance piece, Human Measure (2022), reconceiving that performance as three new immersive installations that are distinct yet interconnected. Drawing upon the structure of a musical score, the exhibition weaves layered auditory experiences into a sweeping soundscape that spans the galleries’ architecture.

Movements is now on view at SITE SANTA FE through February 3, 2025

This program was recorded live on Saturday, November 16, 2024 at SITE SANTA FE in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Many thanks to the incredible teams at both SITE SANTA FE and Albuquerque Museum for your support and collaboration between spaces. 

Long Con is a series of conversations between Director Sterlin Harjo and Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger about life, art, film, history and everything in between - informally shared from the lens of two contemporary Native American artists and friends actively participating in the record of the 21st century. This is the seventh episode of this series, recorded live in person in Tulsa, Oklahoma in October 2024.

For this episode of the Long Con, Cannupa visits Tulsa, Oklahoma for 48 hours for an artist talk and the two artists take advantage of the opportunity to have a recording session for the Long Con series. They begin the convo on a car drive out to Sterlin’s property. In the true nature of this series we dip into UFO’s, Deadman’s thumbprints, Tarantula’s and coffee shop etiquette, among other random stories.
They discuss the nuance of the city of Tulsa, the current state of Native Art, the economics and precarious nature of popularity and how that may impact a larger community when culture is trending in a market. They touch on land acknowledgements, question and answer: who decides what Native Art is and how that demographic has shifted through the generations. There’s mention of Oscar Howe and his infamous letter to the Philbrook Museum, the legendary artist Bob Houzous and others who have bent an arc between generations of artists pushing boundaries for decades. We arrive at Sterlin’s house and the second segment of the conversation features tales from the real ‘Uncle Brownie’, Sterlin’s dad. Brownie shares stories about his upbringing in Sasakwa, Oklahoma, his experiences as a self taught karate instructor and about the character ‘Uncle Brownie, from Reservation Dogs. Rounding out this long con(versation), Brownie imparts some advice to us in the younger generations to remember to be accountable— that there is an obligation to past and future generations to set a good example. As the artists head back into the city, we get a wave from Sterlin’s mom and tune into one of Sterlin’s favorite tracks “Hometown Hero” from local Oklahoma singer/ songwriter, J.R. Carroll.

About the artists:

Sterlin Harjo is an award winning Seminole/Muscogee Creek filmmaker who has directed three feature films and a feature documentary all of which address the contemporary Native American lived experience. Sterlin is a founding member of the five-member Native American comedy group, The 1491s. Sterlin’s latest project Reservation Dogs, is a television show created in collaboration with Taika Waititi, now available to watch on FX.

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multidisciplinary artist who creates monumental and situational installations and durational performance and often initiates community participation and social collaboration. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota.

In this episode of Broken Boxes we hear a conversation with Saya Woolfalk, a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions. Saya’s work builds new narratives and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity. 

I first met up with artist Saya in the summer of 2023 at her studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York to chat about her practice. We walked around the bustling industrial warehouses along the river with her dog, Mr. Mochi, and amid a cacophony of forklifts and semi-trucks, we had an incredibly generative conversation about her practice. Unfortunately I was not able to publish the audio of this conversion on the podcast due to noise interference, but sections of this interview are archived within the new Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue publication available now through UNM Press. 

Recently Saya and I reconvened for a second conversation where we focus in on her origin story of becoming an artist and her decades-long investigation into speculative fiction within her practice. Saya shares about her 2006 work Ethnography of No Place—an installation which invites viewers into the immersive environments of “the Empathics,” a fictional race of women able to alter their genetic makeup and fuse with plants. Saya relates how for years she has utilized fantasy to understand our present reality and to dream of multiple futures. She shared how her present work has expanded far beyond No Place into envisioning the possibility of humanity existing beyond linear time and space. 

Saya communicates her ideas through sculpture, installation, performance and video art and has been at the forefront of conceptualizing ideas around speculative fiction, fantasizing and world building as an agent of change. We end the conversation with some practical advice on how Saya has learned to survive as an artist and she imparts some great tips on ways to utilize the systems in place to work in your favor and do more with less when you have to. Saya continues to show us that to truly enact radical change, we must create spaces for empathy and ease, and that we must continually reflect on how we practice compassion and connection with one another.

This episode is hosted by Ginger Dunnill