Broken Boxes Podcast

In this episode of Broken Boxes recurring host Cannupa Hanska Luger gets into conversation with Oglala Lakota artist Mato Wayuhi who works in both film and TV as an actor, producer and musical composer, as well as writing his own music. Mato reflects on how he first came to music as an artistic outlet and his creative inspirations and challenges as a young person honing his craft. We hear about Mato’s dense and varied approach to realizing a creative vision from filming music videos, to cross discipline collaboration with other artists to activating his family's archived tapes on his recordings. Mato speaks about being the composer for the award-winning FX/Hulu series Reservation Dogs, what impact that project has had on his relationship with his music and acting and how it has built lifelong friendships. Mato also gives a vulnerable and deep dive behind the making of his new album, STANKFACE STANDING SOLDIER, reflecting on the grief and healing that took place through the process of putting together this layered, timely and entirely self-produced record.

+ Featured song: STANKFACE (feat. A$h Da Hunter) from STANKFACE STANDING SOLDIER by Mato Wayuhi

+++

Mato Wayuhi is an Oglala Lakota artist originally from South Dakota. He works in film/TV both as an actor, producer and musical composer, as well as writing his own music. Most notably, Mato is the composer for the award-winning FX/Hulu series Reservation Dogs. He is also featured on the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Hollywood & Entertainment.

His most recent album STANKFACE STANDING SOLDIER is an entirely self-produced record, which Forbes calls a "masterpiece that revolutionizes Indigenous music into a new era."

In this episode, I get into deep reflection with artist and dear sister-friend Amaryllis R. Flowers to mark the 10 year anniversary of Broken Boxes. Amaryllis interviews me around the arc of the project over the course of a decade, uncovering how it has become an archive of the lived experiences and world building strategies of contemporary artists, while acknowledging the many variations of an artists practiced values including those of the activist, advocate, disruptor or culture activator. We speak about collective strength while considering how art and imagining may unbind us from collective social trauma. This long-form interview reflects the vulnerability, uncertainty and strength required to maintain an art practice today. I explain a bit about how the past 4 years of this project has become a dedicated imagination praxis, focused on building a toolkit for surviving the chosen career as artist. At the end of our conversation I announce Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialog - the forthcoming exhibition and accompanying art book which will premiere this fall at the Albuquerque Museum, featuring installation and video work from 23 artists that have been featured on the podcast with an emphasis on the past 4 years.

Originally from Maui, Hawai’i, New Mexico based creative Ginger Dunnill is a producer, journalist, curator, community organizer and sound artist. She collaborates with artists globally, creating work that inspires human connection, promotes plurality and advocates for social justice. Ginger is the founder of Broken Boxes Podcast, the decade long celebrated underground broadcasting project amplifying systemically undervalued voices in the arts. In 2017, Ginger received an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts - 516 ARTS Fulcrum Fund Award on behalf of Broken Boxes to realize an exhibition and publication featuring the work and ideas of over 40 artists featured on the project. As a practicing artist, Ginger has exhibited internationally including at IoDeposito, Italy, Washington Project for The Arts, Washington, DC and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Over the past two decades Ginger has produced numerous social engagement projects, community programs and public exhibitions in collaboration with other artists and activists. She is currently working as a creative advisor for numerous prominent artists and musicians and touring the world as a performer.

Amaryllis R. Flowers is a Queer Puerto Rican American Artist living and working in upstate New York. Raised between multiple cities and rural communities across America in a constantly shifting landscape, her practice explores themes of hybridity, mythology and sexuality. Utilizing drawings, video, sculpture, performance and installation, her work is a visual language paying attention to the spaces in-between categories, and revering those that know the trouble and pleasure there. Amaryllis earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2019 and her BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in 2014. She is the recipient of the 2023 Pocantico Prize from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a 2022-2027 Joan Mitchell Fellow, and a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including at the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo Del Barrio (New York), The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), MoCADA (Brooklyn), and SOMArts (San Francisco).

The forthcoming exhibition - Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialog exhibition will be presented at the Albuquerque Museum September 7, 2024 - March 2, 2025. Featuring installation and video work from 23 artists that have been featured on the podcast with an emphasis on the past 4 years. This exhibition will be accompanied by an art book published by UNM Press which will feature an essay by Broken Boxes creator Ginger Dunnill, a creative response by artist Maria Hupfield and an introduction by Head curator Josie Lopez. The publication will feature the exhibiting artists through quotes from their podcast interviews, images of their work and writings the artists have selected or contributed from their larger practice.

Broken Boxes intro song by India Song

Featured song: Ocean Breath by Aysanabee

This episode marks the second time featuring artist and friend Raven Chacon on Broken Boxes. The first time I interviewed Raven was in 2017, when I visited with him at the Institute of American Indian Arts where he was participating in a symposium on Indigenous performance titled, Decolonial Gestures. This time around, we met up with Raven at his home in Albuquerque, NM where recurring host and artist Cannupa Hanska Luger chatted with Raven for this episode. The conversation reflects on the arc of Ravens practice over the past decade, along with the various projects they have been able to work on together, including Sweet Land (2020), an award-winning, multi-perspectival and site-specific opera staged at the State Historical Park in downtown Los Angeles, for which Raven was composer and Cannupa co-director and costume designer. Raven and Cannupa also reflect on their time together traveling up to Oceti Sakowin camp in support of the water protectors during the resistance of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Raven provides context to his composition Storm Pattern, which was a response to being onsite at Standing Rock, and the artists speak to the long term impact of an Indigenous solidarity gathering of that magnitude. Raven speaks about being named the first Native American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize or Voiceless Mass, and shares the composition's intention and performance trajectory. To end the conversation, Raven shares insight around staying grounded while navigating the pressures of success, travel and touring as a practicing artist, and reminds us to find ways to slow down and do what matters to you first, creatively, wherever possible.

Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the two-mile-long land art installation Repellent Fence.

A recording artist whose work has spanned twenty-two years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America.

Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022) and the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022).

His solo artworks are in the collectIons of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the Albuquerque Museum, University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.

Music Featured: Sweet Land, Scene 1: Introduction (feat. Du Yun & Raven Chacon) · Jehnean Washington · Carmina Escobar · Micaela Tobin · Du Yun · Raven Chacon · Lewis Pesacov. Released on 2021-09-24 by The Industry Productions

This very special episode of Broken Boxes Podcast marked our first ever conversation in front of a live studio audience. Recurring host Cannupa Hanska Luger was joined by Matika Wilbur and Andrea Carlon on October 28th 2023 as part of the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s Memory & Monuments program. The artist’s drew from a hat of pre-considered topics to speak to and expand upon, including: Ancestral trade routes or sharing knowledge within a cultural continuum such as how culture, language and goods traveled precontact; Indigenous memory in relation to the American Myth; Recognition of Indigenous complexity; Indigenous futures including shared histories and futures; and Institutional critique or a generative airing of problematic power structures impact on Native people. Broken Boxes would like to thank UMMA staff and curators and Monument Lab for being present for this generative and complex conversation to take place. We would like to especially thank the students of the Native American Student Association at the University of Michigan, who welcomed Broken Boxes and the artists and helped make this live audience recording a wonderful experience.

More about the artists:

Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) is one of the nation’s leading photographers, based in the Pacific Northwest. She earned her BFA from Brooks Institute of Photography where she double majored in Advertising and Digital Imaging. Her most recent endeavor, Project 562, has brought Matika to over 300 tribal nations dispersed throughout 40 U.S. states where she has taken thousands of portraits, and collected hundreds of contemporary narratives from the breadth of Indian Country all in the pursuit of one goal: To Change The Way We See Native America.

Andrea Carlson is a visual artist who maintains a studio practice in northern Minnesota. Carlson works primarily on paper, creating painted and drawn surfaces with many mediums. Her work addresses land and institutional spaces, decolonization narratives, and assimilation metaphors in film. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. Carlson was a recipient of a 2008 McKnight Fellow, a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors award, a 2021 Chicago Artadia Award, and a 2022 United States Artists Fellowship. Carlson is a co-founder of the Center for Native Futures in Chicago.

Multidisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara), and Lakota. Through monumental installations and social collaborations that reflect a deep engagement and respect for materials, the environment, and community, Luger activates speculative fiction and communicates stories about 21st century Indigeneity. Luger is a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, recipient of the 2021 United States Artists Fellowship Award for Craft, and was named a Grist 50 Fixer for 2021, a list that includes emerging leaders in climate, sustainability, and equity from across the nation.

Music featured: Move, I’m Indigenous by Uyarakq

BBP intro track by India Sky

After years of planning a conversation together for the podcast, artist and friend Raven Halfmoon and I sat down for a chat on a sunny summer afternoon above the clay education workspace at the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana. We talked about the beginning of Raven’s path as an artist and how, although she works across mediums, her practice has most recently been centered in clay- and she has been going big! We speak to her conceptual approach of building large scale ceramics as a means to take up space for Indigenous women and how her recent works echo her community and cultural inspirations. We speak about navigating within the various art worlds including the ceramic and clay community, the Native art world and the larger contemporary art market. Raven shares how working with clay has taught her patience, understanding and an acknowledgement that failure, as much as success, is part of the clay journey. As we round out the conversation, Raven reflects on how as artists, we can’t just stay cooped up in our studios, we also have to go out, live our lives and be with our communities in order to be able to do our creative work in a sustainable way. Raven reminds us to find balance and practice great care with one of the most valuable resources we possess, time. 

Raven Halfmoon (Caddo Nation) is from Norman, Oklahoma. She attended the University of Arkansas where she earned a double Bachelors Degree in ceramics/painting and cultural anthropology. Her work has been featured in multiple exhibitions throughout the U.S. as well as internationally. Raven lives and works in Norman, OK. She is represented by Kouri+Corrao Gallery in Santa Fe, NM and Ross+Kramer Gallery in New York, NY.

This summer I had the opportunity to sit down with twin sisters Sydnie and Haylie Jimenez as they rounded out a two year stint at the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts. We sat down in The Bray’s library to recap on life and art just a couple weeks before they headed back to Chicago to continue the next chapter in their creative practice. The sisters shared about their upbringing and how growing up with mixed heritage in a mostly white community revealed that art can be a tool for nourishment and survival. They reflected on how in attending the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, they finally found their reflection in the BIPOC student body. And we learn how Sydnie began her clay practice, eventually landing on ceramics by utilizing SIAC’s large kilns. Haylie shares her practice of hand drawn animation, providing her the skills she utilizes today through large scale drawings and works on clay.  The artists share how they respectively work with the figure and storytelling, each drawing from identity and representation in an autobiographical nature. The sisters explain how they maintain a practice rooted in DIY culture, making clothes and other accessible pieces as HANDS, along with their more formal artworks. As they round out their journey at The Bray, the sisters reflect on their time in Montana, and we chat about the American clay world and how historically there has been a lack of diversity and representation. We also touch on the gap between the clay and craft markets and the fine art market. We chat about how the sisters inform each other creatively through collaboration while maintaining their own aesthetic and diverse practices - Sydnie produces large scale figurative work and Haylie carves on clay, complimenting her active drawing practice and tattoo trade. As we end our conversation the sisters remind us to take time and nourish our bodies and minds as we push to make space in the world for our communities to thrive creatively.

Sydnie Jimenez (b. Orlando, FL) received a BFA from SAIC (2020) focusing in ceramic sculpture and is a recipient of the Windgate- Lamar Fellowship (2020). Much of her work centers around the representation of black and brown youth in an American context. She illustrates in clay self-expression as a form of protest and self care to protect against a Eurocentric society founded on white supremacy and colonization. Jimenez is currently a long-term resident at Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago.

Born in Orlando and raised in Chattanooga, Haylie later moved to Chicago to attend the School of The Art Institute of Chicago (BFA 2020). Finding Black and Brown Queer community in Chicago and her long lasting relationships with friends and family in Tennessee was and is a pivotal influence for her work which surrounds the importance of belonging, collective care, self expression, and moving through hardships to times of joy together within these communities. She is currently working out of Chicago developing her ceramic and drawing practice, preparing for various shows with her twin sister, Sydnie Jimenez.

For this episode of Broken Boxes I am joined by Monument Lab Director Paul Farber, University of Michigan Museum of Art Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art Ozi Uduma and artist Cannupa Hanska Luger. We gathered together in Ann Arbor Michigan in late September 2023 at the University of Michigan’s Media Center during the opening week of the monumental project and accompanying exhibition by Luger titled, You’re Welcome was developed over the course of two years between Cannupa, Monument Lab and the University of Michigan Museum of Art. This podcast conversation was a chance for the three creatives to speak vulnerably to the process of taking on such a large endeavor and how much care and energy goes into the creation of a project of this magnitude. We learn about the three primary components to the presentation including GIFT, an experimental, time-based, commissioned work by Luger on the front facade of UMMA’s Alumni Memorial Hall which challenges institutional memory and the whitewashing of history. GIFT is accompanied by two indoor installations: Meat for the Beast in the museums Irving Stenn, Jr. Family Gallery, which delves into Luger’s artistic practice and the relationship between museum collections and resource extraction; and Monument Lab: Public Classroom in the Art Gym, which examines formal and informal modes of memory. Moving through the conceptual application of this work, Paul, Ozi and Cannupa break down the larger themes of whiteness, language and time, and unpack the anchoring question of the project, How do we Remember?. The three offer their personal and professional reflections on implementing a project of this magnitude and it’s unknown long term impact. And in speaking to GIFT and the larger constellation of exhibiting works, Paul reflects, “This is an art project that doesn’t quite have a precedent. And that’s the point. It has cousins and kin and points of inspiration and citation, but this work is actually seeking to do something that has never been done in this way.” Over all, You’re Welcome explores the relationship between the Museum’s historic building, the land it stands on, and a long history of colonial narratives deeply embedded in public structures. It supports critical dialogues about the responsibilities of public institutions as cultural history makers and stewards, and it is a key component of UMMA’s ongoing efforts to challenge its history and practices to create an institution more reflective of its community and honest in its explorations of art, culture, and society.

More about YOU’RE WELCOME:

HOW DO WE REMEMBER?

How do we remember on this campus? This is the central question asked in You’re Welcome, a dynamic three-part exhibition. The result of a multiyear collaboration with artist Cannupa Hanska Luger and nonprofit public art and history studio Monument Lab, You’re Welcome examines the foundational narratives of the land occupied by the University of Michigan and both national and global discourse on nationalism, land sovereignty, militarism, colonialism, and sites of memory.

GIFT

The centerpiece of the You’re Welcome exhibition, Cannupa Hanska Luger’s GIFT, is an experimental, time-based, commissioned work, responding to and challenging the University of Michigan’s origin story and the stewardship of the land it occupies.

In September 2023, Luger, a multidisciplinary artist and enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota), painted the word “GIFT” in white porcelain clay slip on the columns of Alumni Memorial Hall, a neoclassical war memorial erected in 1910 that now houses UMMA. His point of departure is the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs, in which Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi tribes “gifted” land to the University that was then sold to found its endowments.

MEAT FOR THE BEAST

Meat for the Beast comprises two works by the multidisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger: This is Not a Snake and The One Who Checks and The One Who Balances. An enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota), Luger was born and raised on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. This is Not a Snake was created there, in the aftermath of the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests. The “snake” is a serpentine monster made of riot gear, ceramics, fiber, steel, oil drums, concertina wire, ammunition cans, trash, beadwork, and other found objects. Interspersed within the creature’s body are artworks from UMMA’s collection selected by Luger and the exhibition’s curators to reflect on the historical and contemporary destruction and extraction of land as an expendable resource.

By positioning the “snake” as if it’s ingesting objects from the museum’s collection, Luger compares the damage done by extractive industries on Indigenous lands to that of museums, which have historically extracted objects and culture from Indigenous communities.

MONUMENT LAB: PUBLIC CLASSROOM

How do we remember on this campus? In addressing this central question of the exhibition You’re Welcome, Monument Lab, a nonprofit public art and history studio, worked with lead artist Cannupa Hanska Luger, University of Michigan Museum of Art staff, and University students, staff, and faculty to gather hundreds of responses. Using 121 of these compiled responses as a starting point, this “classroom” acts as an exploration of memory itself—how we remember, the physical and ephemeral forms memories take, and how they come to constitute the campus itself. This classroom includes a broad range of ways we remember—instances of personal, collective, ancestral, speculative, and institutional approaches to memory.

https://umma.umich.edu/exhibitions/2023/cannupa-hanska-luger-you-re-welcome

Featured song: A Tribe Called Red Ft. Hellnback - The Peoples\' Champ

In this episode I had the honor to sit down with artist Jeffrey Gibson joined by curator and co-editor of An Indigenous Present, Jenelle Porter. We were given space at SITE Santa Fe in Director Louis Grachos office to have a long and generative conversation while we celebrated the book's launch over Indian Market weekend. We talk about Jeff’s practice and his journey to this moment and the Artist shares the vulnerable, complicated, difficult and joyous path of choosing to be an Artist, offering reflection from what he has learned along the way, understanding how the practice and studio has evolved in the 20 some years of being a working Artist. We then dive in with both Jeff and Jenelle to speak on Jeff’s thought process behind An Indigenous Present, learning about the years of care and intention behind the project, which is, as Jeff reflects, an “Artist book about Artists”. We round out our 2 plus hour chat with the excitement and work that has come with Jeffrey being named the artist to represent the U.S. at the 60th Venice Biennale. As we end our chat, both Jeff and Jenelle share important and practical insight on how to navigate the art worlds and art markets and Jeffrey reminds us all that “Artists do have the power to set precedence in institutions”.

Featured song: SMOKE RINGS SHIMMERS ENDLESS BLUR by Laura Ortman, 2023

Broken Boxes introduction song by India Sky

More about the publication An Indigenous Present: https://www.artbook.com/9781636811024.html

More about the Artist Jeffrey Gibson

Jeffrey Gibson’s work fuses his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and experience of living in Europe, Asia and the USA with references that span club culture, queer theory, fashion, politics, literature and art history. The artist’s multi-faceted practice incorporates painting, performance, sculpture, textiles and video, characterised by vibrant colour and pattern.

Gibson was born in 1972, Colorado, USA and he currently lives and works in Hudson Valley, New York.

The artist combines intricate indigenous artisanal handcraft – such as beadwork, leatherwork and quilting – with narratives of contemporary resistance in protest slogans and song lyrics. This “blend of confrontation and pageantry” is reinforced by what Felicia Feaster describes as a “sense of movement and performance as if these objects ... are costumes waiting for a dancer to inhabit them.” The artist harnesses the power of such materials and techniques to activate overlooked narratives, while embracing the presence of historically marginalised identities.

Gibson explains: “I am drawn to these materials because they acknowledge the global world. Historically, beads often came from Italy, the Czech Republic or Poland, and contemporary beads can also come from India, China and Japan. Jingles originated as the lids of tobacco and snuff tins, turned and used to adorn dresses, but now they are commercially made in places such as Taiwan. Metal studs also have trade references and originally may have come from the Spanish, but also have modern references to punk and DIY culture. It’s a continual mash-up.”

Acknowledging music as a key element in his experience of life as an artist, pop music became one of the primary points of reference in Gibson’s practice: musicians became his elders and lyrics became his mantras. Recent paintings synthesise geometric patterns inspired by indigenous American artefacts with the lyrics and psychedelic palette of disco music.

Solo exhibitions include ‘THE SPIRITS ARE LAUGHING’, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2022); ‘This Burning World’, Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, California (2022); ‘The Body Electric’, SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2022) and Frist Art Museum, Nashville (2023); ‘INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE’, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts (2021); ‘To Feel Myself Beloved on the Earth’, Benenson Center, Art Omi, Ghent, New York (2021); ‘When Fire is Applied to a Stone It Cracks’, Brooklyn Art Museum, Brooklyn, New York (2020); ‘The Anthropophagic Effect’, New Museum, New York City, New York (2019); ‘Like a Hammer’, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin (2019); Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington (2019); Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, Mississippi (2019); Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado (2018); ‘This Is the Day’, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas (2019); Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, New York (2018) and ‘Love Song’, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts (2013). For the Toronto Biennial 2022, Gibson presented an evolving installation featuring fifteen moveable stages at Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Other recent group exhibitions include ‘Dreamhome’, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2022); ‘Crafting America’, Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, Arkansas (2021); ‘Monuments Now’, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, New York (2020); ‘Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois (2020) and The Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, New York (2019). Works can be found in the collections of Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado; Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, New York, amongst others. Gibson is a recipient of numerous awards, notably a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2019), Joan Mitchell Foundation, Painters and Sculptors Grant (2015) and Creative Capital Award (2005).

More about Curator/Writer Jenelle Porter:

Jenelle Porter is a curator and writer living in Los Angeles. Current and recent exhibitions include career surveys of Barbara T. Smith (ICA LA, 2023) and Kay Sekimachi (Berkeley Art Museum, 2021); Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design (ICA/Boston, 2019); and Mike Kelley: Timeless Painting (Mike Kelley Foundation and Hauser & Wirth, New York, 2019). She is co-editor of An Indigenous Present with artist Jeffrey Gibson (fall 2023), and a Viola Frey monograph (fall 2024).

From 2011 to 2015 Porter was Mannion Family Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, where she organized Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present and Figuring Color: Kathy Butterly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roy McMakin, Sue Williams, as well as monographic exhibitions of the work of Jeffrey Gibson, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Dianna Molzan, Christina Ramberg, Mary Reid Kelley, Arlene Shechet, and Erin Shirreff. Her exhibitions have twice been honored by the International Association of Art Critics. As Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2005–10), Porter organized Dance with Camera and Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay, the first museum surveys of Trisha Donnelly and Charline von Heyl, and numerous other projects.

From 1998–2001 Porter was curator at Artists Space, New York. She began her career in curatorial positions at both the Walker Art Center and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

She has authored books and essays including those on artists Polly Apfelbaum, Kathy Butterly, Viola Frey, Jeffrey Gibson, Sam Gilliam, Jay Heikes, Margaret Kilgallen, Liz Larner, Ruby Neri, and Matthew Ritchie, among others.

An Indigenous Present: Conversation with Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter

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 episode is the fifth conversation between Harjo and Luger on Broken Boxes, and the artists dive right in, chatting about conspiracy theories, aliens, AI, Indigenous ceramic practices, the current state of the film industry and the writers strike, how creating sanctuary for producing big ideas is important and how everyone's creative process is different, so it’s about finding what your groove is. They also speak about fatherhood, the importance of storytelling, and of course the final season of Reservation Dogs - Season 3 - which premieres August 2nd, just days after this episode airs. Sterlin shares why he decided to complete the series after three seasons and reflects on his adventures of being a showrunner for a production that has changed the face of television for Indigenous people, and how making this work has, in turn, changed him. I am excited to see what comes next for our dear friend Sterlin. Broken Boxes will continue to produce these long conversations between the two artists and also we are so excited for Sterlin’s podcast The Cuts to activate again, please go listen to his podcast archive If you have not yet!

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 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 of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota descent.

Music featured: 25 and Wastin’ Time by Vincent Neil Emerson

Broken Boxes intro track by India Sky