Native Visual Sovereignty

An essential resource for curators, Native and non-Native artists, scholars, students and teachers

Native artists are at the vanguard of performance art practices and discourse, using humor as a strategy for cultural critique and reflection, parsing the relationships between objecthood and agency. This reader centers performance and theater as origin points for the development of contemporary art by Native American, First Nations, Metis, Inuit and Alaska Native artists. Song, dance and music are also posited as a basis for collectivity and resistance and a means to speak to a time when Native traditional ceremony and public gatherings were illegal in both the United States and Canada. Featuring excerpts from the 1969 document Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process, this illustrated reader also includes four long-form essays by leading Indigenous scholars, commissioned artist notes, oral history interviews and a selection of key texts from the fields of Native contemporary art, art history and theory. Oral history interviews with: Rebecca Belmore, TJ Cuthand, G. Peter Jemison, Spiderwoman Theater.

This book was published in association with Forge Project; Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Mackenzie Art Gallery; Vancouver Art Gallery; SITE Santa Fe.