Forge Project and Momus are pleased to announce the participants in Estuaries: An International Indigenous Art Criticism Residency, which will be led by Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi (Sāmoa) and Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation). Seminars, workshops, and other activities will be conducted by leading writers, artists, curators, and scholars belonging to Indigenous communities around the world. Their respective approaches to mentorship will bring together multiple forms of Indigenous writing and voicing, coalescing with one another under Eshrāghi and Hopkins’s leadership.
Participants in this residency will develop texts, share in community-based mentorship, and participate in professional development informed by the breadth of global Indigenous art criticism and cultural protocols.
Estuaries is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation, in alignment with the foundation’s commitment to supporting artists and cultural organizations for whom funding and resources has historically been limited. Received earlier this month as part of the foundation’s latest grantmaking cycle, the grant will help fund participants’ travel, compensate faculty, and bolster programming during the residency.
The 2023 Estuaries Residents are:
- Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick (Kanaka ʻŌiwi) — Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick is an artist, curator, and educator from Mōkapu, a peninsula on the windward side of Oʻahu, in U.S.-occupied Hawaiʻi. Currently, he serves as director of Koa Gallery at Kapiʻolani Community College and as a member of kekahi wahi (2020–), a grassroots film initiative documenting stories of transformation across Moananui. Raised in a deep-rooted matriarchy, his work is guided by the multigenerational efforts of Kānaka ʻŌiwi women—especially his mother, maternal aunties, and grandmother—who have devoted their lives to art, education, organizing, and community in Hawaiʻi. Recently, he co-curated ʻAi Pōhaku, Stone Eaters (2023) with Josh Tengan and Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu; Hawaiʻi Triennial 2022: Pacific Century – E Hoʻomau no Moananuiākea with Melissa Chiu and Miwako Tezuka; and Mai ho‘ohuli i ka lima i luna (2020) with Kapulani Landgraf and Kaili Chun.
- Sháńdíín Brown (Diné) — Sháńdíín Brown is a curator, creative, and citizen of the Navajo Nation from Arizona. She is the first Henry Luce Curatorial Fellow for Native American Art at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum. She co-curated Being and Believing in the Natural World, which is currently on view at the RISD Museum. Brown is also adjunct faculty in the Apparel Design department at RISD. Her forthcoming exhibition at the RISD Museum for fall 2023 explores Diné textiles and fashion. Brown’s research interests include Indigenous fashion, jewelry, art and feminism. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, where she earned her BA in Anthropology as well as Native American Studies and minored in Environmental Studies. Previously she has held positions at the Heard Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Penn Museum, Institute of American Indian Arts, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, School for Advanced Research, and Indian Arts Research Center. Her jewelry can be viewed on Instagram @T.Begay.Designs.
- Napatsi Iola Qiluyak Joy Folger (Inuk [Iqaluit, Nunavut]) — Napatsi Folger is an Inuk comic artist, fiction, non-fiction, and children’s literature writer from Iqaluit, Nunavut. She now lives in North Vancouver, BC and graduated from the University of British Columbia with an MFA in Creative Writing in 2021. Folger is an Associate Editor for Inuit Art Quarterly, where her comics were featured as a limited series in 2020. Her work has also been featured most recently in Studio Magazine, Maisonneuve, Carousel Magazine, Long Con Magazine, The Walrus, Matrix Magazine, Taddle Creek, Word Hoard, and Puritan Magazine, as well as various exhibition texts across Canada. Folger’s first book, Joy of Apex, was published in 2011 by Inhabit Media.
- Tristen Harwood (Ngalakan, Nunggubuyu) — Tristen Harwood is an Indigenous writer, editor, and a lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts. His work engages in environmental philosophy, decolonial theory, and anticolonial praxis. He has published in
Australiaand internationally on Indigenous art, architecture, and literature. He is a member of the ecofeminist collective, Plumwood Committee, and is a contributing editor at MeMo Review, a Narrm/Melbourne-based platform for art criticism. Tristen has recently commenced PhD studies, regarding the relationships between art, dispossession, and enclosure in settler-colonial nations.
- Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi (Ninilchik Tribe, Alutiiq/Sugpiaq) — Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi (Alutiiq) is an art historian, author and museum consultant based in Kachemak Bay in Alaska. For the past decade, she has served as the program director for the “Journey to What Matters: Increased Alaska Native Art & Culture” project at The CIRI Foundation, an Alaska Native non-profit focused on education and heritage. Her work at the Foundation includes supporting Alaska Native art revitalization projects, in addition to overseeing an art writing initiative, a museum sovereignty program and an Alaska Native emerging artist leader program. In addition, Nadia is a contributing author for First American Art Magazine and an occasional art history instructor. She is inspired by the concept of sovereignty and the idea that the arts connect us across generations and cultures. Her art writing practice is focused on documenting Alaska Native and circumpolar art histories.
- Alexandra Rose Nordstrom (Poundmaker Cree Nation) — Alexandra Rose Nordstrom is a PhD student in the Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Art History at Concordia University and a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship recipient. She holds an MA in art history from Concordia University (2020) and a BA in art history from the University of British Columbia (2018). Raised in Treaty Six territory in Saskatchewan, Alexandra is a member of the Poundmaker Cree Nation.
Estuaries will consider how Indigenous histories can be strengthened in their expansion and transmission between generations and territories through visual, gestural, and verbal languages. This residency focuses on river- and lake-shores, springs and estuaries, as storied places of local Indigenous nations as well as sites of reciprocity and entanglement between many living beings.
The residency will take place over two separate weeks: online from Monday May 15th to Friday May 19th, and in-person from Monday May 29th to Sunday June 4th at Forge Project, located on the unceded homelands of the Mu-he-con-ne-ok (People of the Waters that are Never Still) in Upstate New York.
Visit Momus Residencies or contact Lauren Wetmore, Director of Programs, at programs@momus.ca, for more information.
