Estuaries: An International Indigenous Art Criticism Residency

Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi (Sāmoan, Persian, Cantonese) is a visual artist, writer, curator and researcher who works between Australia and Canada. Ia intervenes in display territories to centre Indigenous kin constellations, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial- political practices. Through performance, moving image, writing and installation, ia engages with Indigenous futurities as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that once erased faʻafafine-faʻatane people from kinship and knowledge structures. Eshrāghi has made new commissions for the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Sharjah Biennial 14, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center among other group and solo presentations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Eshrāghi has lectured at gatherings Creative Time, Hawaiʻi Contemporary Art Summit, Experimenter Curators’ Hub, March Meeting, Dhaka Art Summit, Pacific Arts Association, and Asia Pacific Triennial, as well as at universities in Antwerp, San Juan, London, Melbourne, Yogyakarta, Montreal, Honolulu, Auckland and Victoria. Ia contributes to growing international critical practice across the Great Ocean and North America through residencies, exhibitions, publications, teaching, and rights advocacy.

Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Red Hook, New York. She is Executive Director and Chief Curator of Forge Project. Her writing and curatorial practice explores the intersections of history, contemporary art, and indigeneity. She worked as senior curator for the 2019 and 2022 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art and was part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media art collective Isuma. She is co-curator of notable exhibitions including Art for New Understanding: Native Voices 1950s to Now; the 2018 SITE Santa Fe biennial, Casa Tomada; documenta 14 in Athens, Greece, and Kassel, Germany; Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada and Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years in Winnipeg, MB. Her essays include “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier,” for the documenta 14 Reader, “Outlawed Social Life” for South as a State of Mind, and “The Appropriation Debates (or The Gallows of History),” for New Museum/MIT Press. In 2021 she was a recipient of the inaugural Noah Davis Prize, along with Thomas Lax and Jamillah James, and in 2022 received the Leo Award from Independent Curators International.

Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yaktitʸutitʸu yaktiłhini [Northern Chumash]) is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and the Director of Indigenous Programs and Relationality at Forge Project. Their practice is grounded in collaboration across experiences, communities, and place. Relating land and beings throughout nitspu tiłhin ktitʸu, the State of California, and places joined by shared water, political histories, and social contexts, their written and visual texts connect extractive industries, absent treaties, and enclosure to emphasize movement, relational landscapes, and embodied sovereignties.tstaqʰɨnɨʔ tšaqʰinɨ wa tsqʰinɨwana nitspu tiłhinkytitʸu wa nitspu Kanaka ‘Ōiwi wa yatsʔistʸono wa yatsʔisisime wa yatsʔitɨnɨsmuʔ wa University of California, Davis ni Native American Studies. [They listen, learn, and know from their homelands, their family, their kinships, their language, and are currently a PhD candidate in Native American Studies at University of California, Davis.]

Dr. Cathy Mattes (Michif) is a curator, writer, and art history professor based out of Sprucewoods, Manitoba, Canada. Her curation, research, and writing centers on dialogic and Indigenous knowledge-centered curatorial practice as strategies for care. Curatorial projects include Kwaata-nihtaawakihk (Co-curator Sherry Farrell Racette, Winnipeg Art Gallery, March 2022), Radical Stitch (Co-curators Sherry Farrell Racette and Michelle Lavallee, Mackenzie Art Gallery, April 2022), and Inheritance: Amy Malbeuf (March 2017, Kelowna Art Gallery). She has a PhD in Indigenous Studies from the University of Manitoba, and currently teaches at the University of Winnipeg in the History of Art and Curatorial Studies programs. Mattes has been beading since she was 20 years old, when she was first taught by her auntie Jean Baron Ward. Since then she has taught beading and moccasin-making in workshops, university courses, and around her kitchen table with family and friends.

Dr. Maia Nuku, of English and Māori (Ngai Tai) descent, is Curator for the Arts of Oceania at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her doctoral research focused on 18th century collections of Polynesian art and she completed two post-doctoral fellowships at Cambridge University (2008-2014) in England as part of an international research team exploring Oceanic art collections in European institutions (France, Spain, the Netherlands and Russia). This collaborative work alongside Pacific artists, practitioners and scholars sought to create access to these collections both in the physical and digital domains. During her time at the Met, Maia has evolved a curatorial approach that centers indigenous Pacific perspectives, grounding the presentation of visual arts from Oceania in the unique cosmological connections that make art from the region so compelling. Her most recent exhibition Atea: Nature and Divinity in Polynesian Art (2018-2019) explored the close material and genealogical relationships that bind Polynesian islanders with the natural world. She is currently working on a major reinstallation of the Oceania galleries that will reimagine the collection for 21st century audiences and animate the galleries with Pacific voices. 

Pablo José Ramírez is a curator and author living in Berlin. He was the inaugural Adjunct Curator of First Nations and Indigenous Art at Tate Modern (2019-2023). His work explores non-western ontologies, brown and indigenous histories; and the politics of non-colonial aesthetics. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2015 he co-curated the 19th Bienal Paiz: Trans-visible with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill. Ramírez was the recipient of the 2019 Independent Curators International/CPPC Award for Central America and the Caribbean and is currently the Editor in Chief and co-founder of Infrasonica, a curatorial platform dedicated to the research around non-western sonic cultures. Ramírez has lectured for the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, MUAC, Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin, Gasworks, ParaSite, Kunstintituut Melly and a number of academic institutions. He has published extensively including pieces for Artforum, e-flux, Arts of the Working Class, Artishock and a number of museum catalogues and books. Ramírez was part of the curatorial team of the 58th Carnegie International and is currently co-curator with Diana Nawi of the Hammer Museum Biennale, Made in LA 2023: Acts of Living.

Dr. Jolene Rickard (Skarù:ręˀ / Tuscarora) is an Associate Professor at Cornell University in the departments of History of Art and Art, and the former Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program 2008-2020 (AIISP). She is a visual historian, artist and curator interested in the intersection of Indigenous art, cultural theory and the forces of settler colonialism. Her research centers on the expression of multiple sovereignties within Indigenous art and culture globally.

Megan Tamati-Quennell is a leading curator and writer of modern and contemporary Māori and Indigenous art, a field she has specialized in for thirty-three years. She holds the position of Curator of Modern and Contemporary Māori and Indigenous Art at Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, New Zealand and holds an additional position as an external curator at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, Taranaki, New Zealand. Megan is of Te Āti Awa, Ngāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe and Waitaha Māori descent. Her research interests include Māori modernism, contemporary Māori art, international First Nations art, the intersection between the global Indigenous contemporary, non-Western art and modern and contemporary art, and First Nations art curatorial praxis. 

River Whittle is a multidisciplinary two-spirit artist based in photography, shellwork, metals, clay, and printmaking. She currently lives in Anadarko, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma and a descendant of the Delaware Nation of Oklahoma. River holds a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity with a concentration in Identity, Diversity, and Aesthetics. River is currently in a masters program pursuing a Public Health degree with an Indigenous Health specialization. River is also the Director of the Branch of Knowledge at Catalyst, where she works on increasing pathways home for Lenape people in their homelands. In her spare time, River runs youth mentorship programming for Native youth focusing on the arts.

Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick (Kanaka ʻŌiwi) is an artist, curator, and educator from Mōkapu, a peninsula on the windward side of Oʻahu, in US-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) 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]) 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. She is working as the Tauttunnguaqti 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) 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 Australia and 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) 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 Nordstrom is a Montréal-based cultural worker, curator, researcher, and art historian. Her work explores Indigenous knowledge systems, with a focus on Cree worldviews, land-based learning, and creative practice. She is co-curator of the Poundmaker Museum and Gallery and co-director of Sarasa Performance Laboratory (formerly Miyawata Culture Inc.). Her writing has appeared in Room, C Magazine, Canadian Art, the exhibition catalogue for the Contemporary Native Art Biennial – 6th edition, and RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review.