Biographies

Curator

Wendy Red Star

Wendy Red Star lives and works in Portland, OR. Red Star has exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), both of which have her works in their permanent collections; Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain (Paris, France), Domaine de Kerguéhennec (Bignan, France), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Hood Art Museum (Hanover, NH), St. Louis Art Museum (St. Louis, MO), Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis, MN), the Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL), among others. 

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (Fort Worth, TX), the Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO), the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College (Clinton, NY), the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (Durham, NC), the Birmingham Museum of Art (Birmingham, AL), the Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA), the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY), and the British Museum (London, UK), among others.

She served a visiting lecturer at institutions including Yale University (New Haven, CT), the Figge Art Museum (Davenport, IA), the Banff Centre (Banff, Canada), National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (Melbourne, Australia), Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH), CalArts (Valencia, CA), Flagler College (St. Augustine, FL), and I.D.E.A. Space in Colorado Springs (Colorado Springs, CO). In 2017, Red Star was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and in 2018 she received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Her first career survey exhibition “Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth” was on view at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey through May 2019, concurrently with her first New York solo gallery exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters. 

Red Star is currently exhibiting at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL), The Broad (Los Angeles, CA), Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (Santa Cruz, NM), The Drawing Center (New York, NY), The Rockwell Museum (Corning, NY), amongst others. Her new solo exhibition American Progress is on view at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University (Stanford, CA) through August 2022.

Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles.  She is represented by Sargent’s Daughters.

Artists

Rebecca Belmore

Rebecca Belmore is a member of the Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe) and is an internationally recognized multidisciplinary artist.

Rooted in the political and social realities of Indigenous communities, Belmore’s works make evocative connections between bodies, land and language. Solo exhibitions include: Facing the Monumental, Art Gallery of Ontario (2018); Rebecca Belmore: Kwe, Justina M.Barnicke Gallery (2014); The Named and The Unnamed, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, (2002). In 1991, Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother was created at the Banff Centre for the Arts with a national tour in 1992 and subsequent gatherings took place across the Canada in 1996, 2008, and 2014.

In 2017, Belmore participated in documenta 14 with Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany. In 2005, at the Venice Biennale, she exhibited Fountain in the Canadian Pavilion. Other group exhibitions include: Landmarks2017 / Reperes2017, Partners in Art (2017); Land Spirit Power, National Gallery of Canada (1992); and the IV Bienal de la Habana (1991).

Belmore received the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA Award (2004), the Hnatyshyn Visual Arts Award (2009), the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2013), and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2016). She received honourary doctorates from OCAD University (2005), Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2018), and NSCAD University (2019).

Nalikutaar, Jacqueline Cleveland
(Yup’ik)

Nalikutaar, Jacqueline Cleveland is a subsistence hunter, fisherwoman, and gatherer from Quinhagak and a citizen of the Native Village of Kwinhagak Tribal Government. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Media and Theater Arts and a minor in Native American Studies from Montana State University, Bozeman. As a filmmaker and photographer, her work focuses on elevating the languages and cultures of Alaska Native peoples. She is currently working with Alaska Venture Fund as a project manager for Aywaa Storyhouse, on stories that feature the impacts of climate change on the people and communities of rural Alaska.

Martine Gutierrez

Martine Gutierrez is a transdisciplinary artist, performing, writing, composing and directing elaborate narrative scenes to subvert pop-cultural tropes in the exploration of identity—both personally and collectively intersectional to the cultural discriminations of race, gender, class and nationality. Her amass of media—ranging from billboards to episodic films, music videos and renowned magazine, Indigenous Woman—produce the very conduits of advertising that sell the identities she disassembles. Her examination of advertising allows for Gutierrez to hybridize the industry’s objectification of sex with the individual’s pursuit of self, satirically undermining the aesthetics of what we know. While she manufactures ‘celebrity’ to pass as multinational corporations, it is Gutierrez herself who executes every role—simultaneously acting as subject, artist, and muse. Challenging the construction of binaries through the blurring of their borders, Gutierrez insists that gender, like all things, is entangled—and argues against the linear framework of oppositional thinking. These complicated intersections are innate to Gutierrez’ own multicultural upbringing as a first-generation artist of indigenous descent and as an LGBTQ ally. Her malleable, ever-evolving self-image catalogs the confluence of seemingly disparate modes, conveying limitless potential for reinvention and reinterpretation.

Gutierrez’s earlier bodies of work—Real Doll (2013), Girl Friends (2014) and Line Up (2014)—explore gender, intimacy and fantasy, often incorporating mannequins as ambiguous characters in constantly shifting realities. Her semi-autobiographical film, Martine Part I – IX (2012 – 2016), is a meditation on personal transformation that begun while she was an undergraduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design, and was finished years later as a young artist in New York City. The episodic video work follows the eponymous character from Providence to New York via Central America and the Caribbean, communing with urban architecture and natural elements such as sand, water and air. Martine negotiates the permanent and the fleeting, moving from place to place, as she journeys to self-discovery.

In 2018, Gutierrez produced Indigenous Woman, a 124-page magazine replete with fashion spreads, product advertisements and a Letter from the Editor all dedicated, as Gutierrez describes it, to “the celebration of Mayan Indian heritage, the navigation of contemporary indigeneity and the ever-evolving self-image.” Through the style and construct of the glossy magazine, Gutierrez subverts conventional ideals of beauty to reveal how deeply sexism, racism, transphobia and other biases are embedded in our culture. This body of work has been exhibited all over the world, including the 58th Venice Biennale.

Gutierrez received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012. She is also a published musician and has produced several commercial videos. Gutierrez lives and works in New York.

Her work has been featured in several museum exhibitions, including the Australian Centre for Photography’s Martine Gutierrez ‘Body en Thrall’ (2020), the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth’s FOCUS: Martine Gutierrez (2019), and the Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh’s WE & THEM & ME (2016).

Gutierrez has also been included in exhibitions at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston (2021); Bowdoin College Museum of Art (2021); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2021); McNay Art Museum, San Antonio (2021); Rockwell Museum, New York (2020); Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College (2019); Hayward Gallery, London (2019); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (2019); the New Museum, New York (2018); Arnot Art Museum, Elmira (2017); Lowe Gallery at Hofstra University (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (2017); Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park (2017); Boston University Art Gallery (2016); and the McNay Art Museum, (2015).

Her work has been acquired by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; The Frances Lehman Loeb Museum, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, RI; Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Koyoltzintli

Koyoltzintli, is an interdisciplinary artist, healer, and educator living in the USA. She grew up on the Pacific coast and the Andean mountains in Ecuador, these are geographies that permeate her work. She focuses on sound, ancestral technologies, ritual, and storytelling through collaborative processes and personal narratives. Intersectional theories and earth-based healing inform her practice. Nominated for Prix Pictet in 2019, her work has been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, the United Nations, Aperture Foundation in NYC, and Paris Photo, among others. She has been an artist in residence in the US, France, and Italy and has taught at CalArts, SVA, ICP, and CUNY. She has received multiple awards and fellowships including the Photographic Fellowship at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the NYFA Fellowship, and the IA grant by the Queens Council of the Arts. Her first monograph Other Stories was published in 2017 by Autograph ABP, and her work was featured in the Native issue of Aperture Magazine (no. 240). In 2021, her work was included in the book Latinx Photography in the United States by Elizabeth Ferrer chief curator at BRIC. In 2022 she is one of the artists in residence at Socrates Sculpture Park and she has been awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship by US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF).

Duane Linklater

Duane Linklater is an Omaskêko Ininiwak artist and was born in 1976. He is currently based in North Bay, Ontario. He attended the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College in upstate New York, USA, completing his Master of Fine Arts in Film and Video. Linklater’s practice is concerned in part with the exploration of the physical and theoretical structures of the museum in relation to the current and historical conditions of Indigenous people and their objects and forms. These explorations are articulated in a myriad of forms including sculpture, photography, film and video, installation and text works.

Linklater has exhibited his work nationally and internationally at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (2015), Vancouver Art Gallery (2015), 80 WSE Gallery in New York City (2017), Institute of Contemporary Arts Philadelphia (2015), the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City (2015), Documenta 13 (2012), the SeMa Biennale in Seoul Korea (2016), Taipei Biennial (2018), and the Liverpool Biennial (2018) to name a few. Recent projects include a solo exhibition at the Eli And Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, a commission at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a project at the newly reopened Artists Space in New York City. Duane has also received several prizes including the 2013 Sobey Art Award, a national annual prize given to an artist under 40 and more recently the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award from the Canada Council for the Arts in 2016.

Duane is currently represented by Catriona Jeffries Vancouver.

Guadalupe Maravilla

Guadalupe Maravilla is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. In 2016, Maravilla became a U.S. citizen and adopted the name Guadalupe Maravilla in solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as his last name. As an acknowledgment to his past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts belonging to undocumented communities and the cancer community. 

Combining pre-colonial Central American ancestry, personal mythology, and collaborative performative acts, Maravilla’s performances, objects, and drawings trace the history of his own displacement and that of others. Culling the entangled fictional and autobiographical genealogies of border crossing accounts, Maravilla nurtures collective narratives of trauma into celebrations of perseverance and humanity. Across all media, Maravilla explores how the systemic abuse of immigrants physically manifests in the body, reflecting on his own battle with cancer, which began in his gut. Maravilla’s large-scale sculptures, titled Disease Throwers, function as headdresses, instruments, and shrines through the incorporation of materials collected from sites across Central America, anatomical models, and sonic instruments such as conch shells and gongs. Described by Maravilla as “healing machines”, these Disease Throwers ultimately serve as symbols of renewal, generating therapeutic, vibrational sound.

Maravilla currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Additionally, he has performed and presented his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Queens Museum, New York; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Museum of Art of El Salvador, San Salvador; X Central American Biennial, Costa Rica; New York;, Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, New York; and the Drawing Center, New York, among others.

Awards and fellowships include; The 2021 Joan Mitchell Fellowship, LatinX Fellowship 2021, Lise Wilhelmsen Art award 2021, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship 2019, Soros Fellowship: Art Migration and Public Space 2019, Map fund 2019, Creative Capital Grant 2016, Franklin Furnace 2018, Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant 2016, Art Matters Grant 2013, Art Matters Fellowship 2017, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship 2018, Dedalus Foundation Grant 2013 and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Award 2003. Residencies include; LMCC Workspace, SOMA, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Drawing Center Open Sessions.

Maravilla has been featured in the NY Times, Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, the Guardian, Art Forum and many other publications.

Kimowan Metchewais

Kimowan Metchewais was a significant figure in the Native art world. He was born in Oxbow, Saskatchewan, October 2, 1963. He used his step-father Bruce’s name- McLain, until later in life when he began to go by his mother Ada’s maiden name – Metchewais. He spent his childhood and early adulthood on the Cold Lake First Nations reserve in Alberta. He began his artistic career working as an illustrator and later editor at Windspeaker Native Newspaper from 1983 to 1989. From 1992 to 1996 he attended the University of Alberta in Edmonton, receiving his Bachelors of Fine Arts. It was during this time, in 1993, at age 29, that he was diagnosed with oligodendroglioma, a rare form of brain tumor. The surgery to remove the tumor and following radiation left McLain with a permanent bald spot on the back of his head would feature in his art in later years. He was told that life expectancy for this condition was 11-12 years. Despite his illness, in 1995 Kimowan received the Ellen Battel Stoekel Fellowship to spend the summer at Yale University and in 1996 he received a National Award from the Canadian Native Arts Foundation. He continued on to complete his Master of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, from 1996 to 1999. It was there he met life-long friend Larry McNeil. Kimowan then made the move to Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he began teaching in the Art Department at the University of North Carolina, and continuing to exhibit his own work in both solo exhibitions and group exhibitions. In Chapel Hill he lived in the neighborhood of Carrboro, a small, relaxed community attached to the larger college town. At this time, Kimowan developed an interest in “hooping” – hula-hooping as a spiritual activity–founding a collective and developing many close friendships through the hobby. He also began making trips home to Cold Lake and documenting the people and places there. In 2005, following symptoms of his tumor returning, McLain underwent a relatively complication-free surgery that allowed him to return directly to work, including participation in the well-received Loom exhibition. In 2007 Kimowan underwent surgery once again but due to complications from the surgery, Kimowan was left partially paralyzed. For a year, Kimowan worked diligently at rehabilitation, even developing his own rehab program he called “Kimochi,” and was eventually able to return both to work and hooping. During his time at the hospital he met his eventual fiancée, Antje Thiessen. Following his return to work, Kimowan continued to evolve his artistic practice – producing what some called his magnum opus – Cold Lake in 2004 and the evocative self-portrait Raincloud in 2010. Both pieces are examples of the space Kimowan gracefully navigated, between Native and Western sensibilities and artistic practices in his work. In 2011 his symptoms returned for a final time and he returned to his mother’s home in St. Paul, Alberta, with Thiessen, for palliative care. He passed away on July 29, 2011. A retrospective of his work Horizon: Kimowan Metchewais (McLain) was shown that fall at the John and June Allcott Gallery, University of North Carolina.

*Source: https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/archives/sova-nmai-ac-084

Alan Michelson

Alan Michelson is an internationally recognized New York-based artist, curator, writer, lecturer and Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River.

For over twenty-five years, he has been a leading practitioner of a socially engaged, critically aware, site-specific art grounded in local context and informed by the retrieval of repressed histories. Sourcing from both indigenous and western culture, he works in a varied range of media and materials, among them painting, sculpture, photography, sound, video, glass, and stone.

He is the recipient of several awards, including an NEA Visual Artists Fellowship, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship, and the GSA Design Award, Citation in Art. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Canada, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

His practice includes public art, and Mantle, his large-scale monument honoring Virginia’s Indian nations, was recently dedicated on Capitol Square in Richmond. Michelson is co-founder and co-curator, with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, of the Indigenous New York series.

Marianne Nicolson

Marianne Nicolson is an artist activist of the Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nations.  The Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw Nations are part of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala speaking peoples) of the Pacific Northwest Coast.  She is trained in both traditional Kwakwaka’wakw forms and culture and contemporary gallery and museum-based practice.  She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1996), a Master of Fine Arts (2000) from the University of Victoria, as well as a Master of Arts (2005) in Linguistics and Anthropology and a PhD (2013) in Linguistics and Anthropology with a focus on space as expressed in the Kwak’wala language.  Nicolson works as a Kwakwaka’wakw cultural researcher and historian, as well as an advocate for Indigenous land rights.  Her practice is multi-disciplinary encompassing photography, painting, carving, video, installation, monumental public art, writing and speaking.  All her work is political in nature and seeks to uphold Kwakwaka’wakw traditional philosophy and worldview through contemporary mediums and technology.  Exhibitions include the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia; The Vancouver Art Gallery, The National Museum of the American Indian in New York, Nuit Blanche in Toronto, Ontario, Museum Arnhem, Netherlands and many others.  Major monumental public artworks are situated in Vancouver International Airport, the Canadian Embassy in Amman, Jordan and the Canadian Embassy in Paris, France. 

Program Partner

Christopher T. Green

Christopher T. Green is a writer and art historian whose research, teaching, and curating focus on modern and contemporary art, Native North American art and material culture, primitivisms of the historic and neo-avant-garde, and the global representation and display of Indigenous art and culture. His current research focuses on contemporary Tlingit art and the interrelation of twentieth century Northwest Coast Native art and Euro-American modernism. His criticism, essays, and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, frieze, Aperture, and The Brooklyn Rail, amongst others, and he has contributed catalogue essays to the New Museum, Heard Museum, Artists Space, BRIC, the James Gallery, and the Fondation Fernet-Branca. His scholarly research has been published in ARTMargins, Winterthur Portfolio, ab-Original, and BC Studies, and in 2019 he co-edited issue 11 of SHIFT: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, “BLOOD AND EARTH AND SOIL.” He curated “Speculations on the Infrared,” January 30–March 6, 2021 at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts.

Green earned a M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Art History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and an A.B. in Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. His research has been supported by the Dedalus Foundation, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, the International Council for Canadian Studies, the Sealaska Heritage Institute, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College.