In Progress / Forthcoming
“‘Don’t Bump Her’: Natani Notah and the Indigenous Feminist Art of Resurgence.” (In Progress)
This article considers Natani Notah’s IMPACT, a series of found object sculptures comprising discarded auto parts, leather fringe, and beading, arguing that she draws from dynamic Native aesthetic customs and worldviews to evoke intertwined Indigenous feminist concerns about ecological damage and violence against Native women.
“Primitivism, Posing, and the Racial Politics of Dance in John Sloan’s Nude Studies of Edna Guy.” (In Progress)
In the late 1920s, U.S. painter John Sloan produced a series of nude studies during the winters he spent in New York, many featuring American Indian items he collected during his summers in Santa Fe. One model stands out as the only Black woman that Sloan repeatedly hired: Edna Guy, an African-American involved in the modern dance movement. That Sloan frequently chose to pose Guy nude with Native props is notable, and suggests a transference of Otherness whereby the absent Native woman and suggestions of her sexuality are brought forth by the Black body of Guy. This essay critically unpacks the pairing of bare flesh and American Indian objects, considering the fraught intersections of race, gender, and preconceptions thereof that circulated in the years Sloan was producing these works.
Book
Modern Arts in New Mexico: Transcultural Dialogues on Indigeneity, Authenticity, and Gender. (Under Contract, University of Nebraska Press)
This book is an art historical examination of work produced in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico during the early twentieth century. Proceeding via case studies of both Native and non-Native artists – namely Pueblo and Anglo – the overarching agenda of the project involves tracking transcultural dialogues that circulated among the artists and their works while maintaining an emphasis on the agency of the Pueblo artists as well as their Anglo colleagues. These case studies have been carefully chosen to represent Native and non-Native practices, male and female viewpoints, and a range of mediums: Chapter One examines the pottery production practices of Maria and Julian Martinez, Chapter Two focuses on the oil paintings and prints of John Sloan, Chapter Three unpacks the watercolor paintings of Tonita Peña, and Chapter Four considers the mural paintings of Olive Rush. These artists are connected to one another via circumstance and agenda; most of them knew one another, and they were all in contact with anthropologist Edgar L. Hewett, a significant cultural figure in early-twentieth-century-Santa Fe who was invested in promoting Native arts of the area as well as in attracting contemporary Anglo artists to visit. Moreover, each artist mobilized – in different ways, and toward varying ends – the fallacy of the “authentic Indian” in ways that interrogate the notion but also in many ways reify it. Perceptions of authenticity and Indianness were further complicated by circulating stereotypes regarding gender and the appropriate art making methods and materials for men versus women. This book thus considers the impact of gender on the production and reception of the works under investigation, taking into account biases and customs regarding gender in the Anglo as well as the Pueblo contexts, ultimately providing a rich, intersectional reading of the art and politics of the American Southwest during the early twentieth century.
Articles / Chapters / Catalogue Essays
“Indigenous Feminisms and Contemporary Native Art: Countering the Gendered Violence of Extractivism.” In Digging Earth: Extractivism and Resistance on Indigenous Lands of the Americas, edited by Catherine Bernard, 121-146. Cambridge, UK: Ethics International Press, 2024.
This chapter presents the works of two contemporary Indigenous artists who use their art practices to counter the gendered violence of extractivism. Emma Robbins (Diné) contends with histories of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation, continuing effects of radon poisoning, and roles of women in coping with resultant problems in Diné communities today. Angelica Trimble-Yanu (Oglala Lakota Sioux Nation) abstractly represents the Makȟóšiča (Badlands) and Ȟe Sápa (Black Hills) of her South Dakota homelands, symbolizing the significance of these landscapes for her as a Lakota woman and indirectly critiquing the pipeline construction to which these lands and their peoples have been subject. I argue that their works should be contextualized via Native feminisms, highlighting Indigenous customs within which women are epistemologically connected to the Earth as well as the interrelated histories of colonial violence against Native women and Native lands alike—violence that persists in the form of extractivist industries today.
“Bittersweet: Caribbean Diasporas, Transnational Feminisms, and Commodity Consumptions in Victoria Ravelo’s Hidden in Plain View.” In Nourish and Resist: Food and Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art, edited by Hannah Ryan and Lesley A. Wolff. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024. https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31718.
In 2021, Cuban-American artist Victoria Ravelo produced Hidden in Plain View, a series of molten sugar sculptures encasing items donated by local community members. This essay proposes a three-pronged interpretation of the project, exploring how Ravelo’s project evokes the intertwined impacts of sugar production and black African slave labor in Caribbean communities; presents a transnational feminist approach referencing both the nourishing cultural familiarity of sugar-sweetened Cuban coffee and resistance against the domestic labor historically expected of Cuban women; and alludes to the once precious and now quotidian status of sugar, ultimately calling into question the costs of commodities, their conveyance of social clout, and our material and emotional attachments to them.
“Diné Decolonization: The Art and Activism of Hannabah Blue and Bean (Jolene) Nenibah Yazzie.” In “Keeping the Faith: Religion, Gender, and the Arts in the Twenty-First Century,” edited by Gillian Hannum and Kyunghee Pyun. Special issue, Religion and the Arts 27, no. 1-2 (2023): 62-85.
In 2019, Diné artist Bean (Jolene) Nenibah Yazzie and their partner, poet and Tribal health advocate Hannabah Blue (also Diné), decided to get married. Desiring a traditional Diné ceremony, they sought a medicine person who would conduct a marriage ceremony. They struggled to find one, instead experiencing the homophobic and misogynistic ramifications of settler colonialism that continue to echo in their community. As in many Indigenous cultures, pre-invasion Diné customs considered women to be powerful leaders and protectors of their communities, and these customs simultaneously accepted and even celebrated gender variance beyond the cisgender male-female binary. But with colonization came the imposition of reductive gender roles drained of both respect for women and recognition of non-binary identities.
“Native Feminisms and Contemporary Art: Indigeneity, Gender, and Diné Resurgence in the Work of Natani Notah and Jolene Nenibah Yazzie.” In Expanding the Parameters of Feminist Artivism, edited by Gillian Hannum and Kyunghee Pyun, 29-49. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
This essay considers the ways contemporary artists have taken up Native feminisms in their works, focusing on the practices of two Diné women: Natani Notah and Jolene Nenibah Yazzie. These artists decolonize canons of contemporary art and feminisms by underscoring the detrimental effects that heteropatriarchal, colonialist frameworks have had on Indigenous peoples’ lived experiences, while making space for a resurgence of the aesthetic and political power of Diné women’s epistemologies.
“From the Ground Up: Diné Women Artists Fight for Environmental Justice” Art in America (November 2022): 66-71.
This article presents the works of four Diné artists—Jane Benale, Natani Notah, Emma Robbins, and Bean (Jolene) Nenibah Yazzie—whose practices draw from their identities as Diné women and investments in addressing the environmental injustices caused by uranium mining on Dinétah (Diné homelands).
Introduction to Patrick Dean Hubbell: Tack Room, 4-5. Santa Fe: Gerald Peters Gallery, 2022. Exhibition catalogue.
This essay features as the introduction to the exhibition catalogue for Patrick Dean Hubbell: Tack Room, a 2022 show at Gerald Peters Gallery’s Santa Fe space. In the text, I consider the ways this Diné artist’s Tack Room installation functions as an evocative and highly personal synthesis of Hubbell’s experience growing up on his family’s Navajo Nation farmland, deep connections to Diné heritage, and struggles he has faced as a Native artist in the contemporary art world—an arena that continues to discount the contributions of artists outside the insular Euro-American mainstream.
“Tonita Peña and the Politics of Pueblo Art.” American Art 35, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 62-93.
During the early twentieth century, Pueblo artists took up watercolor painting, using the new (to them) medium to produce largely representational scenes of community activities. Tonita Peña was the only woman in this group, necessitating her navigation of gender as well as racial stereotypes. Peña was expected to produce the abstracted imagery seen on Pueblo pottery, a visual style and art form long coded as women’s work. Using a series of images in which Peña depicts women making Pueblo pottery as an interpretive linchpin, I argue that these scenes foreground the care Peña took to avoid inappropriate revelations of Pueblo sacred knowledge. They also evince an epistemological celebration of a practice considered women’s work even as she pictorialized it in a medium and style deemed inappropriate for her gender.
Native Feminisms. New York: apexart, 2021. Exhibition brochure.
This essay was written to accompany Native Feminisms, an exhibition presenting the works of contemporary Native artists who identify as feminist and whose practices address urgent intersectional concerns regarding decolonization efforts, feminine aesthetic traditions, Indigenous ecocriticism, customs of gender fluidity, violence against Native women and Two-Spirits, and Indigenous Futurisms. The breadth of these topics and their historical and contemporary relevance suggest the discursive potential of Native feminisms, and they are taken up by the participating artists in ways that showcase the aesthetic richness and political power of Native feminist art.
“Weaving the Way Toward Liberty: John Singleton Copley’s Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin (Sarah Morris).” In Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats, edited by Hinda Mandell, 33-46. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
John Singleton Copley’s Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin (Sarah Morris) (1773) shows Sarah weaving decorative fringe on a portable loom. In making her own fringe, Sarah demonstrates her refusal to purchase heavily taxed British goods, instead producing her own. This essay analyzes how the “homespun” took on a radical – and ultimately revolutionary – cadence in the 1770s, as colonists looking for a peaceful way to protest British taxes began producing their own wares. Copley painted several portraits of American revolutionaries, but his depiction of the Mifflins is unique in revealing colonial craftwork as not only political, but gendered. Because women controlled the purchase and consumption of goods in their households as well as the production of homespun alternatives, they were at the forefront of early boycotting campaigns. This essay finds that despite disenfranchisement, women and their gendered labor symbolized a central form of patriotism in the volatile years leading up to the American Revolution.
“‘Playing Indian’ at the Nakoma Country Club.” In Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archive, edited by Barry Bergdoll and Jennifer Gray, 78-95. New York: Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2017. Exhibition catalogue.
In this essay, written to accompany the MoMA exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive, I argue that Wright’s use of American Indian imagery and designs stemmed in part from the context of the Chicago Arts and Crafts Movement, which lauded Native craftwork. Wright’s stained glass, rug, and other designs show his use of American Indian-inflected Arts and Crafts designs. He was also taken with Hermon Atkins MacNeil’s bronze sculptures of Native figures, which he used to decorate his Oak Park home as well as other residences he designed in the area. Wright often declared himself the greatest American architect, untainted by European influence. Yet as Philip Deloria argues in Playing Indian, a common strategy of such differentiation involves Euro-American men aligning themselves with American Indians. I argue that the houses and other commissions of Wright’s early career evince their American-ness by way of Native inspiration, in design and decoration. While these projects have been endlessly analyzed, scant attention has been given to the American Indian influence on Wright’s early work, and I seek to remedy this gap in the literature on this foundational U.S. architect.
“James Luna and the Paradoxically Present Vanishing Indian.” Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture 5, no. 1 (2016): 5-26.
James Luna’s performances interrogate how representations of Native Americans have been made to fit western assumptions about the “real Indian.” Using his recognizably Native body as a marker of both presence and endangered existence, Luna links Peggy Phelan’s conception of performance as the presence of loss with the persisting stereotype of Native Americans as the “vanishing race.” In Take a Picture with a Real Indian, he invites viewers to have their photograph taken with him wearing one of three options: war dance regalia, a loincloth, or khakis and a polo shirt. Few people choose the third option. The performance foregrounds histories of Native Americans performing/posing their Native-ness as Otherness for the camera, strategically employing imagery that plays to nostalgic Western views of Native peoples as perpetually vanishing. I argue that Luna’s performances comment not only upon western preconceptions of Native Americans, but also upon the ways that Native Americans have historically reasserted their agency by manipulating such expectations.
“Activist Art and Abortion Rights in the Post-Roe v. Wade United States: An Analysis of the Archival Works of REPOhistory, Kerr + Malley, and Andrea Bowers.” Nierika: Revista de Estudios de Arte 10 (July-December 2016): 27-44.
Feminists in the U.S. viewed the 1973 passage of Roe v. Wade as an enormous victory. But in subsequent years this legislation was eroded at federal and state levels. Several artists have addressed this situation, yet their work is obscured by a double veil; feminist art is often side-lined, and issues surrounding abortion are further complicated by their polarizing nature. Therefore, artists reckoning with this topic have often taken an archival approach, rendering visible the history of abortion. Here, I address works produced by REPOhistory, Kerr + Ma-lley, and Andrea Bowers. They consider contemporary restrictions by recalling restrictions past; producing works that excavate overlooked accounts of abortion and abortion rights. Their projects productively question the intersection of art and activism, the aesthetic and activist potential of the archive, and the struggle that women face in insisting that their stories be told.
“Art, Activism, and Democracy: WochenKlausur’s Social Interventions.” Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research 40, no. 1 (January 2015): 83-109.
This essay explores the sociopolitical practice of the Austrian art group WochenKlausur. Since 1993, members of this collective have produced what they call “concrete interventions”; using funds provided by various cultural institutions, they enact long-term, problem-solving measures in the surrounding communities. Mobilizing their status as an “art” group, they are able to draw attention to otherwise overlooked social ills. Their practice foregrounds the critical issues that arise when art is paired with activism, including the crucial and much-contested differentiation between ethics and aesthetics. I ultimately find that this group’s practical successes productively, if only locally, intervene in areas that have traditionally been the purview of democratic governments, while their works that fail in these terms serve as a mirror to governments’ own failures to create and maintain programs of social betterment and to promote democratic inclusion.