PETE R BLUM GALLERY

NICHOLAS GALANIN

Born 1979 in Sitka, Alaska Lives and works in Sitka, Alaska.

EDUCATION 2007 Masters of Indigenous Visual Arts, Massey University, New Zealand 2003 B.A. Silversmithing and Jewelry Design with honors, London Guildhall University, London, UK 1999 Associate of Arts, University of Alaska Southeast, Sitka, AK 1997-2006 Traditional Master Apprenticeship with Carvers Will Burkhart, Louis Minard, Jay Miller, Wayne Price, Dave Galanin

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2020 Carry a Song / Disrupt an Anthem, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY 2019 Everything We’ve Ever Been, Everything We are Right Now, Law Warschaw Gallery, Saint Paul, MN They’re Threatened by your Survival, Art Mur, Montreal, QC, Canada The Value of Sharpness: When it Falls, Open Source Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2018 Dear Listener: Works by Nicholas Galanin, The Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ The Imaginary Indian, Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, AK 2017 Indian Water: The Native American Pavilion, Venice, Italy We Dreamt Deaf, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA I Think It Goes Like This, Peters Project, Sante Fe, NM 2016 Kill The Indian, Save The Man. Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, AK. 2015 e.g. Nicholas Galanin: We Will Again Open This Container of Wisdom That Has Been Left in Our Care, Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, UT 2014 Home, Memory of Land & Space, Trench Contemporary, Vancouver, BC, Canada 2013 Ever Shoot an Indian?, The Audain Gallery, Victoria, BC, Canada The State of Being, Displaced, Alaska State Museum, Juneau, AK When the Land Forgets You, How Will You Carry On?, ANAF, Anchorage, AK 2012 I Looooove Your Culture, Trench Contemporary, Vancouver BC, Canada Things Are Looking Native, Native’s Looking Whiter, Bunnell St. Gallery, Homer, AK The Tlingit Experience, The Mckenna Museum of African American Art, New Orleans, LA 2011 Nicholas Galanin's First Law of Motion, Toronto Free Gallery, Toronto, ON, Canada New Culture, Trench Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada 2010 Raven and the First Immigrant, UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, BC, Canada Oblique Drift, Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Sante Fe, NM 2009 Oblique Drift, Grunt Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada Native Preference, ANAF Gallery, Anchorage, AK 2006 What Have We Become?, Takatake Gallery, Whakatane, New Zealand

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SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2020 (upcoming) Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (upcoming) Sanctuary, Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, ON, Canada (upcoming) 2020 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY Indigenous Futurisms: Transcending Past, Present, Future, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM Native Voices, 1950s to Now: Art for a New Understanding, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN 2019 Survivance And Sovereignty On Turtle Island: Engaging With Contemporary Native American Art, Kupferberg Holocaust Center, New York, NY The Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY The Value of Sanctuary, The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, NY Unraveling: Reimagining Colonization in the Americas, Sun Valley Center for Arts, Ketchum, ID Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS The Honolulu Biennial: To Make Wrong / Right / Now, Honolulu Museum, Honolulu, HI Aiviq and Nanuq: Sea horse and sea bear of the arctic, Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, AK 2018 Unsettled, Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, FL Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now, Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR Conflicting Heroes, Native Art Biennial, Berlin, Germany The Condor and the Eagle: Moving Forward After Standing Rock, Elisabeth Jones Art Center, Portland, OR I Continue to Shape, Art Museum, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Believe, MOCA, Toronto, ON, Canada Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It, Mainsite Contemporary, Norman, OK The Abundant North: Alaska Native Films of Influence, MOCNA, Sante Fe, NM Between Beauty and Decay, Artspace New Haven, CT Monarchs Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly, Bemis Center, Omaha, NE 2017 Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound, National Museum of the American Indian, New York, NY We The Hell Am I, Lightyear, Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY Out Of Sight, Seattle, WA Sanctuary, Fort-Site Foundation, San Francisco, CA Monarchs, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE Broken Boxes, Form & Concept, Sante Fe, NM American Domain, Museum of Capitalism, Los Angeles, CA Waterline, Center for Visual Art, Denver, CO Single Channel Video Installation, Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, D.C. Standing Rock: Art & Solidarity, The Autry Museum, Los Angeles, CA Songs From The Extraction Zones, Sante Fe Art Institute, Sante Fe, NM Converge, Reed College, Portland, OR Resistance: Art After Nature, Haverford College, Haverford, PA

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Native Fashion Now, National Museum of The American Indian, New York, NY Decolonizing Alaska, Corcoran School of The Arts & Design, Washington, D.C. Decolonizing Alaska, Alaska State Museum, Juneau, AK This Is A Creation Story, California State University, Fresno, CA Unsettled, Nevada Art Museum, Reno, Nevada Connective Tissue: New Approaches to Fiber in Contemporary Art, MOCNA, Sante Fe, NM My Country Tis of Thy People, You’re Dying, Radiator Arts, New York, NY View From Up Here, Northern Norway Art Museum, Tromsø, Norway 2016 Latitude 64, Kajaani Art Museum, Kajaani, Finland Life Size, Art Mur, Montreal, QC, Canada It’s in the Making, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada Without Boundaries: Visual Conversations, Anchorage Museum, Anchorage AK Race and Revolution, Nolan Park, New York, NY Out of Sight, King Station, Seattle, WA What You See is What You Sweat, CoCA, Seattle, WA Light Year 16, Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY From Generation to Generation: Inherited Memory and Contemporary Art, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA Indian Acts: Truths in the Age of Reconciliation, Katzman Contemporary, Toronto, Canada Kingdom, Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, SK, Canada Contemporary Native Art Biennial, Stuart Hall Art Gallery, Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada View from Up Here, Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, AK Native Fashion Now, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR Native Fashion Now, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK Homo Faber: A Rainbow Caravan, Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, Japan The Fifth World, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Kitchener, SK, Canada Dead Animals, or the curious occurrence of taxidermy in contemporary art, David Winton Bell Gallery, Providence, RI Contemporary Native American Indian Photographers and the Legacy of Edward Curtis, Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA Decolonizing Alaska, Bunnell St. Arts Center, Homer, AK 2015 Native Fashion Now, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA Toioho XX, Te Manawa Museum of Art, Palmerston North, New Zealand Our Story, Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, AK You Are On Indian Land, Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff, AZ Living Alaska, Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, AK Beau Dick / Nicholas Galanin / Jeneen Frei Njootli, Macaulay Fine Art, Vancouver, BC, Canada Put A Feather On It!, Red Dot Gallery, Sante Fe, NM 60 Americans, Elga Wimmer PCC, New York, NY You Are On Indian Land, Radiator Arts, New York, NY The Fifth World, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, SK, Canada Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA Personalities: Fantasy and Identity Photography and New Media, Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA 2014 Native Art Now, NONAM, Zürich, Switzerland

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Late Harvest, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV Wendy Red Star’s Wild West And Congress of Rough Riders of The World, Bumbershoot, Seattle, WA Your Fest Has Ended, The Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA Le Symposium International d’art-nature multidisciplinaire, de Val-David, QC, Canada Storytelling: The Contemporary Native Art Biennial, 2nd edition, ArtMur, Montreal, QC, Canada Storytelling, Ottawa School of Art, Ontario, ON, Canada Where Did It Go?, Online, www.ultraextra.org Mother/Land, Kurumaya Museum, Oyama City, Japan Twisted Path III: Questions of Balance, Abbe Museum, Bar Harbor, ME This is Not a Silent Movie, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR I.M.N.D.N. - Native Arts for the 21st Century, The Art Gym, Marylhurst University, Marylhurst, OR Native American Voices, Penn Museum, Philadelphia, PA Porcelain: Breaking Tradition, Division Gallery, Toronto, ON, Canada 2013 RezErect: Native Erotica, Bill Reid Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada Porcelain: Breaking Tradition, Art Mur, Montreal, ON, Canada American Painting Now, WAAS Gallery, Dallas, TX RED: Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN Beat Nation, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada Cross Currents, Center for Visual Art, Denver, CO Who Am I?, Maison des Jésuites de Sillery, QC, Canada Playing with Process: Experimental Prints at the MFAH, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX Sakahàn: 1st International Quinquennial of New Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada SCOPE NYC, International Contemporary Art Show, New York, NY Map(ing), Night Gallery, Phoenix, AZ This is Not a Silent Movie, Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA Two Worlds Indigenous Media and Performance Festival, Royal BC Museum, Victoria, BC, Canada 2012 Process Alaska, Good Question Gallery, New York, NY Carrying on "Irregardless": Humour in Contemporary Northwest Coast Art, Bill Reid Gallery, Vancvouver, BC, Canada Indian Modernism - Art From North America, Humboldt-Forum, Berlin, Germany Beat Nation, The Power Plant, Toronto, ON, Canada Beat Nation, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada A Stake In The Ground, Art Mur, Montreal, QC, Canada Shapeshifting: Transformations In Native American Art, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA 2011 Native American Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH Skin, Raw, Gallery of Architecture and Design, Winnipeg, MB, Canada KINDRED SPIRITS: Native American Influence on 20th Century Art, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY 2010 Time Based Art Festival 2010, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETE R BLUM GALLERY

It's Complicated - Art About Home, Evergreen Gallery, Olympia, WA Dry Ice, Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Sante Fe, NM 100 Records, Gallery 16, San Francisco, CA; Cinders Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, NY Thaw Collection, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN Images Forward, Berlin Gallery, Phoenix, AZ Currents: Native American Forces In Contemporary Art, The University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO Crunchtime, York, England Baie-Saint-Paul’s International Symposium of Contemporary Art, Baie-Saint-Paul, QC, Canada Dry Ice, Princeton Art Museum, Princeton, NJ Currents: Native American Forces In Contemporary Art, Center for Visual Art, Denver, CO The Muhheakantuck in Focus, Wave Hill Gallery, New York, NY A-Y-P: Indigenous Voices Reply, Burke Museum, Seattle, WA Continuum: Vision & Creativity on the Northwest Coast, Bill Reid Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada Beat Nation-Hip Hop as an Indigenous Culture, Saw Gallery/Grunt Gallery, Ottawa, ON, Canada Skabmagovat, Film Festival, Inari, Finland 2008 ImagineNATIVE Film & Media Arts Festival, Toronto, ON, Canada Identity: Shaq'asthut Gathering Place, Roundhouse Community Arts Centre, Vancouver, BC, Canada Northern Disclosure, Bear Gallery, Fairbanks, AK (2005-2008) Second Lives, Museum of Art & Design, New York, NY Twisted Path, Abbe Museum, Bar Harbor, ME Intersections: Native American Art in a New Light, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA 2007 Native Voices: Contemporary Indigenous Art, FiveMyles, Brooklyn, NY On The Edge, Forging New Directions In Alaska Native Art, Museum of the North, Fairbanks, AK No Reservations, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT 2006 Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 2, Museum of Art & Design, New York, NY 2005 Totems To Turquoise, Natural History Museum, New York, NY 2004 Te Tataitanga Matatau, Te Manawa, Palmerston North, New Zealand He Rere Kee, Tinakori Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand 2003 Summer Show, Sir John Cass, London, UK

AWARDS 2018 Rasmuson Fellow Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Fellow 2017 NACF Mentor Fellow 2014 Rasmuson Fellow 2013 Eiteljorg Fellow 2012 United States Artists, USA Rasmuson Fellow Artist of the Year, Greater Sitka Arts Council 2011 Rasmuson Individual Artist Award 2008 Best Experimental Film, ImagineNATIVE Film & Media Arts Festival, Toronto

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Rasmuson Individual Artist Fellowship 2006 1st place, Contemporary Arts, Sealaska 2003 Goldsmiths Commendation London, England

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS NMAI, New York, NY UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver, BC, Canada Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada Humboldt Forum, Berlin, Germany Musée D'Art Contemporain De Baie St-Paul, QC, Canada Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix, AZ Sealaska Heritage Foundation, Juneau, AK Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, AK Pratt Museum, Homer, AK Museum of the North, UAF, Fairbanks, AK Alaska State Museum, Juneau, AK Sir John Cass, London, UK Burke Museum, Seattle, WA CN Gorman Museum, Davis, CA The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX NONAM, Zürich, Switzerland Sitka Historical Society, Sitka, AK Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV Portland State University, Portland, OR LACMA, Los Angeles, CA Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ

ABBREVIATED BOOKS 2018 NICHOLAS GALANIN: Let Them Enter Dancing and Showing Their Faces, Minor Matters Books, Seattle, WA 2017 Unsettled, Nevada Art Museum, Reno, NV Ice Bear, The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon, University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA 2016 Without Boundaries, Visual Conversations, Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, AK Creative Alaska, University of Alaska Press, Anchorage, AK From Generation to Generation, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA Sanders, Terrance. 60 Americans, ArtVoices, Los Angeles, CA Decker, Julie. True North: Contemporay Art of Circumpolar North, Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, AK Aichi Triennale 2016, Nagoya, Japan (catalog)

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2015 Urban Tribes, Annick Press, Toronto, ON, Canada 2014 Late Harvest, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV 2013 RED: Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN 2012 Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art, Yale University Press, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada The Landscape of Being, AGENCY - Art, Life and Society production e-book BLIZZARD: Emerging Northern Artists, Grunt Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada Mithlo, Nancy.Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Sante Fe, NM Carrying on "Irregardless": Humour in Contemporary Northwest Coast Art, Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, Vancvouver BC, Canada, Harbour Publishing 2011 KINDRED SPIRITS: Native American Influences on 20th Century Art, New York: Peter Blum Edition Native American Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art, Hood Museum of Art, Hood/UPNE Book Art: Iconic Sculptures and Installations Made from Books, Published by Gestalten 2008 Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY 2007 No Reservations: Native American History and Culture in Contemporary Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT 2006 What Have We Become?, Self-Published 2005 Totems to Turquoise, The Natural History Museum, New York, NY McFadden, David Revere. Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 2 (Contemporary Native North American Art From West, Northwest & Pacific ), New York : Museum of Arts & Design, 2005.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 2020 Cascone, Sarah. “Editors’ Picks: 17 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week”, Artnet news, March 2, 2020. Battaglia, Andy. “Ancient to the Future: Nicholas Galanin Aims to Change How Indigenous Art Is Understood”, ARTnews, February 13, 2020. Gauss, Daniel. “Carry a Song, Disrupt an Anthem: Nicholas Galanin at Peter Blum Gallery, Manhattan”, Wall Street International, February 10, 2020. Bahadur, Tulika. “Carry a Song / Disrupt an Anthem: Nicholas Galanin On Indigenous Identities and Contemporary Conditions”, OnArtandAesthetics.com, February 7, 2020. Gallaher, Rachel. “Voice of Resistance”, Gray Magazine, Issue 50, February/March 2020. Gaskin, Sam. “Biennale of Sydney to Tackle Race and Colonialism”, OCULA, February 4, 2020. Schneider, Tim. “Editors Picks: 11 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week”, Artnet news, February 3, 2020. FAAZINE. “First American Art Magazine’s Top Ten Native Art Events of 2019”, First American Art Magazine, January 3, 2020. Schmid, Christina. “Nicholas Galanin | LAW WARSCHAW GALLERY, MACALESTER COLLEGE”, Artforum, January 2020.

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETE R BLUM GALLERY

2019 Eler, Alicia. “The year's best Twin Cities art exhibitions were diverse and international”, StarTribune, December 20, 2019. Kroik, Jenny. “Living with Art”, The New Yorker, November 28, 2019. The Editors of ARTnews. “The Most Important Works of the 2010s: Favorite Artworks That Didn’t Make the List”, ARTnews, November 28, 2019. The Editors of ARTnews. “ARTnews in Brief: Liverpool Biennial Names Artists—and More from November 6, 2019”, ARTnews, November 4, 2019. Greenberger, Alex. “Biennale of Sydney Releases Artist List for 2020 Edition With Focus on Indigenous Artists”, ARTnews, September 12, 2019. Galanin, Nicholas. “Standing Together: Whitney Biennial Artist Nicholas Galanin on His Decision in July to Pull Work from the Show”, ARTnews, September 11, 2019 Mitter, Siddhartha. “The Whitney Biennial Called. How Will They Answer?”, The New York Times, May 9, 2019 Green, Christopher. “Nicholas Galanin: The Value of Sharpness: When It Falls”, The Brooklyn Rail, March, 2019 Galanin, Nicholas. “Out of Line: Nicholas Galanin Rejects the Traditional/Contemporary Binary”, Walker Reader (Primer), March 26, 2019 2018 Steinhauer Jillian. “Nicholas Galanin remixes Native American identity at Phoenix’s Heard Museum”, The Art Newspaper, August 6, 2018 Green, Christopher. “Break Open This Container”, Art In America, January 1, 2018 2015 Smith, Matthew Ryan. “Tlingit-Unangax Interdisciplinary Artist Nicholas Galanin”, First American Art Magazine, Issue No. 7, (Summer 2015) 2014 Temenos Academy Review 2014 Smith, Matthew Ryan. “Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan, by Nicholas Galanin”, First American Art Magazine, Issue No. 4, Fall 2012 Walker, Ellyn. “Nicholas Galanin: First Law of Motion”, C Magazine, Issue 113 2008 Jonaitis, Aldona. “A generation of innovators in southeast Alaska: Nicholas Galanin, Stephen Jackson, Da-ka-xeen Mehner and Donald Varnell”, American Indian Art Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 4 (autumn 2008). 2007 Nadelman, Cynthia. “Tribal Hybrids,” ARTnews, Vol 106, No. 6, June 2007 Wallin, Rose. “Painted Bravery: Contemporary Native Artwork Redefines Tradition”, The Anchorage Press, Vol. 16, Ed. 28, July 12, 2007 2006 Genocchio, Ben. “Visions of Native Americans in Today’s World”, The New York Times, September 17, 2006

AFFILIATIONS 2016- Present CERF+ Artist Advisory Committee 2016-present 2013- Present USArtists Fellows Alumni Council First Light Alaska Board Member 2010-19 Sealaska Heritage Artist Advisory Committee

PROFESSORSHIPS 2017 University of Alaska Southeast, Juneau 2016 Adjunct professor, Arts department, University of Alaska Southeast, Sitka, AK 2012 Audain guest professor, 2012 -2013, University of Victoria, BC, Canada

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETE R BLUM GALLERY

SELECTED LECTURES 2018 Oklahoma University, Norman, OK Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI 2017 UBC MOA, Vancouver, BC, Canada WWU, Bellingham, WA 2016 Brown University, Providence, RI American Craft Council, Omaha, NB 2015 University of Washington, Seattle, WA USA Artists Gathering, Chicago, IL 2014 University of Washington, Seattle, WA Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR Marylhurst University, Marylhurst, OR Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA 2013 National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON, Canada Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, QC, Canada 2012 Anchorage Art Museum, Anchorage, AK Ethnology Museum, Berlin, Germany Capilano University, Vancouver, BC, Canada Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA 2011 Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY Humboldt-Forum, Berlin, Germany Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, New York, NY 2010 Emily Carr, Vancouver, BC, Canada University of Washington, Seattle, WA Institute of American Indian Arts, Sante Fe, NM MOCA, Sante Fe, NM 2009 Center for Visual Art, Denver, CO Bill Reid Gallery, Vancouver, BC, Canada Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR

SERVICE/COMMUNITY PROJECTS 2018 42 foot Healing Pole carved for Tlingit T’aaku Kwaan Family, funded by Goldbelt Heritage, to be installed in Juneau, AK Eternal Flame Fire Dish burial ground monument, Sayeik Gastineau Community School, Juneau, AK 2016 28 foot Northern Style Dugout Cedar Canoe, funded through National Park Service, Alaska State Council for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts 2015 Glass Clan House Screen, Walter Sobeleff Center, Sealaska Heritage Juneau AK, created with Preston Singletary, 2015 1999 Sheet’ka Kwaan Naa Kahadi Tribal Community House Screen, Sitka, AK, created with Will Burkhart

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY

Art World Editors’ Picks: 17 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week

From the Armory Party at MoMA to the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, there's something for everyone this week.

Sarah Cascone, March 2, 2020 Thursday, March 5–Sunday, April 5

TOP ROW: Janiva Ellis, Keebler’s Revenge, (2018); Jessica Jackson Hutchins, My Friend the Poet (2019); Trenton Doyle Hancock, Ferroneous & The Monk (1999); Nicholas Galanin, Everything We’ve Ever Been, Everything We Are Right Now – Untitled (Black Figure), 2019; Mike Cloud, F of J (2016). BOTTOM ROW: Lonnie Holley, Busted Without Arms II (2016); Rona Pondick, Magenta Swimming in Yellow (2015–17); Sheila Hicks, Caid Nejjai (1977); Henry Taylor, Portrait of Deana Lawson (2014).

8. “2020 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts” at the American Academy of Arts and Letters This year, more than 150 artists were nominated by members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honorary society of architects, artists, composers, and writ ers, for the organization’s annual show. There are some impressive names—both emerging and established—among the 28 who made the final cut, including Henry Taylor, Janiva Ellis, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Betye Saar, Sheila Hicks, Diana Al -Hadid, and Arthur Jafa. If you’ve never visited the academy, it’s worth the trip uptown. Location: The American Academy of Arts and Letters, 633 West 155th Street, entrance on Audubon Terrace at Broadway between West 155th and 156th Streets Price: Free Time: Thursday–Sunday, 1 p.m.–4 p.m. —Sarah Cascone

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By Andy Battaglia | February 13, 2020

Ancient to the Future: Nicholas Galanin Aims to Change How Indigenous Art Is Understood

Years ago, onto the surface of the earth, Nicholas Galanin painted a petroglyph of the kind found on rocks and mesas in expansive landscapes around the globe. It tapped into a lineage of ancient artworks whose meanings can be simple and complex in ways that take ages to reveal themselves in full. But the pattern of this petroglyph was unique—in the form of the word “Indians” as styled slightly cartoonishly by the Cleveland Indians baseball team. And the expansive landscape was denser than most—on a sidewalk along a stretch of Wooster Street in the downtown New York district of SoHo.

That interventionist gesture happened back in 2011—which feels like an eon ago for an artist whose star has been on the rise. Last year, Galanin exhibited one of the defining works in the Whitney Biennial, and he made news when he joined a group of artists in a high-profile call to have their work removed from the museum in protest of since-departed Whitney board chair Warren B. Kanders. Now, Galanin is back in New York—from his home in Sitka, Alaska—with “Carry a Song / Disrupt an Anthem,” his first solo gallery show in the city.

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The sculptures, paintings, textiles, and installations in the exhibition, at Peter Blum Gallery on the Lower East Side, focus on Galanin’s standing as a Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist exploring Indigenous identity and various conceptions and misconceptions surrounding it. “To balance out the diversity of medium and process was, as always, interesting because I do a lot of different projects,” Galanin told ARTnews during a walkthrough of the exhibition. (As he wrote in Kindred Spirit: Native American Influences on 20th Century Art, a book published around an earlier group show at Peter Blum: “I work with concepts, the medium follows.”)

“These are maps and exit routes for cultural objects from institutions,” Galanin said as he pointed to two new works made over the past year on deer hides pinned to a wall. The first—Architecture of return, escape (Metropolitan Museum of Art)—has arrows charting ways out from where Northwest Coast objects are kept at the Met, and the second—Land Swipe— shows greenspaces and underground transit patterns in Manhattan that used to be Indigenous travel routes Nicholas Galanin, Land Swipe, 2019. in the past. Both address “the simple fact that objects JASON WYCHE/COURTESY THE ARTIST often were removed from communities forcefully or AND PETER BLUM GALLERY, NEW YORK through theft,” Galanin said—but also diverging perspectives on “care for cultural objects, and repatriation and restitution as forms of oppression.”

Pointing out common requirements for museums to even consider relinquishing culturally significant holdings in their collections (temperature control, particular kinds of storage, etc.), Galanin said trading one form of capture for another is not necessarily the best way to think about correcting for the past. “The myth that our cultures wouldn’t be here without museums is still one that’s perpetuated heavily,” he said.

A series of works gathered under the title What Have We Become? centers on carvings of the artist’s face from thousands of pages in an anthropological study published by the Smithsonian in the 1970s. The works, Galanin said, deal with “homogenizing Indigenous knowledge and how that shapes identity and what we can or can’t be.”

Anthropological studies privilege certain kinds of knowledge over others, and the notion that studies of the kind might confer worth on their own is wrong-headed, Galanin said. “Our elders’ words are valued only after they’ve been processed through academia or anthropological texts, and then they’re devalued when conversations come up.” An example is the wealth of knowledge accumulated by local communities over thousands of years about the waterways around Alaska and the transformation of fisheries as a result of climate change. “When our elders speak about the health of the sea and land, it’s deemed memory and myth, and not really entered into scientific reports with numbers that start often in the ’70s. It becomes myth or this ‘other’ that is pushed aside when it doesn’t serve capitalism.”

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An arresting work splayed out on the floor nearby serves a similar point, with what looks like a bear pelt fashioned from a U.S. flag under the punning title The American Dream Is Alie and Well. The bear is festooned with gold leaf and has .50-caliber ammunition for claws—and speaks to notions of trophy-keeping as a component of colonial practice at odds with indigenous ways of treating the remains of a kill. “Our relationship to everything that we do is connected to a form of respect and spirituality and understanding,” Galanin said, while noting an analog between approaches to hunting mementos and objects on view in museums. “Those objects are cared for with humidity control, dust control, etc., but historically, they were also poisoned through conservation techniques with arsenic and defaced with museological numbering. They are not cared for culturally and spiritually in those spaces, and that’s something that we can’t escape as Indigenous people. If we seek to connect with our ancestral past through these objects, it requires a lot of effort, funding, and travel, and not everybody has access to that.”

Nicholas Galanin, The American Dream Is Alie and Well, 2012. JASON WYCHE/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PETER BLUM GALLERY, NEW YORK

Damage and disrespect are not reserved for museums, either. “There’s a whole economy where our aesthetic is appropriated and misappropriated,” Galanin said in front of The Imaginary Indian (Totem Pole), a work from 2016 that features a wooden statue seemingly dissolving in front of wallpaper in a display that greets visitors stepping into the gallery by the entryway. Based on Indigenous patterns, totems of the kind are actually carved in Indonesia before being shipped to Alaskan tourist markets “as a curio,” Galanin said. “Entrepreneurs exploit two communities: the Indonesians for cheap labor and the culture they take from.” The objects, in turn, become “ghost- like shells” in every way at odds with At.óow, a Tlingit word for what Galanin described as tangible and intangible property in the form of treasured cultural objects. “Ceremonial objects have spirits and lives,” he said. “They’re not owned by somebody—they’re your grandchildren’s children’s.”

An especially haunting work in the exhibition is Indian Children’s Bracelet (2014–18), one of three such pieces of jewelry alluding to forced removal and matriculation into boarding schools among Indigenous kids. “Part of the work is that all three are in separate institutions,” Galanin said of a set purposely split up and dispersed so far between the Portland Art Museum in Oregon and

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The legacy of mistreatment of children is only one aspect of “how our histories are often either ignored, erased, or not really spoken about,” Galanin said. “Society generally likes to consume our imagery and art forms without conversations about us or our experiences. Often it’s our iconography that people want, without any actual connection to people or recognition of the multigenerational impact on our communities.”

Nicholas Galanin, Indian Children’s Bracelet, 2014-18 JASON WYCHE/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PETER BLUM GALLERY, NEW YORK

Peering into a series of pointedly abstract prints in the show referencing a type of ritualistic dance, Galanin recalled early reviews of the Whitney Biennial that criticized certain artists for not being radical enough or working at an aesthetic remove from subject matter detractors would have liked to see engaged more directly. But his iconic work in the Biennial—a woven prayer rug resembling a television screen broadcasting white noise (a smaller version of which hangs in the gallery show)— enlisted abstraction in part to point out how, historically, abstraction has often not been afforded to certain artists expected to work in culturally specific ways.

The irony is especially troubling when those culturally specific ways have themselves long been abstract, and in any case, abstraction can be a language on its own terms. He called the dance- informed prints (which share the title Let Them Enter Dancing and Showing Their Faces) “an attempt at capturing cultural memory that is accessed through connections to land, through skinning a deer, through cleaning a salmon—and teaching your children to do all of that. We have these things ingrained in our memory and in our DNA. Whatever that feeling is, it’s not something you can look at, and it’s not something you can hold. But you can feel it, and it comes and goes.”

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Channeling a sense of place is integral to Galanin’s art, whether he’s at home in Sitka—as one can often see on an Instagram feed that finds him doing things like smoking salmon pulled from the Gulf of Alaska—or in a gallery in New York. “It’s important to help share the memory that everybody comes from a place,” he said. “The goal of colonization is often consumption and extraction, and then it just continues on. But it’s through memory and connection to places— and sharing that memory and connection—that we can demonstrate, share, and educate about ways of being in a world that are healthy for not just us but our future generations.” One of the aims of his practice, to that end, involves “challenging what forms of Indigenous art might look like, or how it’s activated through conversation and community.”

Offerings from that practice include artworks that make for ample opportunities to try to understand where they’re coming from. “It’s abstract language that’s been Nicholas Galanin’s The Imaginary Indian (Totem Pole) at Peter Blum Gallery. developed over 10,000 or 15,000 JASON WYCHE/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PETER BLUM GALLERY, years of relationship to a place,” NEW YORK Galanin said. “Sometimes anthropology wants to understand how or what or where or when that came from. But that’s not answered by asking that question. It’s answered by being out on the land, being in a community, being in a place. Then you start to understand.”

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Carry a Song, Disrupt an Anthem

Nicholas Galanin at Peter Blum Gallery, Manhattan 10 FEBRUARY 2020, DANIEL GAUSS

Nicholas Galanin, The American Dream is Alie and Well

Cultural anthropology was established at the height of British imperialism and reflected the racist ideology justifying colonization. E.B. Tylor and J.G. Frazer believed that systems of magic, religion and science revealed an evolution of the human mind, showing peoples of the past and non-urban folks of the present to be “savage” and just a stage toward the development of the white race and its achievements. Anthropologists now seem to believe that (in a nutshell) hunter-gatherers prefer animism/shamanism, farmers prefer magic and city folks like religion, because those belief systems work best for those environments and corresponding emotional exigencies. There is no evolution from one to the other.

By creating a sculpture of a human head from a thick anthropology book, Nicholas Galanin points to the gap between the experience of the Indigenous person, the meaning and gratification derived from that life, and attempts by academia to examine the Indigenous and to what end they aim this analysis. Ties to the natural environment, and the beliefs, stories and communities engendered by those ties, cannot be conveyed adequately through anthropological methods. There is much for us to learn by studying Indigenous cultures:

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Not grasping the dynamics of the Indigenous experience has not been a problem in the West. From the 1880s through the 1930s there was a huge market in Europe for Tlingit totem poles. Europeans could not possibly understand what they meant, because the poles reflected clan history, kinship systems, accomplishments and meaningful stories. But they loved the ambiguous creativity. Galanin has a totem pole camouflaged, as it were, with a Victorian floral design. The Thunderbird at the top represents power, transformation, transcendence and was often an omen of warfare. Hidden within the floral design, therefore, is an otherworldly threat of vengeance. In another piece Galanin has a totem pole which has been broken up and gilded. The fragmentation results from the Western craving to possess and profit by the beautiful.

Galanin also mashes up Indonesian-made Alaskan masks and presents the pulp as a new type of mask. This mirrors a responsibility for Indigenous artists to expose the inauthentic which is not tied to the culture or dances of the people. He is destroying the attempt to fetishize the masks and to present them shorn of the potency they derive in actual use. He also reveals this in his monochrome series titled Let Them Enter Dancing and Showing Their Faces. Many museum exhibits show objects apart from their uses in ceremonies and dances. As Galanin writes: “Dancing in our culture is to move as our ancestors moved. There is much to be learned in this space where we combine time, song, ceremony and community, and breathe life into our mask, headdresses, and hats, our at’oow.”

In one image showing the meaningless appropriation of an Indigenous culture practice, we see Princess Leia side by side with a Hopi girl with a squash blossom whorl in her hair. Bjork also seemed to use this whorl on one of her album covers. The squash blossom was an important fertility symbol used in a winter dance between a male Hopi hawk youth and a hawk woman of marriageable age. The blossoms are spread around the ground to represent and hasten the rebirth of vegetation. For Bjork and Leia, well, it made them look cool. One can be reminded of how the punks began using the Mohawk hairstyle. Of course, it was actually the Pawnee who adopted that style in order to make it more difficult for their warriors to be scalped.

We also see an icon with the head of a shaman’s mask, in lieu of the visage of Jesus, implying we can only imagine the shaman through the lens of our own cultural history and the religion we were taught. So we might look with contempt on the shaman, due to the contempt shown toward shamanism by Christian missionaries who considered the performances to be shams when, in fact, the shaman is the central cultural, spiritual and medicinal figure in many indigenous societies and highly valued for his/her usefulness.

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Perhaps as a snide response to Trump removing prayer rugs from the White House or by Trump’s belief that Islamic prayer rugs have been discovered at the US border, pointing to the infiltration of terrorists, Galanin presents his own American prayer rug. The white-noise emanating from a TV may refer to the ethical system of a consumerist society which does not encourage moral transformation or rising to a higher level of humanity, but instead justifies virtually any kind of abuse one feels like committing for the sake of self- indulgence. In The American Dream is Alie and Well, the “v” is deliberately missing and this is the type of décor, a polar bear rug covered by an American flag, we might see in longhouses once the Ghost Dance is begun again and the earth is renewed and reclaimed by the Indigenous. It is the image of a conquered economic system, which now seems dominant and indestructible.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 pushed Native Americans farther and farther west until it became clear that whites wanted the land that Indians had been pushed onto. This led to the assimilation movement reflected by the Dawes Act of 1887. Native Americans were to be taught to value the ownership of individual parcels of land and their children were to be sent to dominant culture schools. The most famous was the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania – its most famous alumnus was Jim Thorpe. Galanin carves Tlingit designs on the types of handcuffs often employed to forcibly remove children to these schools representing the efforts made during the era of the Dawes Act to save and preserve Indigenous culture at all costs. The children were taking their culture with them into this new hell.

Galanin also presents a deer hide painting of the land once occupied by the Lenape tribe, now burrowed though by the New York City subway system. One sees green parcels of ersatz parks created by landscape artists to provide tranquil spaces folks can go into and leave safely as a respite from their city lives. One also sees markings where the upper crust live and are protected by the NYPD. The piece is called Land Swipe because the land was swiped from the Lenape and because a swiping gesture is required to get into the subway system using an MTA card. Police would often hide behind pillars, during the Bloomberg era, and wait for economically poor New Yorkers to jump turnstyles so as to ticket and criminalize them, not caring that spending over $5 for a short round trip ride was just too much for many people. There is also a deer hide painting as an escape plan for artifacts from Indigenous cultures that are being held at the Met Museum. These pieces cannot be understood apart from their cultural contexts, are often held in storage and are just waiting for a return to their proper circumstances in a transformed world.

In The Golden Bough, Frazer’s attempt to prove an evolution of the human mind inadvertently turned many open-minded Westerners onto the magical practices of non-city-dwellers. Many were taken by the ingenuity, creativity and wonder of the rituals and ceremonies described by Frazer so that, ironically, many folks began to value the culture of Indigenous folks and dispute the evolutionary theory on which cultural anthropology was initially established. This early effort by the early anthropologists backfired as they gave us a new perspective from which to judge our own crimes and ignorance. The critique provided by Galanin and other Indigenous artists should change our overall orientation to Indigenous folks and compel us to focus on the factors which caused us to arrive at such a perilous point in human history.

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By Tulika Bahadur | February 7, 2020

A few days ago I encountered something that made quite an impact on me—White Noise, American Prayer Rug, made of wool and cotton (a version of which was exhibited at the 2019 Whitney Biennial in New York), is a woven image of static on a television set. It is something we are all familiar with—millions of black and white dots dancing rapidly on the screen, difficult to look at. This piece of art offers a critical analysis of contemporary American culture’s relationship with white noise, an acoustic vibration used to drown out unwanted sounds and mask alternate voices. The prayer rug generally signals adherence, devotion, commitment. But here, satirically, it seems to indicate an arrogant, inflexible, adamant, myopic attitude.

White Noise, American Prayer Rug comes from Nicholas Galanin (born 1979), an artist of Tlingit– Unangax̂ background (Native American) based in Sitka, Alaska. He forcefully uses “whiteness as a construct has been used historically throughout the world to obliterate the voices and rights of generations of people and cultures regardless of complexion”—a position to which different people will react in different ways. Some might take it to be exaggeration—but, it must be kept in mind, the artist is expressing himself through his own lived experience and that of his immediate community.

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White Noise, American Prayer Rug (2020). Wool and cotton, 60 x 96 inches (152.5 x 244 cm). © Nicholas Galanin / Courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery.

In his new exhibition titled “Carry a Song / Disrupt an Anthem” running from January 24 to March 28, 2020 at Peter Blum Gallery in New York, Galanin goes further in exploring the intersection of his Indigenous identity and contemporary culture. The exhibition’s title implies that “to carry the songs of Indigenous people, to carry the songs of the land, is inherently disruptive of the national anthem.” Galanin creates mixed media works (including photography, carvings, books, animal hides, ammunition, handcuffs) that show the violence behind the American Dream, how Western anthropology has coldly dissected and recycled Indigenous experience from a distance, how popular culture borrows elements from Indigenous aesthetics (as in Star Wars) even as it refuses to acknowledge the agency of Native Americans to define their own position.

The artist also refers to painful events of the past—the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families and the programmes of assimilation into Western culture they were subjected to against their will, the forced removal of Indigenous objects from their communities that their subsequent display in museums that are unable to take care of them and where they lose their ceremonial value. Moreover, the theft of land, hunting and fishing rights and the expulsion of Native Americans from areas such as present-day New York City.

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The American Dream Is Alive and Well (2012). US flag, felt, .50 caliber ammunition, foam, gold leaf and plastic, 84 x 84 x 9 inches (213.4 x 213.4 x 22.9 cm).© Nicholas Galanin / Courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery.

Galanin’s overall themes are obscured collective memory, barriers to the acquisition of knowledge, the resilience and strength of Indigenous people and culture, the connection to and disconnection from land. Through his deep, serious, complex creations, he reminds us that the comforts of many developed societies have come at a cost—and the ones who have truly paid the price aren’t always the ones who have got to enjoy the comforts.

Galanin earned his BFA at London Guildhall University (2003), his MFA at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand (2007), and he has apprenticed with master carvers and jewellers. He has participated in the Venice Biennale (2017) in the Native American Pavilion, in the Whitney Biennial (2019), the Honolulu Biennial (2019) and been invited to participate in the Biennale of Sydney (2020). His work is in permanent collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of What Have We Become? (2017). Carved book, 8 1/2 x 5 x 4 1/2 inches (21.6 x 12.7 x 11.4 cm). © Nicholas Galanin / Courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery. Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Denver Art Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Anchorage Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art and the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.

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Constructing enigmatic sculptures of masklike faces from the pages of a 19th century anthropological books, Galanin examines the politics of cultural representation and contemporary Indigenous identity. In this series, the materiality of the sculptures is significant pointing to a construct of Tlingit culture by Europeans. Commenting on the outsider’s perspective of Tlingit culture, Galanin notes, “I have found myself reading Western literature, What Have We Become? (2017). Carved book, 11 3/4 x 19 x 2 1/2 inches often written from a foreign (29.8 x 48.3 x 6.3 cm). © Nicholas Galanin / Courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery. perspective, in which my culture has

been digested and recycled back to me.” Galanin recognizes the importance of literature as documentation and is also overtly conscious of its biases in presenting “a dilemma in which old and new, customary and non-customary, overlap and collide. It is at this point of collision that a new dynamic and tension is being negotiated.”

In Kill the Indian, Save the Man, Galanin splinters a mask in what appears to be a destructive gesture. However, this act is not directed at the cultural production of Tlingit people, the materials are masks made by Indonesians for predominantly non-Indigenous markets. The exclusion of Tlingit people as participants in either the creation or collection of these objects is terminated. As Galanin intercedes, he dismantles the masks and forms a new mask from the resulting wood chips, thereby taking back agency through this new creation. This narrative is further segmented Kill the Indian, Save the Man (2016). by the title that references the Diptych, photographs, Edition of 10, 20 x 14 1/2 inches traumatic imprisonment of (50.8 x 36.8 cm) each. © Nicholas Galanin / Courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery. Indigenous children. In 1879, the United States opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School under Pratt’s coined slogan, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Indigenous children were taken from their families and subjected to forced assimilation program that included corporal punishment for speaking Indigenous language or practicing cultural rites.

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In Things Are Looking Native, Natives Are Looking Whiter, Galanin juxtaposes two iconic images. One image is of a Hopi woman wearing her hair in the squash blossom, or butterfly whorl style worn by unmarried Hopi women. The Edward Curtis photo is a part of the documentation of Indigenous people throughout the West in the early 1900s that supported the false notion that Indigenous people and ways of life were disappearing. The second image is taken from a promotional photo for Star Wars, depicting a white female, fantasy character wearing her hair in a style mimicking the squash blossom or butterfly whorl. As Galanin asserts, “In borrowing from an Indigenous aesthetic, the image projects settler claims to Indigenous culture into the future. The title speaks to consumer culture’s desire to claim ‘Native inspired’ looks, while simultaneously refusing Indigenous people the agency to define Indigenous culture in an increasingly hybrid world.”

Things Are Looking Native, Natives Are Looking Whiter (2012). Giclée print, 40 x 28 1/2 inches (101.6 x 72.4 cm), Edition of 5. © Nicholas Galanin / Courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery.

In The Imaginary Indian (Totem Pole), Galanin juxtaposes the form of a carved totem overlaid with Victorian Era floral designs. He both confronts viewers with their own assumptions about Indigenous art and reflects on the attempted assimilation of Indigenous culture by Europeans, thereby asserting contemporary Tlingit art as continually evolving. As he says, “This is despite the resistance of individuals and institutions that would limit Indigenous culture based on assumptions about Indigenous The Imaginary Indian (Totem Pole) (2016). Wood, acrylic, and floral wallpaper, Totem: 80 1/2 x 51 1/2 x 11 inches (204.5 x 130.8 x 27.9 cm); wallpaper: dimensions variable. peoples prior to interaction with © Nicholas Galanin / Courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery. Europeans. The fetishization of early contact and pre-contact Tlingit art has resulted in skeletal, ghost-like objects in gallery and museum collections. The Imaginary Indian series points to the romanticization of these works as a form of colonization of culture, dependent on devaluing current cultural artistic production. The

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In Indian Children’s Bracelet, hand engravings adorn small handcuffs, like those used to remove Indigenous children from their families during the Resdential Scool Period in the United States and Canada. Tlingit carvers began engraving copper bracelets to replace clan tattoos when the practice of tattoo was forcibly removed from communities by the church and settler state. The practice of jewelry making by Indigenous

Indian Children’s Bracelet (2014-18). Hand-engraved iron, 3 x 8 x 1/2 inches people of the Northwest Coast is (7.6 x 20.3 x 1.3 cm).© Nicholas Galanin / Courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery. one of cultural preservation, adaptation, and survival. As Galanin states, “These ‘bracelets’ embody the shared history of European colonization and settlement of the Americas as experienced by Indigenous communities, despite the amnesia of settler states in recognizing history. The work suggests the complexities of the desire for Tlingit art and simultaneous rejection of Tlingit people’s realities and experiences by non-native consumers.” In engraving these bracelets Galanin claims them as part of his history, acknowledging and honoring the resilience and survival of the generations affected by the weight of wearing these “bracelets”.

With Galanin’s unique monotypes, it is the artist’s hand as much as Tlingit culture’s history that shapes the representation. Each monotype bears this imprint and tells the story of its creation, not as myth, but as lived experience—the marks showing the spontaneity of a drawing with the enduring qualities of a print. The imagery is central to Tlingit life and references and mimics visual movements of a customary aesthetic. However, Galanin’s contemporary interpretation forms a creative continuum that combines past with Everything We’ve Ever Been, Everything We Are Right Now – Below (2019). present, demonstrating Tlingit artwork Monotype and gold leaf on paper, 22 x 30 inches (55.9 x 76.2 cm). as a continually evolving practice. © Nicholas Galanin / Courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery.

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In Land Swipe, a deer hide is painted with lines based on the New York City Transit Authority’s subway map. It represents the limited green spaces and subway routes on Lenapehoking, Lenape land, the area that New York City currently occupies. This was a location for overlap and trade among thriving Indigenous communities, while hide paintings have been used in many Indigenous communities to record and remember events of significance. The word “swipe” in the work’s title refers to the theft of land, hunting, and fishing rights from Indigenous people, while also referencing the “swipe” needed by low income residents and commuters of color in the city to move across the area. The process of pushing Indigenous people off the land is repeated through the gentrification of the land the city occupies, pushing people of color further from access to employment and educational opportunities, as the cost of living, Land Swipe (2019). Acrylic on deer hide, 60 x 36 inches (152.4 x 91.4 cm). © Nicholas Galanin / Courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery. rent, and commuting increases. The guns painted on the hide point out to the defense of the commuters at the wealthiest stations, while they point in at the commuters in the lowest income station, to make clear that whether NYPD presence is threatening or comforting is based on income, appearance, and location. This work was created in solidarity with protesters and communities of color in New York City for holding the NYPD and MTA accountable for violence and demanding an end to discriminatory legislation and practices.

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Architecture of return, escape (2020). Deer hide, pigment and acrylic, 31 x 61 inches (78.7 x 154.9 cm). © Nicholas Galanin / Courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery.

This is the first in a series of hide paintings for guiding the escape of Indigenous remains and objects in non-Indigenous institutions to their home communities. Entitled, Architecture of return, escape, the series of hide paintings depict a floor plan referencing a visitor’s guide as well as blue architectural blueprints. This particular work references the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is a mapped escape plan for objects held in the New York City institution. Of the few objects held in display cases, many more (including human remains and ceremonial objects not intended for public view) are held in museum archives. The cost and processes required for Indigenous communities to travel and visit these archives limits access to cultural knowledge and inheritance, and continues the removal of the objects from their land and people. While institutions control the environmental conditions, they are unable to adequately care for these objects in cultural or spiritual ways. The objects themselves are unwilling visitors to the museum, and the painting builds a route for escape and a vision for reunification of cultural inheritance with community. The work serves as a reminder of the past, and as a plan for a good way forward. Stolen objects, human remains, and works sold under duress can now return home for their own health, for the health of the communities that created them, and for the health of the communities that took them.

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Events and Parties

Editors Picks: 11 Things Not to Miss in New York’s Art World This Week This week, the Brooklyn Museum hosts a panel of female museum directors, and Susan Cianciolo has a show at Bridget Donahue Gallery.

Artnet News, February 3, 2020 Through Saturday, March 28

Nicholas Galanin, Land Swipe (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York.

11. “Nicholas Galanin: Carry a Song / Disrupt an Anthem” at Peter Blum Fresh off being featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial —and being among the artists whose demands to remove their work from the show helped push embattled trustee Warren B. Kanders out of the boardroom for good—Nicholas Galanin returns to New York for his fi rst solo gallery exhibition in the city. The show brings together works in multiple media to surface the stories and resilience of Indigenous American communities (especially the Tlingit and Unangax̂ communities of which Galanin is a part), as well as visualize the inherent conflict between their independence and the merciless colonial history of the United States. Location: 176 Grand Street Price: Free Time: Tuesday–Friday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.; Saturdays, 11 a.m.–6 p.m. —Tim Schneider

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PETER BLUM GALLERY

Biennale of Sydney to Tackle Race and Colonialism Sam Gaskin | Sydney | 4 February 2020

Newly announced highlights of the event include Arthur Jafa's The White Album, which won the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Biennale.

Lisa Reihana, In Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015-17). Ultra HD video, colour, 7.1 sound, 64 mins, Courtesy the artist and New Zealand at Venice.

The 22nd Biennale of Sydney has announced highlights of its programme, which runs 14 March to 8 June. Occurring 250 years after British explorer Captain Cook landed in Australia, many of the artists selected for the biennale deal with themes of race and colonialism.

Curated by Indigenous Australian artist Brook Andrew, the biennale is entitled NIRIN, which means 'edge' in the language of the Wiradjuri, the Indigenous people of western New South Wales. Andrew said the biennale programme 'demonstrates how artists have the power to inspire and lead through difficult global times such as environmental catastrophe, urgent states of conflict and reframing histories.'

One of the most celebrated works being shown is Arthur Jafa's The White Album (2018), which won the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Biennale. The video cuts together close-up portraits of white people with found footage of race-based violence, fumbling efforts to excuse racism, and attempts to acknowledge and address it. The work will be shown in the Southern Hemisphere for the first time at the biennale.

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Many of the other participating artists are either people in majority white countries or people who live in countries underserved by the contemporary art world.

Barbara Moore, Chief Executive Officer, Biennale of Sydney said, 'the biennale invites diverse and often marginalised voices of the world to converge, creating a safe place where people can think and talk about issues that resonate on a local and international level.'

Among other highlights are: Peruvian artist Fátima Rodrigo Gonzales' recreation of an TV set from 1960s Latin TV show Sabado Gigante (Gigantic Saturday); Tlingit/Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin's excavation of the shadow cast by the Captain Cook statue in Sydney's Hyde Park; and New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana's Nomads of the Sea, an immersive film installation exploring Māori and Pacific peoples' culture.

The biennale will take place at six sites where entry is free: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artspace, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Cockatoo Island, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and the National Art School.

An interconnected programme called NIRIN WIR (meaning 'edge of the sky'), includes ticketed events and extends to the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney Observatory, Parramatta Female Factory and Sydney University. —[O]

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SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA JANUARY 2019

Nicholas Galanin and Merritt Johnson, Creation and her children, 2017, mixed media, 62 × 84 × 74". Nicholas Galanin

LAW WARSCHAW GALLERY, MACALESTER COLLEGE

On-screen, a break-dancer’s fluid movements rhythmically align with a Tlingit song. When voice and drumbeat end, club music takes over and accompanies a Tlingit dancer’s slow, circling steps. This pair of videos, Tsu Héidei Shugaxtutaan I and II, both 2006—whose titles translate to “We Will Again Open This Container of Wisdom That Has Been Left in Our Care”—epitomized Nicholas Galanin’s interest in remixing cultural references and bridging the past and present. The title of his recent exhibition, “Everything We’ve Ever Been, Everything We Are Right Now,” suggested an expansive view of ever-emergent identities and histories, of the not quite yet. Addressing the legacies of violence inflicted on Native peoples, Galanin insisted on nuance as a route to addressing trauma and allowing for transformation.

Creation and her children, 2017, showed a knife-wielding mother carving her own face. Her features, sketched in pencil, are still incomplete. This act of self-re-creation seemed to be a response to the violence of her past beheading: “Cut off or burned or stolen, it may have been left to rot,” the

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We Dreamt Deaf, 2015, presented a different scene of violence’s aftermath. A taxidermied polar bear claws its way out of a fur rug—or is its torso about to be flattened into an expensive skin? The trophy kill, formerly majestic, has morphed into a reliquary for species threatened by global warming. The subduing of the bear also serves as an allegory of conquest. Its recognizable shape reappeared in The American Dream is Alie and Well, 2012, in which the Stars and Stripes takes the place of an actual hide. Outfitted with a plastic head and claws made from bullets, this ersatz skin doubles as a patriotic masquerade, suggesting pride in having brutally subjugated “the wilderness.”

Galanin took aim at cultural camouflage elsewhere in the show, pushing back against appropriation and erasure by foregrounding both product and producer: In White Carver, 2012–, Galanin invites non-Native carvers to produce phallic shapes outfitted with a “pocket pussy,” a masturbatory toy ready “to satisfy desire without intimacy,” as the artist writes. One such toy was displayed in a vitrine for the show. With its title, I Looooove Your Culture! Fine Wood Working, 2012, the work mocked appreciation-fueled cultural theft. The critique was subtler in Unceremonial Dance Mask, 2017, in which the artist splintered an Indonesian reproduction of a Tlingit mask before gluing together the fragments to form a new visage, itself exhibited alongside comparison photographs in Kill the Indian, Save the Man, 2016, whose title references Brigadier General Richard Henry Pratt’s infamous words.

A similar mask appeared in How Bout Those Mariners, 2014, a single-channel video that revisits the 2010 fatal shooting of John T. Williams, a hearing-impaired Native artist, by a Seattle police officer. Galanin pairs audio from the police vehicle with choppy footage of a masked Tlingit warrior rushing toward the camera, carving knife in hand. As the leather-clad figure rapidly approached, one wondered: Does this warrior come to haunt or avenge? Or does he stand for the specter the officer thought he saw before killing a man who carried a carving knife?

Six monotypes struck a markedly different tone while still centering Galanin’s concern for the intersections of cultures and temporalities. They integrated gold leaf, a staple of medieval European religious iconography, to pay tribute to “above,” “below,” and the four cardinal directions. In one of the works that gave the show its title, a thin shimmering line reached from golden sky to golden land, traversing a feathery blue expanse. In another, two profiles faced each other: One was deep underground, the other poised on the horizon. A kiss, or maybe a river of breath, connected them. By interlacing such moments of deep reverence with pointed critique, Galanin carved a space for complexity that unsettled rather than pacified.

— Christina Schmid

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First American Art Magazine’s Top Ten Native Art Events of 2019

BY FAAZINE ON JANUARY 3, 2020 ARTICLES, WEB CONTENT

The politics of the last year have been volatile, particularly for Indigenous peoples of Brazil, Colombia, and Bolivia. It is profoundly important that those of us with media platforms use our voices to advocate for fellow Indigenous peoples of the Americas, both to provide hope for the future when the darkness can seem overwhelming and to embody and share Indigenous worldviews for future generations.

The arts are one platform where Native people can communicate our perspectives with each other and the greater world at large. Indigenous artists shared their visions of sustainability and resilience throughout 2019, and below are ten events the writers, editors, advisors, and supporters of First American Art Magazine found most inspiring.

5. Indigenous Inclusion at the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art The longest-running survey of new American art, the Whitney Biennial featured a critical mass of Indigenous artists for the first time in 2019. Curators Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley co-curated this 79th edition of the Whitney Biennial that included Indigenous artists Thirza Cuthand (Plains Cree), Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax), Adam Khalil (Sault Ste. Marie Ojibwe), Zach Khalil (Sault Ste. Marie Ojibwe), Caroline Monnet (Algonquin), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit), Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw/Cherokee), Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) and the late James Luna (Payómkawichum/Ipi, 1950–2018). Galanin was one of the first of many artists who pulled their work from the show to protest the vice-chairman of the museum’s board, Warren Kanders, who owns Safariland, a tear gas manufacturer, and Sierra Bullets. The protests resulted in Kanders resigning from the museum board.

Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax), “White Noise, American Prayer Rug,” 2018. whitney.org

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The year's best Twin Cities art exhibitions were diverse and international The best art exhibits this year. By Art Alicia Eler | DECEMBER 20, 2019 — 4:16PM

Nicholas Galanin The Violence of Blood Quantum, Half Human (animal), Half Human (animal) after James Luna, 2019.

From the powerful and arresting Native women showcase "Hearts of Our People" to the radical lesbian world of "Strong Women, Full of Love": the best of 2019 arts and entertainment included these 10 art shows. 1. "Hearts of Our People" at Minneapolis Institute of Art: The first-ever major museum exhibition of art by Native women showcased the work of 115 artists from the United States and Canada, spanning more than 50 tribes, 65 languages and seven centuries. 2. "History Is Not Here: Art and the Arab Imaginary" at the Minnesota Museum of American Art: The 17 artists in this exhibition, still on view through Jan. 5, hail from 22 countries and explore the complexities of the "Arab" diaspora, questioning the colonial nature of geographic boundaries.

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3. Nicholas Galanin, "Everything We've Ever Been, Everything We Are Right Now" at Macalester College: Galanin took on America's cultural amnesia, delivering critiques of colonialism and settler mentality, the imposition of "blood quantum" and the cultural appropriation of Native cultures. 4. "The Body Electric" at Walker Art Center: Nearly 50 artists or collectives addressed the body's relationship to technology in this boldly intergenerational exhibition. 5. "Queer Forms" at the University of Minnesota's Nash Gallery: More than 100 LGBTQ artists struck a pose in this exhibition coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riot. 6. "Swimming on Dry Land/ Nadar en Seco" at St. Olaf College: This modest solo exhibit by internationally acclaimed Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco explored the politics and poetics of her home country's revolution. 7. "I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating" at Weinstein Hammons Gallery: Self-proclaimed "kind of 'emo' photographer" Alec Soth had a spiritual awakening in 2016, took a break from snapping pics, then returned with 70 intimate photos aimed at shifting the power dynamic between photographer and subject. 8. "Strong Women, Full of Love" at Mia: Photos by Carolyn "Meadow" Muska, documenting the radical lesbian world of 1970s Minnesota, emerged from the closet. 9. Cara Romero at Bockley Gallery: The Chemehuevi artist based in Santa Fe explored the supernatural in everyday life and contemporary Indigenous expression. 10. "The Builders: Shaping Minnesota's Architectural Landscape on the Color Line" at Mill City Museum: Three prominent black Minnesota architects leapt out of the history vault and into a show all their own.

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Culture Desk Living with Art

By Jenny Kroik | November 28, 2019

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The Most Important Works of the 2010s: Favorite Artworks That Didn’t Make the List BY The Editors of ARTnews NOVEMBER 28, 2019 9:00AM

Nicholas Galanin, White Noise, American Prayer Rug, 2018. | COURTESY THE ARTIST

Today, ARTnews presented a list of the most important artworks produced between 2010 and 2019: just 20 of them. Of course, many more works were made in that span of time that remain absolutely essential. Below are a few more entries from the editors, involving only pieces by artists not represented on the main list. Let the debates begin.

Andy Battaglia, Deputy Editor Laurie Anderson, Habeas Corpus, 2015 Matthew Barney, River of Fundament, 2015 Carol Bove, Polka Dots, 2016 David Brooks, Continuous Service Altered Daily, 2016 Stan Douglas, Helen Lawrence, 2014 Nicholas Galanin, White Noise, American Prayer Rug, 2018 Pope.L, Claim (Whitney Version), 2017 Walid Raad, Scratching on things I could disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World, 2007–ongoing Tom Sachs, Tea Ceremony, 2016 Taryn Simon, “Paperwork and the Will of Capital,” 2015

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ARTnews in Brief: Liverpool Biennial Names Artists—and More from November 6, 2019

BY The Editors of ARTnews POSTED 11/04/19 5:31 PM

Installation view of the Whitney Biennial 2019 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 17-Sept. 22, 2019).

Photograph by Ron Amstutz. Nicholas Galanin, White Noise, American Prayer Rug, 2018, wool and cotton, 84 × 120 inches.

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Nicholas Galanin Gets New York Gallery Representation One of the 2019 Whitney Biennial’s most talked-about artists, Nicholas Galanin, will now be represented by Peter Blum Gallery in New York. The artist, who is based in Sitka, Alaska, and is of Tlingit and Unangax̂ descent, frequently deals with themes related to Indigenous identity and the perception of it by non-Indigenous people in his work. At the Whitney Biennial, he showed a prayer rug resembling white noise on a television monitor, which Galanin said refers to the way that distractions are generated to ward off political strife. Earlier this year, he made headlines for being one of eight artists to request that their work be removed from the Biennial amid controversy over a Whitney board member—a topic he addressed in an essay for ARTnews. A show of his work will open at Peter Blum Gallery in 2020.

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Biennale of Sydney Releases Artist List for 2020 Edition With Focus on Indigenous Artists

BY Alex Greenberger POSTED 09/12/19 9:21 AM

Jota Mombaça, How old is suffering?, 2018, performance view. | ANNA CERATO

The Biennale of Sydney in Australia has revealed the full artist list for its 2020 edition. Some 98 artists and collectives are lined up to participate in the exhibition, which is due to run next year from March 14 to June 8.

The focus of the show curated by Brook Andrew, a member of the Wiradjuri people, is the “unresolved past anxieties and hidden layers of the supernatural,” according to a statement. Its title is “NIRIN,” after the Wiradjuri word for “edge.”

Andrew has previously stated that the title is meant to reference a de-centering that he hopes to achieve with a Biennial, which focuses in large part on indigenous artists and members of various diasporas.

Among the indigenous artists lined up for the event are various members of First Nations hailing from areas near Sydney—Noŋgirrŋa Marawili (Darrpirra/Yirrkala) and S.J Norman (Wiradjuri) among them. There are also Native Americans included in the show, such as Nicholas Galanin (a citizen of the Sitka Tribe in Alaska who recently wrote for ARTnews about his decision to pull out of the Whitney Biennial in July) and Demian DinéYazhi´ (Navajo), who is participating alongside the activist initiative that he founded, R.I.S.E. Other artists include Arthur Jafa, who has said he will consider blackness in relation to Australia with his new work.

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Standing Together: Whitney Biennial Artist Nicholas Galanin on His Decision in July to Pull Work from the Show BY Nicholas Galanin POSTED 09/11/19 11:47 AM

Nicholas Galanin’s White Noise, American Prayer Rug, 2018, is one of two works by the artist included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. | COURTESY THE ARTIST

Nicholas Galanin is an artist and citizen of the Sitka Tribe of Alaska. He is of Tlingit and Unangax̂ descent, and lives and works with his family in Sitka.

In July I was one of eight artists who requested that our work be pulled from the 2019 Whitney Biennial in protest of the presence on the Whitney Museum board of

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Warren B. Kanders, owner of the company Safariland, a manufacturer of tear-gas canisters and other weapons used against protesters around the world. I was also part of the same group of artists who, when Kanders resigned a little more than a week later, chose to remain in the exhibition. For me, the reason for both decisions was to fight erasure. My position as an Indigenous artist invited to show at the Biennial had been conflicted from the start. I accepted the invitation fully aware of Kanders’s position on the board and the potential for both conflict and—I hoped— conversation about culture and capital, in relation to Kanders as well as other issues that transcend him. The Whitney, like so many other institutions of its kind, has historically continued the long American tradition of erasure by way of a lack of Indigenous artists represented in exhibitions and collections. In the past, when it has been acknowledged at all, Indigenous art has too often been romanticized, fetishized, and homogenized through a Eurocentric lens, all in the service of lies about who we have been, who we are, and who we can be.

As an Indigenous artist, I am not new to the Nicholas Galanin. ©CARLOS CRUZ feeling of being seen as spectacle. Indigenous cultures have been objectified in World’s Fairs and in display cases, our ancestors’ bones secured in museum storage even as our populations shrank through forced starvation and removal. While museums claim to be safe spaces for sharing knowledge and generating discussion, this has not been true from my Indigenous perspective.

But in order to have agency in such spaces, you have to show up. It’s more impactful to engage in conversation than to avoid it. That is not the same for everybody, but for me it is important and true—and showing up in the interest of engagement was part of the promise of exhibiting at the Whitney.

I agreed to contribute to the Biennial because underrepresented voices are so rarely given such a platform from which to tell their truth. The invitation presented me with acknowledgment of my work but, more important, with a responsibility to my culture, my community, and my ancestry.

Prior to the group request with other artists to have our work pulled, we—along with additional artists in the show and important figures from around the art world—sent a letter to the Whitney asking the museum to remove Kanders from the board. For me, it

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY was about more than just tear gas. Tear gas is a means of biological warfare designed to clear space. Today, it is used at Standing Rock in North Dakota, at the border between the U.S. and Mexico, in city streets. Kanders and the war profiteers who supply tear gas and other weapons have no place guiding our cultural institutions. And those institutions do not have to accept direction from such sources or reward them with board positions or namesake galleries.

But the Whitney, like so many other museums, continues to draw on toxic philanthropy that wields power over our communities while creating a self-congratulatory climate of comfort for the existence of economic disparity, cultural suppression, erased histories, and white guilt. This is all part of the noise that White Noise, American Prayer Rug (2018), one of my two works in the Whitney Biennial, refers to: distraction from economic, cultural, and environmental realities constantly being generated to justify and protect the status quo.

Nicholas Galanin’s Let them enter dancing and showing their faces: Shaman, 2019, is installed on a ground-floor window at the Whitney Museum in New York.

We live in a nation built on white supremacy, and white supremacy fuels the militarization of our borders and the lands between them, for Indigenous people as well as others of different descent. It has been as American as apple pie for white officers of the law to attack black and brown men, women, and children since the era of “Manifest Destiny.” When such communities assemble in protest, it is very possible they will be

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY removed—cleared from the space they’re in—by a Safariland-manufactured canister. Our children are being taken from their parents, innocent people killed in the streets, our families and communities torn apart. If you are able to view such conditions from a position of comfort and can’t see why I and other artists might remove work in protest, then this is an opportunity to look and listen, carefully.

The media coverage of protests at the Whitney Biennial, starting with actions organized by the activist group Decolonize This Place before the show opened and continuing through mass letters sent to the museum and the ultimate call for artwork to be taken back, has largely focused on making protest into spectacle rather than listening to different perspectives and valuing them for what they are—thoughtful calls for action.

My decision to remove my work from the Whitney came when my hope for meaningful conversation was met with inaction—on the part of many but, most fatefully, by the museum, which for weeks and then months failed to issue any meaningful response to protests mounting within its walls. For me, that inaction translated to complicity with militarized denial of the right of Indigenous people to freely move through land that we belong to.

I am glad that Kanders left the board. I’m glad that the exhibition curated by Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta—which reflects the strengths and values of creative people of color, women, LGBTQ, and other artistic voices who came together to insist we do better in our institutions—remains intact and on view for the duration of the Biennial through September 22.

The protests had everything to do with the Whitney Museum and its capacity to contribute to culture. Culture not only reflects the reality of life and politics—it creates it. My aim is to engage in conversation based on reality—to create change rooted in responsibility and resist cultural amnesia that would have us mistake the status quo as acceptable or just.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of ARTnews, on newsstands September 24, under the title “Standing Together.”

© 2019 ARTNEWS MEDIA, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ARTNEWS® IS REGISTERED IN THE U.S. PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE.

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The Whitney Biennial Called. How Will They Answer?

By Siddhartha Mitter | May 9, 2019 Nicholas Galanin

“All these institutions come with politics.”

Mr. Galanin at his studio in Sitka, Alaska .Credit: Ben Huff for The New York Times

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Mr. Galanin’s “White Noise, American Prayer Rug” (2018).Credit: Nicholas Galanin

Nicholas Galanin stepped outside his house on the hill and aimed his phone camera toward the bay. An artist of Tlingit descent, he lives in Sitka, Alaska, making a video visit more convenient.

“There’s a herring fishery here, managed by the state,” Mr. Galanin, 39, said. He explained how overfishing had depleted the stock despite years of warnings by elders. Native knowledge was overlooked in arts as well, he said. Ethnography presented it as static, when in fact it adapts.

Mr. Galanin is a craftsman who recently led the carving of a 40-foot totem pole near Juneau. He is also adept at contemporary techniques like video and installation.

His work will greet Biennial visitors in the form of a large ink and gold-leaf monoprint of a female shaman in the museum lobby. A textile piece, combining imagery of a prayer rug and a television screen flickering white fuzz, is also in the show.

By refusing to stay bounded, Mr. Galanin said he could connect with other artists and communities, and help Native culture evolve on its own terms. “People who want to fetishize us are going to have to wait and see what we do next,” he said.

Mr. Galanin is a veteran of museum shows, including a midcareer retrospective at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. He welcomed the Biennial curators’ decision to feature several Native artists. “It’s empowering to have voice in these spaces,” he said.

Still, he tempered his expectations of dramatic change. “All these institutions come with politics,” he said.

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Nicholas Galanin: The Value of Sharpness: When It Falls By Christopher Green | March 2019

Installation view: Nicholas Galanin,The Value of Sharpness: When It Falls, Open Source Gallery, 2019. Photo: Stefan Hagen. Courtesy Open Source Gallery, New York.

At Open Source Gallery, 60 white porcelain hatchets, patterned with red and blue florals, tumble end over end in a shallow arc along the length of the gallery. Suspended from the ceiling by threads of clear fishing line, they fly as if thrown. Rising from chest height, the visitor can just barely walk under the peak of their crest before the axes fall and come to a stop at eye level, shy of the gallery wall. Their shadows dance on the walls as the hatchets sway on their strings, the angular shades appearing out the corner of one's eye like another crowd of blades thrown from out of sight. Walking around the installation, one cannot help but step directly into the arrested trajectory and look head-long into the drove of spinning earthenware. Staring down the gilded edges, the light shines off their delftware glaze, a glimmering hint at their true fragility.

A single-work exhibition by Sitka-based Nichola Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂), The Value of Sharpness: When It Falls reprises a recurring medium and format that the artist uses to engage

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY questions around the authenticity, commodification, and responsiveness of Indigenous culture in the face of colonialism's legacy. The present work recalls his 2013 installation I dreamt I could fly, in which sixty porcelain arrows with a similar blue delftware decoration hung in an arc from the gallery ceiling. The arrows in that piece are long and thin, evident in their wavering fragility. As tools for sustenance and protection they are functionless decorative representations, incapable of flight. The hatchets of The Value of Sharpness are likewise fragile and decorative, but Galanin finds further ambiguity in their form and material utility. While the porcelain is guaranteed to break upon first impact, the hatchets have a palpable heft nearly felt in one's palm. As Galanin notes in the exhibition release, "The capability of the hatchets is not in their ability to split wood or bone, but in their ability to shatter, creating small sharp projectiles and edges from decorative representations." The potentiality in the sharpness of fragmentation, the mutability of material, is Galanin's apt metaphor for the survivance and resilience of Indigenous communities.

Porcelain is a fragile and malleable medium that Galanin has frequently exploited to mask, confound, and make ambiguous the utility and cultural associations of its moldable forms. In God Complex (2016) a white porcelain set of riot gear hangs on the wall in a cruciform. The material fragility of the body armor belies its connotations of police militarization and bodily violence, the fragile ceramic shell of the suit suggesting the emptiness of the white savior-martyr ideology at the heart of the settler-colonial state. He has likewise used floral patterning as cultural camouflage in ongoing series such as Imaginary Indian (2008-2016) and S'igeika'awu: Ghosts (2009). In the former, the artist sourced Indonesian made imitation masks that are frequently sold in Alaskan tourist shops and painted them with the floral and garden patterns of French toile. S'igeika'awu: Ghosts features similarly sourced masks cast out of porcelain and decorated with the floral delftware pattern that recurs in The Value of Sharpness. These cultural transmutations, whereby a cheap imitation acquires the status of Indigenous art, are a hallmark of Galanin's practice and are insightful commentaries on the commodification of Indigenous culture. The delftware hatchets are likewise outsourced, made by a non-Native porcelain studio based in Colorado after a commercial hatchet design that provided the mold. Thus Galanin, in a Duchampian move, doubly transforms the non-Native products, the readymade commercial design and the Colorado-sourced porcelain, into a conceptual work of contemporary and "authentic" Indigenous art.

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Installation view: Nicholas Galanin,The Value of Sharpness: When It Falls, Open Source Gallery, 2019. Photo: Stefan Hagen. Courtesy Open Source Gallery, New York. The particular style of hatchet was intentionally chosen to evoke the tomahawk, the stereotypical weapon of choice in popular imaginings of the "Indian." The ambiguity in The Value of Sharpness between hatchet and tomahawk, tool and weapon, plays on the assumptions, stereotypes, and fetishes that the viewer brings and accordingly must confront from their own position. The opportunity is available, in standing before the path of the flying hatchets, to engage in cowboy and Indian fantasies. It is not dissimilar from the expectations that consumers of tourist curios, unloading from cruise ships and tour buses, bring to the market for Alaska Native arts. Seeking the fantasy of the authentic, the consumer is more often confronted by the foreign-made facsimile, in the end only to not know or care about the difference. We see that desire for the decorative, consumable, stereotypical representations of Indigenous people in the floral patterning of Galanin's hatchets, and the commodification of culture in the gilded edge of the blade. The gold glaze, however, is soft; it cancels out the imagined sharpness of the blade, just as the delicate ceramic does. While gold had less value than ceremonially significant materials like copper or utilitarian metal like steel when introduced to the Northwest Coast as a trade good, its value as currency and capital had to be reckoned with as contrasting ideals of wealth were steadily imposed on Indigenous communities. The gilded edge obscures any use value, and the sharpness of the hatchets will only return when they break. The porcelain blades of The Value of Sharpness are in a state of arrested flight; their trajectory leads towards a shattering point, but their fall is controlled, tied up in an alien system. When these tools do break, perhaps their fragmentary edges might be turned on the binds that hold them.

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Out of Line: Nicholas Galanin Rejects the Traditional/Contemporary Binary By Nicolas Galanin | Mar 26, 2018

Leornard Getinthecar (Nicholas and Jerrod Galanin), Space Invaders, hides, ink, paint, 2013

As an artist, Nicholas Galanin has utilized a wide range of tools and techniques and tapped into influences from conceptual art, pop culture, indigenous philosophy, protest, and his Tlingit and Unangax̂ (Aleut) ancestry. Born in Sitka, Alaska, the artist’s work is often characterized as a fusion of elements found along a continuum between tradition and contemporaneity: he’s modified an AR-15 rifle with Tlingit hand-engraving, carved walnut, and a hand-sewn sea otter strap; a photomontage pairs a 1906 Edward Curtis image of a young Hopi-Tewa woman with a photo of Carrie Fisher as Star Wars’s Princess Leia; a taxidermied polar bear rug is clad in an American flag; his music, created as part of the trio Indian Agent (with Otis Calvin III and Zak Dylan Wass) melds hip-hop, experimental, and electronic sounds with stories and sensibilities from its members’ Indigenous, African, and European backgrounds. But it’s a premise he rejects: the “tradition versus contemporary” binary, he argues, is more about settler pain than about his own reality as an indigenous person, artist or otherwise, living today.

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In advance of his March 28 artist talk at the University of Minnesota and his participation in the March 29 Walker panel discussion, we share Galanin’s Walker Reader commission on this oft- perpetuated and false dichotomy.

I have the immense joy and honor to participate in the continuum of Tlingit culture, creating from a position of independence and interdependence. Settler society attempts to categorize and compartmentalize work by artists of Indigenous descent. In doing so, lines are invented according to percentages, materials, processes, and dates strategically selected to limit who and what we are told we can be and how we should function.

Nicholas Galanin, Operation Geronimo, silkscreen, 2013

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I refuse to separate the intricacies of Indigenous culture and community to maintain authority for colonial and settler institutions or agendas. Stereotypes and romanticization of Indigenous people are rooted in centuries-old justifications for genocide which have been continued via blood quantum and ethnicity based on percentage. We are the only community in the United States that resides in part in internment camps (reservations). We are the only community in the United States whose blood percentage is monitored to determine if we are registered with the Bureau of Indian Nicholas Galanin, I dreamt I could fly, 60 porcelain Affairs by a number. I challenge those who view or arrows, 2013 listen to my work to consider that Indigenous people are not contained by colonial mechanisms designed to erase our existence through continually narrowing categories of Indian-ness.

Early assertions that we were primitive, uncivilized people in need of white saviors and religion were used to advocate for our physical destruction. When such destruction was not possible, efforts turned toward Nicholas Galanin, The Imaginary Indian, from the destroying our cultures, removing us from the series, Paint. Wood, Wallpaper, 2009 land, dividing our communities and forcibly removing our children. Today, due to the partial success of these violent and sustained efforts to remove, disperse, and dilute our cultures and communities, the attempt to control and erase us is based on grading and categorizing how closely we match the characters written into settler accounts of our ancestors. A viewer’s position and participation in engaging my work reveals more about them and the culture they come from than it does about who I am or the cultures I Nicholas Galanin, Follow S'igeika'awu: Ghost, continue to shape. ceramic, horse hair, 2009

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Nicholas Galanin, Things Are Looking Native, Native’s Looking Whiter, giclée, 2012

The process of channeling ideas and knowledge into physical form has been practiced by Indigenous communities for as long as we have existed. We create canoes to connect our communities with ceremony, to subsist and feed our people. We create drums and songs to heal, masks to dance stories and ceremony. Our creative output is visual, and our spoken language is not separated by materials of process, by museum or gallery standards, by anthropologists or art historians. My work holds stories, ideas; it documents and reflects the world. My works teach and tell histories, based on my relationship to land and Nicholas Galanin, Where will we go?, 2008 communities.

Tradition is not defined by anthropologists, art historians, or institutions. Tradition is an English word that speaks to continuum. For me, the continuum of Indigenous ways of being is embodied in giving, in living respectful of land and water. Conversations around “tradition versus contemporary” are tired, from where I stand; they continue to reinforce and accept the division of the two as a form of control. Those insistent on continuing these

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY conversations continually ask me to differentiate and divide my work using this boundary, to impose this line on my creative practice. It’s problematic and absurd to classify “traditional” as a pure and selfless maker creating solely from experience of Indigenous culture, materials, and processes that predate colonization and “contemporary” as the personification of western individuality embodied in an Indian Artist creating with any and all materials available and usually labeled as a shapeshifter. It seems that this absurd insistence to imagine and create “tradition versus contemporary” in living/contemporary artists is responsive to settler pain, a pain that is real but non-guiding. Settler Nicholas Galanin, Get Comfortable,C-print, 2012 pain and discomfort with the continued existence of Indigenous people as thriving post-colonization and post-settlement does not define who we are, what we do, or how we dream as Indigenous people. Settler pain deserves none of our energy or magic, though we continue to give, share, and teach in the wake of so much theft and destruction because we continue to recognize that we are all connected.

Nicholas Galanin, stills from Unceremonial Dance Mask, 21st century, video, 2012

This line placed before me when presenting this conversation of “tradition versus contemporary” may seem fixed and solid to those who invent, believe, and enforce it. For me this line moves, disappearing and reappearing, shifting constantly in attempts to contain or disrupt the flow of creation and culture through categorization—attempting to control and exert

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY power through variable exclusion or inclusion. Like colonial national borders cutting through land and people who have lived here longer than those invented lines, these lines drawn through creative production are also an attempt to control. I actively resist the authority of settler culture to define who I am or what I do. I resist the internalization of these lines and division in Indigenous communities, and work to affirm connection with land among all living things in everything I do.

Nicholas Galanin, Haa Aaní (Our Land), hand-carved and etched AR-15 with hand-seen sea otter strap, 2013

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Nicholas Galanin remixes Native American identity at Phoenix’s Heard Museum

The artist, who is of Tlingit and Unangax descent, confronts the traumatic past in deeply affecting ways but does not wallow in it

JILLIAN STEINHAUER | 6th August 2018 22:05 BST

Nicholas Galanin’s mid-career survey at the Heard Museum in Phoenix begins in a spacious gallery, where a photograph of the artist’s head has been blown up and split in half

Nicholas Galanin’s mid-career survey Dear Listener (until 3 September), at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, is grounded in the artist’s experiences and heritage as a Native Alaskan. But to reduce his art to the limiting category of “identity politics” would be a mistake. The exhibition is expansive, embracing and grappling with many facets and complexities of what it means to be Native American today.

The show begins in a spacious gallery, where a photograph of the artist’s head has been blown up and split in half. Its two parts frame the doorway through which visitors must pass to get to the main display. It is not entirely unusual for the introduction to a solo show to contain a photograph of the

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY artist, but more often than not, the image is historical and the subject is dead. Galanin, who is of Tlingit and Unangax descent, is very much alive, although his peoples have been decimated by white America. The large photograph of his face reminds visitors to the Heard, one of the top institutions in the country dedicated to Native American art, that they are not about to see more ethnographic displays of artefacts like the ones sitting in glass cases across the lobby; they are encountering contemporary art made by a practitioner in the present day.

One of the showstoppers in the exhibition of around 50 pieces, organised by the museum’s fine arts curator, Erin Joyce, is We Dreamt Deaf (2015), which greets visitors in the same entry gallery as Galanin’s photograph. On a raised platform, the front half of a taxidermy polar bear seems to crawl forward, while its back half is flattened into a rug. The animal, which has bullet holes in its side, has suffered triply at the hands of humans. Visitors accustomed to benign taxidermy displays in natural history museums will likely be unsettled by the sight of a creature trying to escape its brutal fate.

Galanin is a keen observer and critic of exploitation, especially of Native people. For White Carver (2012-present), he enlists a white man to sit on a platform behind a red velvet rope and carve a wooden “fleshlight” sex toy that resembles one made by the artist himself, titled I Looooove Your Culture (2012). The performance, which took place five times at the Heard, brilliantly satirises the way “Indian” culture has been fetishised and flips whose bodies get exhibited by whom.

The performance White Carver brilliantly satirises the way “Indian” culture has been fetishised and flips whose bodies get exhibited by whom

On adjacent walls, two sets of work are based on Galanin’s practice of buying fake Native American masks made in Indonesia, chopping them up, and reassembling the pieces to create abstract masks of his own. The artist also carries out this process in a video, Unceremonial Dance Mask, 21st century (2012), playing in the same gallery. There’s something powerful in the image of a steady and determined Galanin hacking away at the commodification of indigenous culture with a hand tool. As I watched him hold the new mask to his face and dance around a fire, I wondered if he was re-

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY consecrating the object, skewering the ignorance of non-Native viewers, commenting on the slipperiness of authenticity, or all three.

Clearly, for Galanin, it’s just as important to destroy the fake masks as it is to make something new of them. This impulse to reuse pre-existing material, no matter how offensive, runs throughout the show. In one gallery, a tiny pair of iron handcuffs lays low to the ground in a case. Galanin found the shackles, which were used in boarding schools where the US government tried to “assimilate” Native American children by stripping them of their culture. He engraved them with designs of Tlingit formline, reclaiming the oppressor’s tool. Acerbically titled Indian Children’s Bracelet (2014), the work is deeply affecting.

In one gallery, a tiny pair of iron handcuffs lays low to the ground in a case. Galanin has engraved the shackles, used in boarding schools where the US government tried to “assimilate” Native American children by stripping them of their culture, with designs of Tlingit formline, reclaiming the oppressor’s tool

Galanin often talks about his art as part of a cultural continuum, and you can feel that at the Heard: he confronts the traumatic past but does not wallow in it. He works in traditional Native arts, such as formline, and in mediums more associated with contemporary art, like video. Tsu Héidei Shugaxtutaan (2006)—which translates to “We will again open this container of wisdom that has been left in our care”—features a man break-dancing to a Tlingit chant. A follow-up video shows another man performing a ceremonial Tlingit dance to electronic music. In both cases, the performers’ moves appear perfectly in tune with the music of a different culture. The continuum is vast, and it is hybrid.

The show’s most beautiful expression of hybridity is No Pigs in Paradise, a collaboration between Galanin and the Canadian artist Nep Sidhu. The series honours Canadian indigenous women, who have been the targets of deadly violence for decades, with elaborate garments that are outfitted on

Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY mannequins and displayed mostly in one gallery, as if in a showroom. They are stunningly original creations—mash-ups that seem to blend high-end casual wear, punk gear, ceremonial clothing, and even, in one case, what looks like a foil emergency blanket. With titles such as She in Gold Form, She in Shadow Form, and She in Rhythm Form 7B, the works seem to evoke a pantheon of goddesses that will rise in part due to the strength bestowed on them by such carefully wrought garments.

Although the Heard’s mission is “to be the world’s pre-eminent museum for the presentation, interpretation and advancement of American Indian art,” it was founded by white collectors. It’s also not a contemporary art museum with a history of exhibiting such conceptual and political work. To an outsider, at least, Galanin’s survey feels like an act of decolonisation. I hope that visitors will, as the exhibition title beseeches them, make an effort to truly listen.

• Dear Listener: Works by Nicholas Galanin, Heard Museum, Pheonix, Arizona, until 3 September

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