Creating an Osage Future: Art, Resistance, and Self-Representation
CREATING AN OSAGE FUTURE: ART, RESISTANCE, AND SELF-REPRESENTATION Jami C. Powell A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Anthropology. Chapel Hill 2018 Approved by: Jean Dennison Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld Valerie Lambert Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote Chip Colwell © 2018 Jami C. Powell ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Jami C. Powell: Creating an Osage Future: Art, Resistance, and Self-Representation (Under the direction of Jean Dennison and Rudolf Colloredo Mansfeld) Creating an Osage Future: Art, Resistance, and Self-Representation, examines the ways Osage citizens—and particularly artists—engage with mainstream audiences in museums and other spaces in order to negotiate, manipulate, subvert, and sometimes sustain static notions of Indigeneity. This project interrogates some of the tactics Osage and other American Indian artists are using to imagine a stronger future, as well as the strategies mainstream museums are using to build and sustain more equitable and mutually beneficial relationships between their institutions and Indigenous communities. In addition to object-centered ethnographic research with contemporary Osage artists and Osage citizens and collections-based museum research at various museums, this dissertation is informed by three recent exhibitions featuring the work of Osage artists at the Denver Art Museum, the Field Museum of Natural History, and the Sam Noble Museum at the University of Oklahoma. Drawing on methodologies of humor, autoethnography, and collaborative knowledge-production, this project strives to disrupt the hierarchal structures within academia and museums, opening space for Indigenous and aesthetic knowledges.
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