Candice Hopkins – författare

Art for a New Understanding, an exhibition from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opening this October, seeks to radically expand and reposition the narrative of American art since 1950 by charting a history of the development of contemporary Indigenous art from the United States and Canada, beginning when artists moved from more regionally-based conversations and practices to national and international contemporary art contexts.This accompanying book documents and expands on the histories and themes of this exciting exhibition.This fully illustrated volume includes essays by art historians and historians and reflections by the artists included in the collection. Also included are key contemporary writings—from the 1950s onward—by artists, scholars, and critics, investigating the themes of transculturalism and pan-Indian identity, traditional practices conducted in radically new ways, displacement, forced migration, shadow histories, the role of personal mythologies as a means to reimagine the future, and much more.As both a survey of the development of Indigenous art from the 1950s to the present and a consideration of Native artists within contemporary art more broadly, Art for a New Understanding expands the definition of American art and sets the tone for future considerations of the subject. It is an essential publication for any institution or individual with an interest in contemporary Native American art, and an invaluable resource in ongoing scholarly considerations of the American contemporary art landscape at large.

An essential resource for curators, Native and non-Native artists, scholars, students and teachersPublished with Forge Project, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Mackenzie Art Gallery, and SITE Santa Fe.Native artists are at the vanguard of performance art practices and discourse, using humor as a strategy for cultural critique and reflection, parsing the relationships between objecthood and agency. This reader centers performance and theater as origin points for the development of contemporary art by Native American, First Nations, Métis, Inuit and Alaska Native artists. Song, dance and music are also posited as a basis for collectivity and resistance and a means to speak to a time when Native traditional ceremony and public gatherings were illegal in both the United States and Canada. Featuring excerpts from the 1969 document Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process, this illustrated reader also includes four long-form essays by leading Indigenous scholars, nine artist contributions, oral history interviews and a selection of key texts from the fields of Native contemporary art, art history and theory.