No Place: Conversation with Saya Woolfalk

In this episode of Broken Boxes we hear a conversation with Saya Woolfalk, a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions. Saya’s work builds new narratives and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity. 

I first met up with artist Saya in the summer of 2023 at her studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York to chat about her practice. We walked around the bustling industrial warehouses along the river with her dog, Mr. Mochi, and amid a cacophony of forklifts and semi-trucks, we had an incredibly generative conversation about her practice. Unfortunately I was not able to publish the audio of this conversion on the podcast due to noise interference, but sections of this interview are archived within the new Broken Boxes publication available through UNM Press. 

Recently Saya and I reconvened for a second conversation where we focus in on her origin story of becoming an artist and her decades-long investigation into speculative fiction within her practice. Saya shares about her 2006 work Ethnography of No Place—an installation which invites viewers into the immersive environments of “the Empathics,” a fictional race of women able to alter their genetic makeup and fuse with plants. Saya relates how for years she has utilized fantasy to understand our present reality and to dream of multiple futures. She shared how her present work has expanded far beyond No Place into envisioning the possibility of humanity existing beyond linear time and space. 

Saya communicates her ideas through sculpture, installation, performance and video art and has been at the forefront of conceptualizing ideas around speculative fiction, fantasizing and world building as an agent of change. We end the conversation with some practical advice on how Saya has learned to survive as an artist and she imparts some great tips on ways to utilize the systems in place to work in your favor and do more with less when you have to. Saya continues to show us that to truly enact radical change, we must create spaces for empathy and ease, and that we must continually reflect on how we practice compassion and connection with one another.

STANKFACE STANDING SOLDIER: Conversation with Mato Wayuhi

In this episode of Broken Boxes recurring host Cannupa Hanska Luger gets into conversation with Oglala Lakota artist Mato Wayuhi who works in both film and TV as an actor, producer and musical composer, as well as writing his own music. Mato reflects on how he first came to music as an artistic outlet and his creative inspirations and challenges as a young person honing his craft. We hear about Mato’s dense and varied approach to realizing a creative vision from filming music videos, to cross discipline collaboration with other artists to activating his family's archived tapes on his recordings. Mato speaks about being the composer for the award-winning FX/Hulu series Reservation Dogs, what impact that project has had on his relationship with his music and acting and how it has built lifelong friendships. Mato also gives a vulnerable and deep dive behind the making of his new album, STANKFACE STANDING SOLDIER, reflecting on the grief and healing that took place through the process of putting together this layered, timely and entirely self-produced record.

Featured song: STANKFACE (feat. A$h Da Hunter) from STANKFACE STANDING SOLDIER by Mato Wayuhi

Mato Wayuhi is an Oglala Lakota artist originally from South Dakota. He works in film/TV both as an actor, producer and musical composer, as well as writing his own music. Most notably, Mato is the composer for the award-winning FX/Hulu series Reservation Dogs. He is also featured on the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Hollywood & Entertainment.

His most recent album STANKFACE STANDING SOLDIER is an entirely self-produced record, which Forbes calls a "masterpiece that revolutionizes Indigenous music into a new era." 

Mato Wayuhi. Photos by Alf Bordallo

Breaking Boxes & Building Worlds - 10 Year Anniversary! Ginger Dunnill in conversation with Amaryllis R. Flowers

For this special episode, I get into deep reflection with artist and dear sister-friend Amaryllis R. Flowers to mark the 10 year anniversary of Broken Boxes. Amaryllis interviews me around the arc of the project over the course of a decade, uncovering how it has become an archive of the lived experiences and world building strategies of contemporary artists, while acknowledging the many variations of an artists practiced values including those of the activist, advocate, disruptor or culture activator. We speak about collective strength while considering how art and imagining may unbind us from collective social trauma. This long-form interview reflects the vulnerability, uncertainty and strength required to maintain an art practice today. I explain a bit about how the past 4 years of this project has become a dedicated imagination praxis, focused on building a toolkit for surviving the chosen career as artist. At the end of our conversation I announce  Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialog - the forthcoming exhibition and accompanying art book which will premiere this fall at the Albuquerque Museum, featuring installation and video work from 23 artists that have been featured on the podcast with an emphasis on the past 4 years.

Originally from Maui, Hawai’i, New Mexico based creative Ginger Dunnill is a producer, journalist, curator, community organizer and sound artist. She collaborates with artists globally, creating work that inspires human connection, promotes plurality and advocates for social justice. Ginger is the founder of Broken Boxes Podcast, the decade long celebrated underground broadcasting project amplifying systemically undervalued voices in the arts. In 2017, Ginger received an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts - 516 ARTS Fulcrum Fund Award on behalf of Broken Boxes to realize an exhibition and publication featuring the work and ideas of over 40 artists featured on the project. As a practicing artist, Ginger has exhibited internationally including at IoDeposito, Italy, Washington Project for The Arts, Washington, DC and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Over the past two decades Ginger has produced numerous social engagement projects, community programs and public exhibitions in collaboration with other artists and activists. She is currently working as a creative advisor for numerous prominent artists and musicians and touring the world as a performer.

Amaryllis R. Flowers is a Queer Puerto Rican American Artist living and working in upstate New York. Raised between multiple cities and rural communities across America in a constantly shifting landscape, her practice explores themes of hybridity, mythology and sexuality. Utilizing drawings, video, sculpture, performance and installation, her work is a visual language paying attention to the spaces in-between categories, and revering those that know the trouble and pleasure there. Amaryllis earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2019 and her BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in 2014. She is the recipient of the 2023 Pocantico Prize from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a 2022-2027 Joan Mitchell Fellow, and a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including at the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo Del Barrio (New York), The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), MoCADA (Brooklyn), and SOMArts (San Francisco). 

The forthcoming exhibition - Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialog exhibition will be presented at the Albuquerque Museum September 7, 2024 - March 2, 2025. Featuring installation and video work from 23 artists that have been featured on the podcast with an emphasis on the past 4 years.  This exhibition will be accompanied by an art book published by UNM Press which will feature an essay by Broken Boxes creator Ginger Dunnill, a creative response by artist Maria Hupfield and an introduction by Head curator Josie Lopez. The publication will feature the exhibiting artists through quotes from their podcast interviews, images of their work and writings the artists have selected or contributed from their larger practice.

Broken Boxes intro song by India Sky Davis
Featured song: Ocean Breath by Aysanabee

Unsettled Scores: Conversation with Raven Chacon

This episode marks the second time featuring artist and friend Raven Chacon on Broken Boxes. The first time I interviewed Raven was in 2017, when I visited with him at the Institute of American Indian Arts where he was participating in a symposium on Indigenous performance titled, Decolonial Gestures. This time around, we met up with Raven at his home in Albuquerque, NM where recurring host and artist Cannupa Hanska Luger chatted with Raven for this episode. The conversation reflects on the arc of Ravens practice over the past decade, along with the various projects they have been able to work on together, including Sweet Land (2020), an award-winning, multi-perspectival and site-specific opera staged at the State Historical Park in downtown Los Angeles, for which Raven was composer and Cannupa co-director and costume designer. Raven and Cannupa also reflect on their time together traveling up to Oceti Sakowin camp in support of the water protectors during the resistance of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Raven provides context to his composition Storm Pattern, which was a response to being onsite at Standing Rock, and the artists speak to the long term impact of an Indigenous solidarity gathering of that magnitude. Raven speaks about being named the first Native American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize or Voiceless Mass, and shares the composition's intention and performance trajectory. To end the conversation, Raven shares insight around staying grounded while navigating the pressures of success, travel and touring as a practicing artist, and reminds us to find ways to slow down and do what matters to you first, creatively, wherever possible.

More about the artist:

Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the two-mile-long land art installation Repellent Fence. 

A recording artist whose work has spanned twenty-two years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America. 

Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022) and the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022). 

His solo artworks are in the collectIons of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the Albuquerque Museum, University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.


Music featured:

Sweet Land, Scene 1: Introduction (feat. Du Yun & Raven Chacon) · Jehnean Washington · Carmina Escobar · Micaela Tobin · Du Yun · Raven Chacon · Lewis Pesacov.  
Released on 2021-09-24 by The Industry Productions

BBP LIVE with artists Matika Wilbur, Andrea Carlson and Cannupa Hanska Luger

This very special episode of Broken Boxes Podcast marked our first ever conversation in front of a live studio audience. Recurring host Cannupa Hanska Luger was joined by Matika Wilbur and Andrea Carlon on October 28th 2023 as part of the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s  Memory & Monuments program. The artist’s drew from a hat of pre-considered topics to speak to and expand upon, including: Ancestral trade routes or sharing knowledge within a cultural continuum such as how culture, language and goods traveled precontact; Indigenous memory in relation to the American Myth; Recognition of Indigenous complexity; Indigenous futures including shared histories and futures; and Institutional critique or a generative airing of problematic power structures impact on Native people. Broken Boxes would like to thank UMMA staff and curators and Monument Lab for being present for this generative and complex conversation to take place. We would like to especially thank the students of the Native American Student Association at the University of Michigan, who welcomed Broken Boxes and the artists and helped make this live audience recording a wonderful experience.  

More about the artists:

Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) is one of the nation’s leading photographers, based in the Pacific Northwest. She earned her BFA from Brooks Institute of Photography where she double majored in Advertising and Digital Imaging. Her most recent endeavor, Project 562, has brought Matika to over 300 tribal nations dispersed throughout 40 U.S. states where she has taken thousands of portraits, and collected hundreds of contemporary narratives from the breadth of Indian Country all in the pursuit of one goal: To Change The Way We See Native America.

Andrea Carlson is a visual artist who maintains a studio practice in northern Minnesota. Carlson works primarily on paper, creating painted and drawn surfaces with many mediums. Her work addresses land and institutional spaces, decolonization narratives, and assimilation metaphors in film.  Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. Carlson was a recipient of a 2008 McKnight Fellow, a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors award, a 2021 Chicago Artadia Award, and a 2022 United States Artists Fellowship. Carlson is a co-founder of the Center for Native Futures in Chicago.

Multidisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara), and Lakota. Through monumental installations and social collaborations that reflect a deep engagement and respect for materials, the environment, and community, Luger activates speculative fiction and communicates stories about 21st century Indigeneity. Luger is a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, recipient of the 2021 United States Artists Fellowship Award for Craft, and was named a Grist 50 Fixer for 2021, a list that includes emerging leaders in climate, sustainability, and equity from across the nation.

Music featured: Move, I’m Indigenous by  Uyarakq
BBP intro track by India Sky