This episode of Broken Boxes Podcast presents a live stream recording by artists Christine Howard Sandoval and Cannupa Hanska Luger as they visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new exhibit: Art of Native America, The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection on October 7th, 2018. The two artists engaged in a live stream critique and shared the experience on social media as it was unfolding. Onsite at the Met the two artists were joined by the guest curators from the Nelson Atkins Museum Gaylord Torrence and Marjorie Alexander along with the Met's director of public programs Mari Robles.

In reflecting on the experience in her social media post about the experience, Christine Howard Sandoval explains, “The museum mobilized responsively and the conversation about how the museum is FOR THE FIRST TIME starting to engage with Indigenous art is raw and honest. They have so much work to do as the major museum of art in the country!”

Broken Boxes would like to acknowledge this is an audio recording of a live feed video of an experience viewing an exhibition, so it may feel a bit hard to follow along, but if you are up to it, it may be worth the journey. You can view the video live stream HERE.

Here is the audio recording of Artists Christine Howard Sandoval and Cannupa Hanska Luger live stream at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new exhibit: Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection:

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More About The Artists Engaging In This Action:

Christine Howard Sandoval is an Obispeño Chumash and Hispanic artist based in New York. She is a multimedia artist who challenges the boundaries of representation, access, and habitation through the use of performance, video, and sculpture. Sandoval makes work about contested places such as the historic Native and Hispanic waterways of northern New Mexico; the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site in New York; and an interfacing suburban-wildland in Colorado.

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multi-disciplinary artist of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian descent. Through monumental installations that incorporate ceramics, video, sound, fiber, steel, and cut-paper, Luger interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about 21st century Indigeneity. Using social collaboration and in response to timely and site-specific issues, Luger produces multi-pronged projects which often times presents a call to action, provoking diverse publics to engage with Indigenous peoples and values apart from the lens of colonial social structuring. Luger lectures and participates in residencies around the globe and his work is collected internationally.

More About The Exhibition:

Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection

Exhibition overview sourced from the Met’s website: This landmark exhibition in the Museum's American Wing showcases 116 masterworks representing the achievements of artists from more than fifty cultures across North America. Ranging in date from the second to the early twentieth century, the diverse works are promised gifts, donations, and loans to The Met from the pioneering collectors Charles and Valerie Diker. Long considered to be the most significant holdings of historical Native American art in private hands, the Diker Collection has particular strengths in sculpture from British Columbia and Alaska, California baskets, pottery from southwestern pueblos, Plains drawings and regalia, and rare accessories from the eastern Woodlands.

A note from the producer about this episode:

Broken Boxes Podcast has had the immense privilege to interview over 70 artists over the past 3 years. As the producer and creator of Broken Boxes, this project has been so dear to my heart and I am truly humbled and grateful for all of the incredible people who have taken the time to be vulnerable and share their stories on the platform of this podcast. This episode will mark a 6 month break I will initiate in the project, so I can regroup and take time and space to gather more interviews, edit them, upgrade equipment and connect with more artists and movements in a way that feels authentic and respectful. On a personal note, as a mother of two young children, I have just began approaching ‘unschooling’ or kind of like life schooling, focusing on some really intense life choices, allowing my children to love learning and be able to navigate the world in a way which respects them, and this journey is radical, scary and my partner and I are really excited to focus on our children a bit more holistically, which seems to be quiet a strong way to walk the walk in caring for our future and how we hope it to perpetuate. For this episode I was going to make a collection from all of the interviews I have done to date, I began, and got to about episode 30, when I realized there is no clear way to edit down the content of each episode, each artist is speaking in such a long format, and unapologetic way, sharing such important and critical information, I just could not edit the episodes down into soundbites, and it was making me feel horrible to try. (If you need to catch up on all the past episodes, you can do so in the Archive section.) And so, I chose not to do that for this episode. For this episode, before I take a nice break in publishing work, stories, interviews, conversations on this platform, I am grateful to share with you a pretty special recording of a live feed from earlier this month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I felt sharing this live feed broadcast would be a wonderful segway into the more in depth concentrated content I hope to begin intercepting into this project. I hope to find a way to follow more closely with a project or approach an artist is examining and present a more journalistic approach to the story and concepts. This will take time and travel and equipment upgrades. And so this break will allow me space to find these tools and refresh this work. I do feel this project is critical, it is an archive of existence, but this project breaks the colonial lens which the stories of my peers are often times focused through. And so I would like to continue it, but I would like to step it up many notches.

I also wanted to put out there that if you are a person of color, and Indigenous person, a queer, trans, two spirit, gender non-conforming person, an activist or feminist person who centers people of color in your work, and have content you need a platform to put it out on, email me! While I am on this break of producing, I would love to allow this airwaves space to be utilized by anyone who needs it and has the skills and energy to edit together an episode to share information. If you need this access and want to share something on Broke Boxes, I can put up your content on the podcast for you anytime over the next 6 months (through say April 2019), email me at brokenboxespodcast@gmail.com and I can fill you in on the logistics of how I could support this. I am In gratitude and solidarity with all the artists and activists whom I have had the privilege to engage in this project and with all the listeners who I may never meet, I believe in you, and I believe in us.

Gratitude and solidarity, Aloha malama pono!