Skywalkers & Vulnerability: Interview with Marie Watt

This episode we are in conversation with artist Marie Watt. Marie is a member of the Seneca Nation and also has German-Scot ancestry. Her interdisciplinary work draws from history, biography, Iroquois protofeminism, and Indigenous teachings; in it, she explores the intersection of history, community, and storytelling. Through collaborative actions, she instigates multigenerational and cross-disciplinary conversations that might create a lens and conversation for understanding connectedness to place, one another, and the universe.

This conversation took place in February of 2021 at Camp Colton during a residency Marie Watt and collaborator Cannupa Hanska Luger were in, hosted through the Portland based organization, Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation. Tucked into a cedar forest in the Pacific Northwest for two weeks, the artists and their families hung out in a pod as the artists worked to create together a new monumental work for their two person exhibition Each/Other: Marie Watt & Cannupa Hanska Luger. The piece is a canine form, created out of bandanas stitched with messages sent to the artists from around the world. 

http://mariewattstudio.com

https://www.denverartmuseum.org/exhibitions/each-other

Music: A Fly In The Hand by Alice Russell

This conversation was hosted by Ginger Dunnill of Broken Boxes Podcast

This episode is now streaming on iTunes & Spotify

Long Con: Sterlin Harjo & Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ep 2

Long Con is a series of conversations between Director Sterlin Harjo and Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger about life, art, film, history and everything in between - informally shared from the lens of two contemporary Native American artists and friends actively participating in the record of the 21st century.

Sterlin Harjo is an award winning Seminole/Muscogee Creek filmmaker who has directed three feature films and a feature documentary all of which address the contemporary Native American lived experience. Harjo is a founding member of the five-member Native American comedy group, The 1491s. Sterlin’s latest project Reservation Dogs, is a television show created in collaboration with Taika Waititi , airs August 9th on FX. 

Cannupa Hanska Luger is a multidisciplinary artist who creates monumental and situational installations and durational performance and often initiates community participation and social collaboration. Raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, he is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota and European descent. 

In this conversation the artists reflect on the process and outcome from Sterlin’s journey on creating the television series Reservation Dogs. They also talk about Native humor, colonization, fruit flies, equity for women in the film industry, their mullets, anxiety in dealing with the press, boundaries, honesty, Indigenous community responsibility, Billy Jack hats, Indigenous film crews, fatherhood and so much more.

I hope you enjoy this little pre-party before you get to see the premier of Reservation Dogs on August 9th on FX. 

Also check out Sterlin’s podcast ‘The Cuts’ where this conversation and others with the creative team from Reservation Dogs and Sterlin will be airing and ‘The Cuts’ archive is thick, including an interview with his collaborator Taika Waititi.

Watch Reservation Dogs Trailer: https://youtu.be/RoHewFAkrWU

Follow the artists work: 
www.sterlinharjo.com
www.cannupahanska.com

Music: ‘Rumble’ by Link Wrey

This episode is now streaming on iTunes & Spotify

This conversation was hosted by Cannupa Hanska Luger of Broken Boxes Podcast

On the Poetics of an Afrofuture: Interview with Anaïs Duplan

To open this episode I rebroadcast a reading by Anaïs Duplan of his recent new work Blackspace: on the Poetics of an Afrofuture, and which took place through Harvard Book Store's virtual event series in November 2020.

Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and St. Joseph’s College. 

His video works have been exhibited by Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2021. 

As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. He works as Program Manager at Recess.

Song featured: Court Of Love  by Durand Jones & The Indications

Connect With The Artist

This episode first aired June 28, 2021 for Broken Boxes on Radio Coyote, a project initiated by Raven Chacon and CCA Wattis Institute, on the occasion of Chacon's 2020-21 Capp Street Artist-in-Residency. Radio Coyote is currently produced by Atomic Culture and will transition to new programming Summer, 2021. www.radiocoyote.org

This episode is now streaming on iTunes & Spotify
This conversation was hosted by Ginger Dunnill of Broken Boxes Podcast

Storywork: Interview with Maria Hupfield

Transdisciplinary artist Maria Hupfield activates her creations in live performances. She is interested in the production of shared moments that open spaces for possibility and new narratives. In her work, these moments of connection are recalled and grounded by coded and re-coded hand-sewn industrial felt creations and other material mash-ups worn on the body. An Urban off-reservation member of the Anishinaabek People she belongs to Wasauksing First Nation in Ontario, Hupfield is deeply invested in embodied practice, Native Feminisms, collaborative processes, craft and textiles.

Storywork: Maria Hupfield’s solo exhibition at Galerie Hughues Charbonneau, 2021

Maria Hupfield is a 2020-2022 inaugural Borderlands Fellow for her project Breaking Protocol at The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School and the Center for the Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, and was awarded the Hnatyshyn Mid-career Award for Outstanding Achievement in Canada 2018. Previous projects at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau included her 2014 Performance Lab and 2017 transdisciplinary installation Stay Golden. She has exhibited and performed her work through her touring solo exhibition The One Who Keeps On Giving (organized by The Power Plant) 2017-2018, and solo Nine Years Towards the Sun, at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, 2019-2020. Amongst other places, she has also presented her work at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the NOMAM in Zurich, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Galerie de L’UQAM, the New York Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, the New York Museum of Art and Design, BRIC House Gallery, the Bronx Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Site Santa Fe, and the National Gallery of Canada. She is co-owner of Native Art Department International with her husband artist Jason Lujan, and a founding member of the Indigenous Kinship Collective NYC.

Sound shared in this episode:

Maria Hupfield and Tusia Dabrowska Electric Prop and Hum Freestyle
documentation from 3 performances by Maria Hupfield and Tusia Dabrowska, including:
11.30.2017 MAD Museum
12.06.2017 The Gibney Dance Theater
07.03.2018 The Bric Media House
Maria Hupfield Performance Piece at Bronx Museum of the Arts
June 15th 2015 with Laura Ortman
“The one who keeps on giving” performance by Maria Hupfield 
2017-01-29 documented at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery Toronto

This episode first aired June 14, 2021 for Broken Boxes on Radio Coyote, a project initiated by Raven Chacon and CCA Wattis Institute, on the occasion of Chacon's 2020-21 Capp Street Artist-in-Residency. Radio Coyote is currently produced by Atomic Culture and will transition to new programming Summer, 2021. www.radiocoyote.org

This episode is now streaming on iTunes & Spotify

This conversation was hosted by Ginger Dunnill of Broken Boxes Podcast

Process & Intention: Interview with Kali Spitzer

"Indigenous Femme Queer Photographer Kali Spitzer ignites the spirit of our current unbound human experience with all the complex histories we exist in, passed down through the trauma inflicted/received by our ancestors. Kali's photographs are intimate and unapologetic and make room for growth and forgiveness while creating a space where we may share the vulnerable and broken parts of our stories which are often overlooked, or not easy to digest for ourselves or society."

—Except from catalog introduction for Kali Spitzer’s exhibition, "An Exploration of Resilience and Resistance”, written by Ginger Dunnill, Creator and Producer of Broken Boxes Podcast, published by Grunt Gallery, Vancouver, BC, 2019.

Kali Spitzer. Photo by Byron Flesher

Kali Spitzer is a photographer living on the Traditional Unceded Lands of the Tsleil-Waututh, Skxwú7mesh and Musqueam peoples. The work of Kali embraces the stories of contemporary BIPOC, Queer and trans bodies, creating representation that is self determined. Kali’s collaborative process is informed by the desire to rewrite the visual histories of indigenous bodies beyond a colonial lens. Kali is Kaska Dena from Daylu (Lower Post, british columbia) on her father’s. Kali’s father is a survivor of residential schools and canadian genocide. On her Mother’s side and Jewish from Transylvania, Romania on her mother’s side. 

Kali studied photography at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and the Santa Fe Community College. Under the mentorship of Will Wilson, Kali explored alternative processes of photography. She has worked with film in 35 mm, 120 and large format, as well as wet plate collodion process using an 8x10 camera. Her work includes portraits, figure studies and photographs of her people, ceremonies, and culture. At the age of 20, Kali moved back north to spend time with her Elders, and to learn how to hunt, fish, trap, tan moose and caribou hides, and bead. Throughout Kali’s career she has documented traditional practices with a sense of urgency, highlighting their vital cultural significance.

Kali’s work has been featured in exhibitions at galleries and museums internationally including, the National Geographic’s Women: a Century of Change at the National Geographic Museum (2020), and Larger than Memory: Contemporary Art From Indigenous North America at the Heard Museum (2020). In 2017 Kali received a Reveal Indigenous Art Award from Hnatyshyn Foundation.

Kali would like to extend her gratitude to all who have collaborated with her, she recognizes the trust and vulnerability required to be photographed in such intimate ways.

Website

This episode first aired June 07, 2021 for Broken Boxes on Radio Coyote, a project initiated by Raven Chacon and CCA Wattis Institute, on the occasion of Chacon's 2020-21 Capp Street Artist-in-Residency. Radio Coyote is currently produced by Atomic Culture and will transition to new programming Summer, 2021. www.radiocoyote.org

This episode is now streaming on iTunes & Spotify

This conversation was hosted by Ginger Dunnill of Broken Boxes Podcast