Revolutions of Pattern: Interview with Lehuauakea

This episode I speak with artist Lehuauakea. Lehua is a māhū or Queer, Kanaka Maoli/Native Hawaiian and mixed heritage interdisciplinary artist and kapa maker from Pāpaʻikou on Moku O Keawe, or the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. We caught up this summer on the ancestral lands of the Tewa/Towa people of what is now known as Santa Fe, NM during their residency at the School for Advanced Research this summer where Lehua was working on making some large scale Kapa and other projects. We chat about the intention Lehua takes in how their culture is embedded in all they make, their ways of practicing art and producing kapa, and how the act of making keeps Lehua connected deeper to their land and ancestry.

Opening the episode we hear an audio recording from the late Kanaka Maoli activist Haunani Kay Trask. This excerpt is from a speech Trask gave On the 100th anniversary of the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, in 1993, where Trask famously spoke in front of Iolani Palace.

About Lehuauakea:

O Haumea Kino Pāhaʻohaʻo (detail). Lehuauakea

Lehuauakea is a māhū mixed-Native Hawaiian interdisciplinary artist and kapa maker from Pāpaʻikou on Moku O Keawe, the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. Lehua’s Kānaka Maoli family descends from several lineages connected to Maui, Kauaʻi, Kohala, and Hāmākua where their family resides to this day.

Through a range of craft-based media, their art serves as a means of exploring cultural and biological ecologies, spectrums of Indigeneity, and what it means to live within the context of contemporary environmental degradation. With a particular focus on the labor-intensive making of ʻohe kāpala (carved bamboo printing tools), kapa (bark cloth), and natural pigments, Lehua is able to breathe new life into patterns and traditions practiced for generations. Through these acts of resilience that help forge deeper relationships with ʻāina, this mode of Indigenous storytelling is carried well into the future.

They have participated in several solo and group shows around the Pacific Ocean, and recently opened their first curatorial research project, DISplace, at the Five Oaks Museum in Portland, Oregon. The artist is currently based between the Pacific Northwest and Pāpaʻikou after earning their Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting with a minor in Art + Ecology at Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Follow the work of Lehuauakea: 

Website: https://lehuauakea.com 
IG at @_lehuauakea_ https://www.instagram.com/_lehuauakea_/

Music featured on this episode by Hawane Rios
Songs: It’s Everything & Warrior Rising 

This conversation was hosted by Ginger Dunnill of Broken Boxes Podcast

This episode is now streaming on Apple Music & Spotify

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