Healing Our Collective Imagination: Conversation with Kate DeCiccio

In this episode we get into conversation with artist, educator and creative strategist Kate Deciccio who shares how her practice is a space to unpack the ways whiteness, colonization and the prison industrial complex have harmed our collective imagination. Kate also presents tangible ways we may heal and be nourished collectively by collaborative processes of building through community led abolition and also in personal accountability to whiteness through practices such as somatics. 

Justice Calls for a Copless Future, Kate DeCiccio, 2020

Kate DeCiccio is an Oakland based artist, educator & creative strategist. Her work centers portraiture for counter narrative, community storytelling & cultural strategy on behalf of abolition and collective liberation.  DeCiccio is from Central Massachusetts where she grew up on occupied Nipmuc territory on her family’s 4th generation farm. She is the 3rd generation of her Polish and Italian ancestors and descends from 11 generations of English colonizers. Before working as an artist full time DeCiccio was a mental health and substance abuse counselor and taught art at San Quentin Prison,  St Elizabeths Forensic Psychiatric hospital &  Leadership High School. The intersections of creativity, mental illness, addiction and ancestral investigation have been driving themes in her art practice since she was a teenager. DeCiccio is committed to repairing the harm of her inherited legacy and working to heal our collective imagination by learning how to stand squarely in truth, accountability, renewed resilience and unknown possibility. She is currently working on a body of work called Anatomy of the Colonial Fetish & Cynical Pilgrim, stay tuned!

DeCiccio is a Co-Director at Performing Statistics, a project that supports youth organizers to close youth prisons across the country. Her collaborations include work with The People's Paper Coop, The Painted Desert Project, 826 National,  Critical Resistance, Survived and Punished, Planting Justice and Dear Frontline. She's been commissioned by Amplifier Foundation to create work on behalf of The Women's March, The Science March and March For Our Lives. Her work has been featured in news and media sources including The Huffington Post, Teen Vogue, The Daily Show, LA Times and Navajo Times. She’s exhibited at Galeria de La Raza, The Mission Cultural Center, The United States of Women, US Botanic Garden, Betti Ono Gallery, INTO ACTION, Interference Archive and Politicon. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Library of Congress and The Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

Song featured: September Song by Agnes Obel

Learn more about the work of Kate DeCiccio:
katedeciccio.com
IG: @k8deciccio

What's happening at Performing Statistics: 
www.performingstatistics.org
IG: @performingstatistics

Additional resources:

On Somatics: 
Book: My Body My Earth, Dr Ruby Gibson
Book: My Grandmothers Hands, Resma Menakem
https://generativesomatics.org

On Abolition: 
https://www.interruptingcriminalization.com
https://criticalresistance.org/abolish-policing/
https://www.commonjustice.org

Long Con: Sterlin Harjo & Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ep 3

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.

In this conversation Sterlin Harjo and Cannupa Hanska Luger reflect on the process and outcome of Sterlin’s journey in creating the hit television series Reservation Dogs, now in its second season. They also talk about creating through a pandemic, lifting up independent filmmakers, swinging for the fences, the actors from Reservation Dogs and their character breakdowns, the latest custom hat by Cannupa, Indigenous film crews, with a little cameo by Sterlin’s son Ayo and so much more.

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, Season 2 now streaming on FX. 

This is the third conversation between Sterlin & Cannupa for the podcast - check our archive to listen to the first two conversations.

Also check out Sterlin’s podcast ‘The Cuts’ where Sterin chats with the creative team from Reservation Dogs and many other creative peers, including Taika Waititi.

Song featured: Letters On The Marquee by Vincent Neil Emerson

Invisible Stories: Conversation with Tanya Aguiñiga

For this episode recurring host Cannupa Hanska Luger speaks with our dear friend and powerhouse artist and activist Tanya Aguiñiga about the cochineal beetle, clay as a healing practice for immigrant detainment camps, Indigenous solidarity and Tanya’s ongoing work with AMBOS: Art Made Between Opposite Sides.

Tanya Aguiñiga is an artist, designer, and craftsperson, who works with traditional craft materials like natural fibers and collaborates with other artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, and community-based art projects. Drawing on her upbringing as a binational citizen, who daily crossed the border from Tijuana to San Diego for school, Aguiñiga’s work speaks of the artist’s experience of her divided identity and aspires to tell the larger and often invisible stories of the transnational community.

Aguiñiga began her career by creating collaborative installations with the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, an artist collective that addressed political and human rights issues at the U.S.-Mexico border. The artist co-built and for six years ran a community center in Tijuana, aimed at bringing attention through arts initiatives to injustices that the local community faced. Aguiñiga has maintained this spirit of activism and community collaboration throughout her career, going on to create many performances and installations that involve the participation of other artists, activists, and community members. In her installations, furniture, and wearable designs, Aguiñiga often works with cotton, wool, and other textiles, drawing upon Mesoamerican weaving and traditional forms. In 2016, in response to the deep polarization about the U.S.-Mexico border, Aguiñiga created AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of projects that provides a platform for binational artists. Her inaugural AMBOS project, Border Quipu, used brightly colored strands of fabric to create quipu—an Andean pre-Columbian organizational system—that recorded the daily commutes to and from the United States.

Tanya Aguiñiga holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. She is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of crafts and traditional arts, a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures awardee, Creative Capital grant awardee, and a recipient of an Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. She has had major solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2018); Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018); among others. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Annenberg Space for Photography (2019) and Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles (2018), among others. Aguiñiga lives in Los Angeles, California.

Support the work Tanya is doing with AMBOS which stands for Art Made Between Opposite Sides, including a donating directly to the  AMBOS Ceramics program, which Tanya speaks of in this podcast.

AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides): http://www.ambosproject.com
Donate to AMBOS Ceramics program: https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/ambos
Learn More about Tanya’s work: http://www.tanyaaguiniga.com

Music Featured: For The Young by Kindness

Future Radicalized Ancestors: Conversation with Kristy Moreno

In this episode we speak with Mexican American Ceramic and Multidisciplinary artist Kristy Moreno who is a current long-term resident artist at Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts (The Bray). 

“My current body of work examines the systems and bonds between social, political, and personal narratives. These narratives intersect to embody forms of relativity, healing and resilience. By producing these physically paused moments, I introduce a space for reflection which investigates the journey of my personal point of view, individual habits and character.” - Kristy Moreno

Artist Kristy Moreno in the studio with her sculpture work at The Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts.

Kristy Moreno was born in the city of Inglewood, California and often found herself creating doodles of her favorite cartoons. Moving to Orange County inspired her to become involved in the art communities of Santa Ana, leading her to collaborate with group collectives including We Are Rodents and Konsept. She then attended Santa Ana College where she found an interest in ceramics that led her to transfer to California State University, Chico to pursue a BFA degree. Her work now spans across mediums to bring awareness and visibility to an abundant future where mutual aid is possible.

Website: https://kristymorenoart.weebly.com
IG: @kristy.moreno 
Song Featured: Mar Iguana by É Arenas

Liminal Beings: Conversation with Joseph M. Pierce

In this episode recurring host and artist Cannupa Hanska Luger gets into conversation with Joseph M. Pierce, a Citizen of the Cherokee Nation and an Associate Professor at Stony Brook University where he teaches and researches about Queer Studies, Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies. Joseph is also a writer and an artist who often collaborates with other Queer, Trans and 2spirit Indigenous Kin on curation and performance work. In this conversation Joseph and Cannupa speak about the points of connection within community through time, focusing on the realms of storytelling and speculative fiction that weave us together in continuum.  

More about the Artist:
Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19 th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published recently in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, Latin American Research Review, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. Along with S.J. Norman (Koori of Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Ways to engage with Joseph’s work:
Joseph M. Pierce website
Dayunisi's Turn
Knowledge of Wounds
Joseph and SJ Norman in conversation about their collaborative practice

Featured Song: Performing Life from Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ by Elisa Harkins