Finding The Words: Conversation with Elisa Harkins

In this episode of Broken Boxes we talk about the life and current projects of Cherokee/Muscogee artist and composer Elisa Harkins. From her experience of being an adopted child to surviving a near fatal bike accident, Elisa shares both foundational and vulnerable life experiences which gave her strength as an artist. Elisa also reflects on grad school, noting artists who inspired her through insight and mentorship. We speak on how she has used language as a tool in her practice and as a way to access belonging and participation in community. She walks us through Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ, a collaborative performance project which recently toured Europe. In closing, Elisa reminds us that as we strive to do things in a good way as creatives, we should also not be afraid to take a chance on bold ideas that push our comfort levels.  

Elisa Harkins for Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ

Elisa Harkins is a Native American (Cherokee/Muscogee) artist and composer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work is concerned with translation, language preservation, and Indigenous musicology. Harkins uses the Cherokee and Mvskoke languages, electronic music, sculpture, and the body as her tools.  She is the first person to use the Cherokee language in a pop song.  Harkins received a BA from Columbia College, Chicago, and an MFA from CalArts. She has since continued her education at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has exhibited her work at Crystal Bridges, documenta 14, The Hammer Museum, The Heard Museum, and MoMA.  

In 2020, She created an online Indigenous concert series called 6 Moons and published a CD of Muscogee (Creek)/Seminole Hymns. She is also the DJ of Mvhayv Radio, an Indigenous radio show on 99.1FM in Indianapolis, IN, and streaming from OK#1 in Tulsa, OK. Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ is a dance performance that features music and choreography by Harkins. With support from PICA and Western Front, songs from the performance have been collected into a limited edition double LP, which can be found on Harkins’ Bandcamp. Harkins resides on the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation and is an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

Song Featured: Deadly by Elisa Harkins

Ingeniero social: Conversation with Guadalupe Maravilla

Guadalupe Maravilla is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. In 2016, Maravilla became a U.S. citizen and adopted the name Guadalupe Maravilla in solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as his last name. As an acknowledgment to his past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts belonging to undocumented communities and the cancer community. 

In This episode of Broken Boxes Guadalupe Maravilla speaks with Cannupa Hanska Luger about the current creation story of Mariposa Relámpago, a school bus being reworked into a new healing sound work. The artist reflects how this bus’ artwork journey is becoming so much more including multiple communities involvements, several countries and even a volcano. We hear how migration routes are reflected throughout the visual language of Guadalupe’s practice, including the autobiographical nature of the artist's own migration story as a child. Guadalupe unpacks a bit on how he strives to create sustainable micro economies through his artmaking process and we hear about how his art practice also becomes a vessel of support for new asylum seekers arriving in NYC, while in tandem the artworks provide sound healing for those recovering from trauma, including centering healing for cancer survivors.Rounding out the conversation Guadalupe shares how maintaining wellbeing for mind, spirit and body through daily ritual aids in the strength needed to continue to carry the work and support forward, and emplores us to find time in our daily life to nurture inner health. 

Please visit the following link to donate to Guadalupe’s efforts in supporting new asylum seekers arriving in NYC. gofund.me/396e7d27

Artist website: https://www.guadalupemaravilla.com
Artist IG: https://www.instagram.com/guadalupe__maravilla/
Song featured: La Democracia by the artist Very Be Careful

Into The Irrational Space: Conversation with SWOON

Broken Boxes is thrilled to present a very special conversation with the prolific artist Caledonia Curry, known globally as SWOON. In speaking with Broken Boxes producer Ginger Dunnill during the opening of Seven Contemplations at CONTAINER in Santa Fe, NM, Callie reflects on how art has been a healing practice for her throughout life. She talks about her pivot from art school to street art, in a time before the genre’s fame in the global art market and untangles the complexity of being a woman artist in male dominated spaces of that time, while giving credit to the continued brilliance of the next generation who are teaching us the expanse of the gender spectrum. We end our conversation with notes on the impact of accessing and valuing experiences of artists who came before, such as a mentor of hers, Judy Chicago. In closing, Callie offers a bit of fearless inspiration, imploring us as artists to always “follow the impulse” in order to unlock the next gift and adventure.

Caledonia Curry, known as Swoon, is a contemporary artist and filmmaker recognized around the world for her pioneering vision of public artwork.Through intimate portraits, immersive installations and multi-year community based projects, she has spent over 20 years exploring the depths of human complexity by mobilizing her artwork to fundamentally re-envision the communities we live in toward a more just and equitable world. She is best known as one of the first women Street Artists to gain international recognition in a male-dominated field, pushing the conceptual limits of the genre and paving the way for a generation of women Street Artists. 

Her recent work has been focused on the relationship of trauma and addiction. Through community partnerships that center compassion and the transformative power of art, Curry draws on her personal history growing up in an opioid addicted family as a catalyst for connection and healing. Over the past 10 years, she has founded and developed collaborative multi-year projects in Braddock and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Komye, Haiti, that address crises ranging from natural disasters to the opioid epidemic. 

She is currently developing a full length narrative movie which will bring together drawing, immersive installation, stop motion animation and her collaborative work, with the traditions of storytelling through film.

Website: https://swoonstudio.org
IG: https://www.instagram.com/swoonhq/

Swoon’s Seven Contemplations retrospective exhibition is now on view at the new art space, CONTAINER in Santa Fe, NM. Special thanks to Tonya Turner Carroll and Michael Carroll for supporting us with space to conduct this interview in the gallery. 

Image: SWOON’s Seven Contemplations at Albright-Knox Northland, 2021

Song featured on this episode: What They Call Us by Fever Ray
Stream this episode on Broken Boxes Podcast via Spotify and Apple Podcasts

Full Circle: Conversation with Christine Howard Sandoval

In this episode we hear artist Christine Howard Sandoval in conversation with Cannupa Hanska Luger. Christine breaks down the importance of research within her current practice and how her family have become an integral part of her work as she uncovers deeper relationship to her ancestors' pathways throughout California. She reflects on the complexity of connection, disconnection and reconnection to land that we all face today and how she uses performance, video surveillance documentation and large scale earthen paintings to expand upon these notions of belonging. Christine implores us to examine the future of art and education and to trust our own speed and trajectory as we navigate the artworld, reminding us that culture is not static. 

Christine Howard Sandoval is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam First Nations and is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Praxis in the Audain Faculty of Art at Emily Carr University (Vancouver, BC). She is an enrolled member of the Chalon Nation in Bakersfield, CA.

Howard Sandoval's work has exhibited nationally and internationally including: The Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo (Brazil), The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC), Oregon Contemporary (Portland, OR), The Museum of Capitalism (Oakland, CA), Designtransfer, Universität der Künste Berlin (Berlin, Germany), El Museo Del Barrio (New York, NY), and Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, NY).

Howard Sandoval's work has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the ICA San Diego (2021) and Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College (2019), during which time she was the Mellon Artist in Residence at Colorado College. Howard Sandoval has been awarded numerous residencies including: UBC Okanagan, Indigenous Art Intensive program (Kelowna, BC), ICA San Diego (Encinitas, CA), Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM), Triangle Arts Association (New York, NY). She is represented by parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles.

Photo credit: Rachel Topham Photography
Featured song: Journey In Satchidananda by Alice Coltrain

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