Long Con: Sterlin Harjo & Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ep 5

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.

This episode is the fifth conversation between Harjo and Luger on Broken Boxes, and the artists dive right in, chatting about conspiracy theories, aliens, AI, Indigenous ceramic practices, the current state of the film industry and the writers strike, how creating sanctuary for producing big ideas is important and how everyone's creative process is different, so it’s about finding what your groove is. They also speak about fatherhood, the importance of storytelling, and of course the final season of Reservation Dogs - Season 3 - which premieres August 2nd, just days after this episode airs. Sterlin shares why he decided to complete the series after three seasons and reflects on his adventures of being a showrunner for a production that has changed the face of television for Indigenous people, and how making this work has, in turn, changed him. I am excited to see what comes next for our dear friend Sterlin. Broken Boxes will continue to produce these long conversations between the two artists and also we are so excited for Sterlin’s podcast The Cuts to activate again, please go listen to his podcast archive If you have not yet!

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, now available to watch 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 and Lakota descent. 

Music featured: 25 and Wastin’ Time by Vincent Neil Emerson
Broken Boxes intro track by India Sky

Instructions For A Future: Conversation with Amaryllis R. Flowers

Nine years after our first conversation on Broken Boxes Podcast, I got to circle back with one of my besties, and the incredible artist now known as Amaryllis R. Flowers. Amaryllis works across materials from drawing to video, to performance to clay, creating a visual language paying attention to the spaces in-between categories, and revering those that know the trouble and pleasure there. It was a warm early summer day and we sat outside in the clover fields at the Rockefeller Brothers Estate in New York where Amaryllis was an artist in residence at the Pocantico Center. 

In our conversation, Amaryllis reflects on her journey in claiming and reframing what the term Artist can mean, how it can evolve. She gives us a glimpse into the adventures and miseducation of the formal art school path and how her experiences in academia have had lasting effects on her life and practice, both positive and negative. Amaryllis takes some time to speak vulnerably about mental health and how stigmatized certain diagnoses still are in our society. She shares her own path of healing over the past few years and provides tangible resources and support systems she has gleaned in finding wellness. We speak to her current experience of reclaiming her way as Artist, as she reforms a more balanced and generative relationship with her practice and the artworld. 

Amaryllis R. Flowers is a Queer Puerto Rican American Artist living and working in upstate New York. Raised between multiple cities and rural communities across America in a constantly shifting landscape, her practice explores themes of hybridity, mythology and sexuality. Drawing inspiration from visual systems of communication such as comics, cartoons, codices, Egyptian scrolls, sympathetic magic, Caribbean Surrealisms, and alchemical diagrams for transformation, Amaryllis  creates non-linear symbol sets that buck colonial notions of how to navigate and describe our world. Where taste has been constructed by these notions, she aims to create work of questionable taste, utilizing color and material classed as “femme” and casting it to the center of the circle. Illuminated with fluorescents, metallics, and iridescence, these images refuse a naturalizing aesthetic of the universe.

Amaryllis earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2019 and her BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in 2014. She is the recipient of the 2023 Pocantico Prize from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a 2022-2027 Joan Mitchell Fellow, and a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including at the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo Del Barrio (New York), The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, CT), MoCADA (Brooklyn), and SOMArts (San Francisco). 

Artist Website
Featured Song: Goin’ Looney by Big Freedia

Relative Arts: Conversation with Korina Emmerich & Liana Shewey

In this episode of Broken Boxes we sit down with Relative Arts founders Korina Emmerich and Liana Shewey. We chat about their long and collaborative friendship, the powerful impact and also social harms that can often accompany radical collective advocacy within mutual aid and direct action work. We speak to the growing pains and collective strength of community organizing and how Korina and Liana recently launched Relative Arts with an urgency to create a contemporary Indigenous artist-run community shop, showroom, artist studio / education and event space in Manhattan's East Village. We speak to the community care that is woven throughout Relative Arts, how the space has become a destination stop for Indigenous folks in New York to find community, connect and bond over art and fashion and so much more. We hear how in their experience the most important advice for community organizing, movement building and revolution is not to look to the person taking up the most space but how it is in autonomy that we are able to find true intersection, to change and to hear other perspectives. The overall theme of our conversation echoing throughout is that “We are nothing without our community.”

Relative Arts is a new brick-and-mortar community space, open atelier, and shop displaying contemporary Indigenous fashion and design. Our mission is to provide a peer-run space in New York City to celebrate and foster the advancement of Indigenous futurism in fashion through representation and education. We are Indigenous owned and operated by Korina Emmerich (Puyallup) and Liana Shewey (Mvskoke).

Located at 367 E 10th St, NY, NY 10009, we are open Thursday - Sunday 12pm - 6pm. Visitors will be able to shop from a curated collection of over 20 Indigenous artists from across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico including EMME Studio, Copper Canoe Woman, Quw’utsun' Made, Mobilize, Ginew, Teton Trade Cloth, and more. 

www.relativeartsnyc.com
@relativeartsnyc

Korina Emmerich 

Artist and designer Korina Emmerich founded EMME Studio in 2015 and co-founded Relative Arts, NYC in 2023. Her colorful work celebrates her patrilineal Indigenous heritage from The Puyallup tribe while aligning art and design with education. With a strong focus on social and climate justice, Emmerich's artwork strives to expose and dismantle systems of oppression in the fashion industry and challenge colonial ways of thinking.

Her work has been featured in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Moma PS1, The Denver Art Museum, Vogue, Elle, Instyle, Fashion, Flare, New York Magazine, and more notable publications. She has presented her collections in Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week, Indigenous Fashion and Arts, Santa Fe Indian Market's Couture Runway Show, and New York Fashion Week.

She most recently co-founded the new atelier, gallery, showroom, and community space Relative Arts NYC. Located in the East Village, the space celebrates Indigenous and subversive art and fashion.

Liana Shewey

Liana Shewey (Mvskoke) is the Programming Director at Relative Arts. Shewey is a committed educator and community organizer who has led teach-ins and speak-outs to create awareness around missing and murdered Indigenous relatives (MMIR), the damaging effects of fossil fuels, and Indigenous liberation. She has also worked in music and event production for more than 15 years and brings those skills and relationships to Relative Arts to host events featuring artists of all forms, and to develop progressive educational programming.

The Astral Sea: Conversation with Tsedaye Makonnen

In this episode of Broken Boxes Podcast we hear from Tsedaye Makonnen, a multidisciplinary artist, curator, researcher and cultural producer. Tsedaye’s practice is driven by Black feminist theory, firsthand site-specific research, and ethical social practice techniques, which become solo and collaborative site sensitive performances, objects, installations, and films. In our conversation Tsedaye shares with us about her experiences in building and sustaining her art practice which focuses primarily on intersectional feminism, reproductive health and migration. She shares how her personal history as a mother, the daughter of Ethiopian refugees, a doula and a sanctuary builder nourish and guide her creative expression. 

“I want to be as expansive and imaginative as possible - to me that is freedom. I am Building worlds that have not existed yet, for myself and for others.” - Tsedaye Makonnen

Tsedaye Makonnen is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, researcher and cultural producer. Tsedaye’s practice is driven by Black feminist theory, firsthand site-specific research, and ethical social practice techniques, which become solo and collaborative site sensitive performances, objects, installations, and films. Her studio primarily focuses on intersectional feminism, reproductive health and migration. Tsedaye’s personal history is as a mother, the daughter of Ethiopian refugees, a doula and a sanctuary builder. 

In 2019 she was the recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. In 2021 her light sculptures were acquired by the Smithsonian NMAFA for their permanent collection, she has also exhibited these light sculptures at the National Gallery of Art and UNTITLED Art Fair. In 2023, she will be showing these light installations in traveling exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bard Graduate Center and the Walters Art Museum. 

She is the current recipient of the large-scale Landmark Public Art Commission for Providence, RI where she will create a permanent installation of her renowned light sculptures. In the Fall 2022 she performed at the Venice Biennale for Simone Leigh’s ‘Loophole of Retreat’ and was the Clark Art Institute’s Futures Fellow. 

In 2021 she published a book with Washington Project for the Arts titled ‘Black Women as/and the Living Archive’ based on Alisha B. Wormsley’s ‘Children of Nan’. In 2021, she exhibited at Photoville & NYU’s Tisch, the Walters Art Museum as a Sondheim Prize Finalist, CFHill gallery in Stockholm, Sweden and 1:54 in London.  In 2022 she exhibited at Artspace New Haven in CT and The Mattress Factory and much more. Other exhibitions include Park Avenue Armory, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Art Dubai, and more. 

She has performed at the Venice Biennale, Art Basel Miami, Art on the Vine (Martha's Vineyard), Chale Wote Street Art Festival (Ghana), El Museo del Barrio, Fendika Cultural Center (Ethiopia), Festival International d'Art Performance (Martinique), Queens Museum, the Smithsonian's, The Momentary and more. 

Her work has been featured in Artsy, NYTimes, Vogue, BOMB, Hyperallergic, American Quarterly, Gagosian Quarterly and Transition Magazine. She is represented by Addis Fine Art and currently lives between DC and London.

TSEDAYE'S WEBSITE
Music: Tew Ante Sew by GIGI
Broken Boxes opening song by India Sky
Photograph of Tsedaye Makonnen taken by performance artist Ayana Evan

Come With Me! - Conversation with Natalie Ball

In this episode we hear from artist Natalie Ball who dives right in sharing critical artworld survival insight gleaned from a life changing studio visit by artist Willie T. Williams while she was attending Yale School of Art. Among a long list of support tactics Willie imparted, the artist emplored Natalie to find a means to sustain a studio practice beyond sales, and as an artist, to always be in control of your work and process. Natalie also shares vulnerable truths from her experience as a Black Indigenous artist navigating both the Native artworld and the larger contemporary artworld. We chat about higher education and how it has been as a pathway of respite as Natalie navigated motherhood from a young age. We talk about the journey Natalie experienced having a child with a chronic illness and how she took a 5 year hiatus from art, stepping into a focused world of love and care for family back home on her territory. We talk about this current moment in time for Natalie - unpacking the need for administrative support in order to create the time to make the work and how art school does not always provide the tangible insight on how an artist can build this support into their career. Material and place informs Natalie’s work most - from her studio practice to motherhood to work on her territory - everything is connected. She uplifts play and joy as critical components to her practice, noting the courage and intention it takes to create this response to a harsh world. Through her work and life, Natalie asserts that art is power and holds the ability to transform our way of thinking. In her practice she boldly asks her audience to open their hearts and minds to new ways of seeing, presenting a call to “Come with me!”.

Natalie Ball was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She has a Bachelor’s degree with a double major in Indigenous, Race & Ethnic Studies & Art from the University of Oregon. She furthered her education in Aotearoa (NZ) at Massey University where she attained her Master’s degree with a focus on Indigenous contemporary art. Ball then relocated to her ancestral Homelands in Southern Oregon/Northern California to raise her three children. In 2018, Natalie earned her M.F.A. degree in Painting & Printmaking at Yale School of Art. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally. She is the recipient of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s Oregon Native Arts Fellowship 2021, the Ford Family Foundation’s Hallie Ford Foundation Fellow 2020, the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant 2020, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2019, and the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Award 2018. Natalie Ball is now an elected official serving on the Klamath Tribes Tribal Council.

Artist Website: www.natalieball.com

Music Featured: Damn Right by Snotty Nose Rez Kids
Broken Boxes intro track by India Sky