Event
Interwoven: Indigenous ContemporaryPost an Event »
Thacher Gallery at the University of San Francisco
November 16 - February 14, 2016Info
- www.usfca.edu/thacher-gallery
- 415-422-5178
Reception
November 18, 2015 5:00 pm to 7:30 pm
Lewis deSoto, Wave System, 1983, photograph
A survey of contemporary Native American art at the University of San Francisco’s Thacher Gallery presents artists challenging preconceived ideas about Indigenous identity in California. Interwoven: Indigenous Contemporary is offered from November 16, 2015 to February 14, 2016, and presents 15 artists, including many from California Indian tribes, representing three generations, working in a range of mediums. Their art dispels romanticized Native American archetypes and re-contextualizes traditional and modern Indigenous culture.
Highlights include the art of James Luna who reimagines sacred artifacts through a series of self-portraits. Dugan Aguilar, Gerald Clarke, Jr., and Linda Aguilar explore essential California Indian traditions such as basketry arts and ceremonial practices with new materials. Katie Dorame uses the iconography of science fiction to examine narratives around the California mission system. Works by Jaque Fragua, Spencer Keeton Cunningham, and Erick Andino comment on the appropriation of Native American imagery in popular culture.
The aesthetic activism seen in all of these artists’ works generates a new landscape informed by contemporary arts and the culture of diaspora. By engaging several generations of Indigenous artists, Interwoven: Indigenous Contemporary offers up a variety of Native American voices on the evolving American cultural landscape. If art is a form of storytelling, then the works in this exhibit provide a contemporary lexicon with which Indigenous artists express personal truths. This exhibition reveals how these diverse artists have successfully reclaimed their history, their land and their identity through creative expression.
Indigenous Contemporary is organized by USF's Museum Studies MA Program Curatorial Practicum course taught by John Zarobell. Located in the University of San Francisco’s Gleeson Library, the Thacher Gallery is free and open to the public noon to 6 p.m. with a holiday closure from Dec. 19 to Jan. 1. Tours are available upon request. // 2130 Fulton Street (at Parker) // (415) 422-5178 // www.usfca.edu/thacher-gallery