Conversation
VLC Forum 2024: Re-visioning Native Histories
Oct 24, 2024
6:30–8:30pm ET
The New School, Wollman Hall
5th Floor, 65 West 11th Street
New York City
In an expansive conversation, Cree artist Kent Monkman joins Nathan Young, a member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, revisit some of the foundational narratives of the so-called United States of America, centering Indigenous figures, events, and narratives that have been erased or denied as part of the settler-colonial project.
Drawing on their own artistic, political, and scholarly work, including Monkman’s widely exhibited paintings that inject themselves into and disrupt the canon of Western European and American art history, and Young’s Nkwiluntàmën, a site-specific, sound-based installation in the landscape surrounding Pennsbury Manor, a reconstruction of the home of Pennsylvania founder William Penn. Their conversation reckons with the processes of colonial erasure, and the making and unmaking of history. Indigenous visual and sonic agency contends with these processes, the trope of “discovery,” and the complexities of historical and contemporary Indigenous experiences. VLC Borderlands Curatorial Fellow Larissa Nez (Diné) introduces and moderates the conversation to ask: How can artists and historians correct or produce a “correct” record of Indigenous histories? How can historical scholarship and artistic practice work in tandem to reenvision Native pasts and futures?
This program launches the VLC Forum 2024: Correct History* and includes a festive reception.
The Vera List Center Forum 2024 is presented as part of the center’s 2022–2024 Focus Theme Correction*. It is curated by Eriola Pira with Carin Kuoni, with research support by Ariana Kallinga and is convened with the support of Tabor Banquer, Re’al Christian, and Adrienne Umeh.
This event is supported by the Barbara Jordan Lectures: The State of Democracy and the Helen Shapiro Lectureship fund.
The Fall 2024 programs of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School are generously supported by members of the Vera List Center Board, individual donors as well as the following institutional funders:
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
The Boris Lurie Art Foundation/The Schaina and Josephina Lurje Memorial Foundation
Dayton Foundation
Mellon Foundation
Native Arts and Cultures Foundation
New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature
Terra Foundation for American Art
and The New School