American and Indigenous Studies Program, Center for Indigenous Studies, and Montgomery Place Present

In Conversation: Cara Romero & Suzanne Kite

Sponsored by Hudson Valley Greenway and the Mellon Foundation, as a part of Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck.

 All events require separate registration. Exhibition viewing is not included in event registration.

Exhibition Viewing Hours:
April 6th & 7th, 1:00-5:00pm (timed entry every 15 minutes - register here)
April 10-12th, 1:30-4:00pm

Schedule of Events:
April 6th, 1:30pm: Opening Remarks & Activation, poetry reading by Bonney Hartley (doors open at 1pm - registration required)
April 6th, 4:00pm: Cara Romero in conversation with Suzanne Kite - registration required
April 7th, 3:00pm: Dana Claxton Artist Talk, on zoom, seating available at MP visitor's center. Register for the zoom talk here.
April 10th, 6:30pm: Cara Romero: Following the Light, Preston Cinema, Bard College. A short documentary on the work & practice of Cara Romero. No registration required.

Returning Home is the first small scale contemporary Native photography exhibition to take place in the Montgomery Place Mansion at Bard College. The exhibition addresses long standing Indigenous child removal policies and practices of Canada and the United States, whose governments strategically implemented the kidnapping of Native children to be sent to Indian boarding schools during the 19th and 20th centuries to sever familial ties and dispossess Indigenous peoples of their land and lifeways. By introducing the history of the United States’ settler colonial past and ongoing present alongside the works of four contemporary Native photographers—Kali Spitzer (Kaska Dena/Jewish), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Dana Claxton (Wood Mountain Lakota First Nation), Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke(Crow))—and poet Bonney Hartley (Stockbridge-Munsee), this exhibition provides narratives of resistance, resilience, dissent, subversion, memorialization, and what Anishinabe writer Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance,” that disrupt historic and contemporary notions that Native peoples are helpless victims who are unfit to raise their own children – often infantilized by a paternalistic US government through colonial welfare practices. This exhibition is an intervention in a house museum whose history is intertwined with the forced removal of the Mohican peoples in early colonial New York.

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About Cara Romero: "An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, I am a visual storyteller, activist, and mother. Born to interracial parents in LA, I grew up between the reservation and big city sprawl. I am known for dramatic fine art photography that examines Indigenous life in contemporary contexts. As an undergraduate at the University of Houston, I pursued a degree in cultural anthropology and was disillusioned by how Native Americans are portrayed in academia and media. After realizing that photographs could do more than anthropology did in words, I shifted my medium. With training in film, digital, photojournalism, editorial portraiture, and commercial and fine art photography, my work is shaped by 25 years of formal study and artistic practice. Blurring the lines between fine art and activism, I tell stories of cultural memory, collective histories, and autobiography. My work commonly explores themes of environmental racism, power and belonging of Native womxn, Native sub-pop, and mythos.
As my work continues to grow and evolve, my imagery–which ranges from pointed satire to the supernatural in everyday life — conveys the complex realities of contemporary Native peoples. Now entering my mid-career, my work has been acquired by major institutions including The Met, The MoMA, The Amon Carter, as well as the Forge Project Collection. Over the past 3 years, I have been commissioned to create monumental-scale public art including the 2019 Desert X Biennial and NDN Collective’s #TONGVALAND billboard series in Los Angeles. Since 2017, I have mentored four emerging Native American women photographers in my studio. Mother of three children, I travel between Santa Fe and the Chemehuevi Valley Indian Reservation, where I inherited my childhood home and maintain close ties to my tribal community and ancestral homelands through art and activism."

For more information, call 860-992-6472, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://rethinkingplace.bard.edu/returning-home/.

Time: 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Montgomery Place Estate

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