American and Indigenous Studies Program Presents

Dana Claxton: Artist Talk with Returning Home

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

This event will be via Zoom, with viewing available at the Montgomery Place visitor's center. Register for the Zoom talk here.

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

Exhibition Viewing Hours:
April 6 & 7, 1:00-5:00 pm (timed entry every half hour—register here)
April 10–12, 1:30–4:00 pm

Schedule of Events:
April 6, 1:30 pm: Opening Remarks & Activation, poetry reading by Bonney Hartley (doors open at 1pm - registration required)
April 6, 4:00 pm: Cara Romero in conversation with Suzanne Kite - registration required
April 7, 3:00 pm: 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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Dana Claxton is a critically acclaimed artist who works with film, video, photography, single/multi-channel video installation, and performance art. Her practice investigates indigenous beauty, the body, the sociopolitical, and the spiritual. Her work has been shown internationally and is held in public, private, and corporate collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Mackenzie Art Gallery, Audain Art Museum, Eiteljorg Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Forge Project, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the Moose Jaw Museum and Art Gallery. She is professor and head of the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory with the University of British Columbia. She is a member of Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in SW Saskatchewan and resides in Vancouver Canada.

Dana comments, “I am grateful for all the support my artwork and cultural work has received. I am indebted to the sun and my sundance teachings—mni ki wakan—water is sacred.”

For more information, call 845-758-6822, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://rethinkingplace.bard.edu/returning-home/.

Time: 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Online Event

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