Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World

EXHIBITION OVERVIEW

A collaborative exhibition created by the Heard Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Remix seeks to explore complex ideas about what it means to be an indigenous artist in the 21st century. The exhibition, featuring the work of 15 artists from across the western hemisphere, explores the very limits of human experience.

AUDIO

Remix artists Franco Mondini-Ruiz and Kent Monkman in Conversation

Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World seeks to explore complex ideas about what it means to be an indigenous artist in the 21st century. The exhibition, featuring the work of 15 artists from across the western hemisphere, explores the very limits of human experience. Provocative Remix artists Franco Mondini-Ruiz and Kent Monkman discuss their work with exhibition co-curator and AGO Curator of Canadian Art, Gerald McMaster.

Franco Mondini-Ruiz abandoned a successful career as a lawyer in 1995 to become an artist. Since then, his work has been exhibited in the 2005 Prague Biennial, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and at the AGO in 2001’s Ultra Baroque: Aspects of Post Latin American Art. Mondini-Ruiz lives in San Antonio, Texas.

Kent Monkman’s work ranges from figurative painting to film and performance, often featuring his alter ego, Miss Chief Share Eagle Testickle. A member of the Fisher River Band of northern Manitoba, Monkman lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Recorded: Wednesday, April 1, 7 - 8:30 p.m.
Duration: 1:09:06

Are we past the age of an aboriginal art show? 

Exhibition curators Gerald McMaster and Joe Baker, Globe and Mail art critic Sarah Milroy, and professor of African and African Diaspora art history and visual culture Salah Hassan discuss the exhibition Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World.

The provocative question – "Are we past the age of an aboriginal art show" – was posed by the Globe and Mail’s art critic, Sarah Milroy, as a lead in to her review of Remix. While this question caused quite a commotion within the Aboriginal art community, it remains a key issue for present and future practice.

Indeed, are we past the age of an aboriginal art show, or any exhibition organized around identity? Are the issues and problematics that gave rise to a host of identity-based exhibition in the 1990s now completely resolved? Can an exhibition that considers hydridized identity formation be something other than an essentialist trap?

Joe Baker is formerly curator at the Heard Museum and now the Director for Community Engagement, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. He is also the co-curator of Remix.

Sarah Milroy is former editor of Canadian Art magazine who has written widely on Canadian art and is currently the art critic for the Globe and Mail.

Salah Hassan is the editor of NHK: Journal of Contemporary African Art; Professor and Director of the Africana Studies and Research Center;professor of African and African Diaspora art history and visual culture,Department of History of Art and Visual Culture, Cornell University.

Gerald McMaster will be the moderator. He is curator of Canadian art, Art Gallery of Ontario, and co-curator of Remix. 

Presented in collaboration with Planet IndigenUs, an international, multi-disciplinary contemporary art festival celebrating innovation, adaptability and evolution of indigenous identity. 

Recorded: Sunday, August 23 2009
Duration: 1:04:19

VIDEO

Artist Bernard Williams speaks about his work in the Remix exhibition

Artist Steven Yazzie speaks about his work in the exhibition Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World