Raven HalfmoonIndian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 takes its impetus from a modest, yet significant document: “Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Progress”, published by the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in 1969 and written by Lloyd Kiva New and Rolland R. Meinholtz, together with IAIA students. The document initiated the New Native Theater movement, which offered a radically different way to contextualize the long-standing practice of performance in Native societies across Turtle Island. It also created a template for its future. It is a methodology and an origin point for this exhibition. For the participating artists and performers, it is a guide. This exhibition situates performance, performativity, and theater as an origin point for the development of contemporary art by Native American, First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and Alaska Native artists; this includes the influential role that Native artists played in the self-determination era.

In the artworks and archival materials in Indian Theater, visual sovereignty is enacted via strategies and long traditions of material agency and invention; storytelling and testimony; blanketing and adornment (as material and method); masking, and taking on new identities; representations of the body and its absence; Native music; inauthenticity and fabrication; racy humor; historical and contemporary secret societies; Native and non-colonial economies; #LandBack and #WaterBack movements; and Native resistance movements, of the present and the past.

Every attempt at history is always partial and inevitably filled with omissions. Consider this exhibition an unfolding of relations—both known and yet to be defined.