American and Indigenous Studies

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Bard College Hosts Third Annual Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Conference on Food & Memory, March 6–8

Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, a Mellon Foundation Humanities for All Times initiative, hosts its final annual conference from March 6 through 8, at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Centered around the theme of the Rethinking Place project’s third year, the conference, “Food & Memory,” will aim to explore food systems, agricultural practices, and culinary histories as a point of entry into place-making past, present, and future.

The two prior Rethinking Place conferences, “The DRE: Disturbance, Re-Animation, and Emergent Archives” and “Refusal, Creation, and Intersectionality,” focused on emergent and disruptive archives and on Indigenous research methods, and engaged themes that continue to apply to “Food & Memory.” Our complex food systems and their many human and non-human players—recipes and seeds, plants and care—can be seen as living archives, locations of research, and sites of knowledge production.

From March 6 through 8, Rethinking Place hosts a multidisciplinary gathering to interrogate questions of food and memory, building on 24 months of work in adjacent areas. This conference brings together agricultural workers including Jalal Sabur of Sweet Freedom Farm and Kenny Perkins (Mohawk) of the Akwesasne Seed Hub, chefs including Farah Momen, food systems scholars including Ozoz Sokoh, and artists, notably Vivien Sansour and Marie Watt (Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians), to create fertile ground for interdisciplinary discussion.

On Thursday, March 6, Lucille Grignon (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican) gives her opening keynote address, titled “In the Kitchen with Our Ancestors,” followed by a presentation by Marie Watt, a community meal with Ozoz Sokoh and BEM Brooklyn, celebrating the release of her new Nigerian cookbook, Chop Chop. A simultaneous exhibition in the Bard Stevenson Library features former Architecture Program Fellow Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee’s work, “Hard Labor, Soft Space: The Making of Radical Farms,” made while in residence at Bard College.

On Friday, March 7, the day’s events feature chef Farah Momen’s talk “Taste the Revolution: The Evolution of Bengali Food Culture,” farmer Jalal Sabur’s workshop “Grow Food Not Prisons: Building a movement towards Liberation and Justice,” and several other concurrent workshops include a medicine walk with Misty Cook (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican), place-based research and zine making, jam making at Montgomery Place Kitchens, and presentations by Rethinking Place Food & Memory Fellows Sage Liotta ’25 and Tatiana Blackhorse ’27. A Stone Soup Community Dinner and Storytelling, cohosted by the Bard Farm, Fisher Center Anti-Racism Working Group, and Experimental Humanities concludes the day.

On Saturday, March 8, Kenny Perkins of Akwesasne Seed Hub gives the closing keynote address, followed by Choy Common’s talk “Growing Interdependence—Building a Food Sovereignty Cooperative Within and Against Industrial Food Systems,” workshops on student organizing for food justice and building land-based solidarity networks, and the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library Traveling Kitchen.

Find the full conference schedule and workshop descriptions here. The conference is free, registration required here.

“We are honored to benefit from the generosity and wisdom of individuals who have long engaged in the hard work of nurturing and defending the flora and fauna vital to a balanced world,” says Christian Ayne Crouch, principal investigator of Rethinking Place and director of the Center for Indigenous Studies at Bard College. “I can think of no better way, on the cusp of spring and a new growing season, to conclude this grant celebrating deep local learning and myriad forms of intellectual and community engagement.”

We are pleased to have joined our efforts in place-based inquiry with other entities on the Bard campus. For their support over the life of the Rethinking Place project, we thank the Bard Farm, the Center for Environmental Science and Humanities, the Center for Experimental Humanities, the Center for Human Rights and the Arts, and the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Rethinking Place would also like to extend gratitude to our supporting partners at Center for Indigenous Studies, American and Indigenous Studies, the Fisher Center Anti-Racism Working Group on Food, BEM Brooklyn, Forge Project, Sweet Freedom Farm, and the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. “Food & Memory” is the final conference of the “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project grant period.

Post Date: 02-04-2025

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Jeffrey Gibson Reflects on a Standout Year in Artnet

Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence at Bard College, reflects on 2024—a year that started with Gibson being honored as the first Indigenous and openly queer artist to have a solo representation of the US Pavilion in Venice Biennale and continued with MASS MoCA’s commissioning of Power Full Because We’re Different, the largest single museum installation in his career—in an interview with Artnet. Gibson notes the opening events of the Venice Biennale as a personal highlight of 2024 “because of the sheer joy felt by myself and many other Native and Indigenous people who traveled to Venice to celebrate together and bring life to the installation through music, dance, poetry and performance. To see how the images ricocheted through Indian Country in the US was thrilling.” He also mentions Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self Determination since 1969, organized by Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies at Bard Candice Hopkins CCS ’03, at the Hessel Museum of Art, as one of the best exhibitions that he saw in 2024. “It is the kind of exhibition that I have been waiting for and it established a fresh starting point for many when considering the history of Native American Art,” says Gibson.

Further reading:
Center for Indigenous Studies’ Three-Day Convening at the Venice Biennale Featured in Hyperallergic

 

Post Date: 01-07-2025

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Professor Kite’s Artistic Residency Featured in I Care If You Listen

Bard Distinguished Artist in Residence and Assistant Professor of American and Indigenous Studies Kite MFA ’18 was profiled in the multimedia hub I Care If You Listen. The piece focuses on Kite’s two-day residency at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer (EMPAC) where she led seven students through a workshop on dreaming, then let them create and perform their own visual scores based on their dreams. ​​“It’s great to get to work with the students here,” Kite said. “Wrangling crazy ideas, organizing them into something sensible, being sensitive to your audience’s needs, and being careful with time, being self aware—those are all skills I can share.”

Kite joined Bard in 2023 and has worked in the field of machine learning since 2017. She develops wearable technology and full-body software systems to interrogate past, present, and future Lakȟóta philosophies. She is also the director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard. I Care If You Listen describes her work as “[uniting] scientific and artistic disciplines through custom worn electronic instruments, research, visual scores, and more… rooted in Lakota ways of making knowledge, in which body and mind are always intimately intertwined.”

Post Date: 01-07-2025

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Suzanne Kite MFA ’18 Interviewed for NBC News

Suzanne Kite MFA ’18, aka Kite, distinguished artist in residence, assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies, and director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard, was interviewed by News10 NBC for an article about how Indigenous engineers and artists are using artificial intelligence for cultural preservation projects. Of the 4,000 Indigenous languages worldwide, it is estimated that one dies every two weeks with its last speaker, according to data from the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. AI can be a valuable tool in the initiatives designed to preserve those languages and other aspects of Indigenous culture and creative practices, such as the art which Kite is using machine learning to create. “My question is simple: How do we create ethical art with AI by applying Indigenous ontologies?” Kite said. “I try to resist Western personification of AI and instead dig into the hyperlocal, grounded and practical frameworks of knowledge that American Indigenous communities provide.”

Post Date: 12-03-2024

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Center for Indigenous Studies’ Three-Day Convening at the Venice Biennale Featured in Hyperallergic

Bard’s Center for Indigenous Studies (CfIS) hosted a convening in Venice to consider how Indigenous aesthetics, futurity, and arts intersect with global practices and modernism. The name of the convening, “if I read you/what I wrote bear/in mind I wrote it,” from a poem by Layli Long Soldier MFA ’14 (Oglala Lakota), gathered Native and non-Native poets, academics, artists, musicians, curators, teachers, and students to address the interdisciplinary, transnational nature of Bard Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson's (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee) work in the US Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale Arte.

“The convening as a whole felt like an energizing disco, a kaleidoscopic exploration of Native identities in all their rich dualities, contrasts, and dichotomies: familiar and unfamiliar, past and future, joy and sorrow, detailed and monumental,” wrote Sháńdíín Brown (Navajo) for Hyperallergic.
  
The three-day event hosted luminaries of Native American and Indigenous studies and cutting-edge performers. Panels on beads, materiality, economies of labor and trade, aesthetics, poetry, performance, silhouette, and color also celebrated contemporary Indigenous artists, writers, and activists while examining the continued segregation of Indigenous voices in conversations regarding taste making, trade, modernity, and power. Several Bard College faculty and staff participated including Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies, associate professor of history and American and Indigenous studies, and CfIS director; Brandi Norton (Iñupiaq), CfIS curator of public programs; Melina Roise, CfIS program coordinator; and Dinaw Mengetsu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program.

Further reading:
The Art of Jeffrey Gibson Shines in Venice (ICT)

Post Date: 11-07-2024

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Peter L’Official’s Essay “Black Builders” Published in Places Journal

Peter L’Official, associate professor of literature and director of the American and Indigenous Studies Program, has published “Black Builders,” an article exploring the relationship between both writing and architecture, and race and design, for Places Journal. In examining the works of visionary Black architect and urban planner W. Joseph Black (1961–1977), who tragically died of cancer at age 43, novelist Colson Whitehead, and other scholars and writers, L’Official asks: “What do we learn about visions of cities when we consider writing and architecture as mutually defining?” L’Official delves deeply into Black’s archives and grapples with his brilliant unfinished masterpieces including the ambitious Harlem Music Center and Gateway to Harlem complex, as well as two comprehensive volumes Visions of Harlem, intended as an exhibition and catalogue, and Black Builders of America, a compendium focused on the many known and unknown Black builders dating back from 1619 to the contemporary. Inspired by the career and legacy of W. Joseph Black, L’Official proposes a notion: “writing about architecture is also a method of practicing architecture—that is, by thinking it.” In contemplating “how many works by Black architects, planners, builders, and other dreamers lie dormant, still, in archives, or tossed by the wayside in frustration, never to be lauded as great works of even speculative imagination?” L’Official asserts “We should also expand our notions of who and what Black builders and Black building can be—and, indeed, of what it means to ‘build’ in the first place.”

L’Official’s “Black Builders” is the first essay in An Unfinished Atlas, a series funded by the Mellon Foundation and published by Places Journal that brings together scholars, cultural critics, essayists, and novelists of color to enrich the cultural record of place-based narratives across what is now called North America.

Post Date: 11-05-2024

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Bard Professor Christian Ayne Crouch Participates in “Unsettled Landscapes” Roundtable Discussion

Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies and associate professor of history and American and Indigenous studies at Bard College, participated in a roundtable conversation with Alan Michelson, an artist and Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, and Dr. Scott Manning Stevens, who is a citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation and curator of the exhibit Native Prospects: Indigeneity and Landscape, featuring works by Michelson and other contemporary Indigenous artists. The event, “Unsettled Landscapes,” was sponsored by the Bard College Center for Indigenous Studies and took place at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, where Native Prospects is on display. In presentations, Stevens and Michelson examine the concepts of landscape, wilderness and the Sublime in western artistic tradition, and offer perspective on how fundamentally these notions differ in Native American modes of thought. “What I wanted to do, then, in the exhibition that’s up, is bring in both older representations of Native people thinking of landscape and abstract, lived experience ways, and then contemporary expressions of landscape,” said Stevens. “Because, it’s not that we don’t love the landscape—we love the beauty of it. But it’s not a commodity which we frame and own, but much more reflect on the experience of living in.”

Post Date: 10-15-2024