Changing Hands, Exchanging Perspectives
Overview
The conversation will encourage participants and audience members (both members of the UR community and members of the general public) to make important links between academics and the museum, and to understand objects and the artists who produced them in a larger and richer context. Additionally, the artists will visit students at the River Campus for a day of structured, yet informal dialogue. Michelson and Myre will visit River Campus to meet, in a roundtable moderated by faculty, with undergraduate Art History and Anthropology students and graduate students in the Visual and Cultural Studies Program to discuss the challenges of intercultural representation in North America. The artists will also visit Sage Art Center to provide professional critique of the work of undergraduate studio art majors.
"Changing Hands, Exchanging Perspectives," will take place in conjunction with the exhibition Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 3, at the Memorial Art Gallery. Indigenous artists Alan Michelson and Nadia Myre will join Amanda Jane Graham and Alexander Brier Marr, Doctoral Candidates from the Visual and Cultural Studies Graduate Program, for a public conversation about Native art today. This primary program, to take place at Memorial Art Gallery from 3 pm to 5 pm on Friday, February 8, 2013, seeks to shed light on the distinctive points of view of two exceptional Native contemporary artists. Michelson's and Myre's works provide especially productive cases for exploring the aesthetic and social commitments of contemporary Native art across a range of boundaries. Michelson has long produced aesthetically sophisticated installations, paintings, and videos that investigate the historical construction of American borders. Nadia Myre's work is often participatory in nature. It examines experiences of loss, histories and language, and formations of identity.