Curating Indigenous Art: A Panel Conversation

Please join us for an evening to explore the landscape of Indigenous Art through the perspectives and experiences of esteemed curators: Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), Executive Director of Forge Project; Jami Powell (Citizen of the Osage Nation), Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Indigenous Art, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, and Lara Evans (Cherokee Nation), Interim CEO and President of the First People's Fund.

About the Panelists

Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Red Hook, New York. Her writing and curatorial practice explore the intersections of history, contemporary art, and Indigeneity. She is Executive Director & Chief Curator of Forge Project, Taghkanic, New York, and Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She is curator of the exhibitions Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969, at the Hessel Museum of Art, and the touring exhibitions Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts, co-curated with Dylan Robinson, and ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision, featuring textiles, prints and drawings by Jessie Oonark, Janet Kigusiuq, and Victoria Mamnguqsualuk. She was the Senior Curator for the inaugural 2019 and 2022 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art and part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media collective Isuma; as well as documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; and Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Her notable essays include “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier,” in the documenta 14 Reader; “Outlawed Social Life,” in South as a State of Mind; and “The Appropriation Debates (or The Gallows of History),” in Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (New Museum/MIT Press, 2020).

Jami Powell was initially hired in May 2018, as the Hood's first associate curator of Native American art. She was promoted to curator of Indigenous art in May 2021 and now also serves as the museum's associate director for curatorial affairs. Powell, a citizen of the Osage Nation, has a PhD in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to working at the Hood, she was a faculty lecturer in the American Studies Program at Tufts University. She has focused her research on American Indian expressive forms through an interdisciplinary lens. She has worked as a research assistant at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, was a Mellon Fellow at the Peabody Essex Museum, and has published widely, with articles in Museum Anthropology, Journal of Anthropological Research, Museum Management and Curatorship, Museum Magazine, and First American Art Magazine.

Lara M. Evans, PhD., is a scholar, curator, artist, and enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation. Dr. Evans has been art history faculty since 2005, first at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, then at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM, since 2012. She guided the IAIA Artist-in-Residence Program from its inception in 2015 into its eventual growth into the IAIA Research Center for Contemporary Native Arts, which provides residencies, fellowships, research support, and access to the IAIA Archives and Museum of Contemporary Native Arts collection. Dr. Evans's recent curatorial projects include Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Shared Honors and Burdens: Renwick Invitational 2023, the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art exhibition The Moving Land: 60+ Year of Art by Linda Lomahaftewa (2021), and co-curation of the traveling exhibition Action/Abstraction Redefined (2017-2024). Publications include “Indigeneity and the Posthumous Condition,” co-authored with Mique’l Dangeli in Posthumous Art, Law, and the Art Market: The Afterlife of Art, edited by Sharon Hecker and Peter J. Karol (2022); “Transforming Art History in the Classroom,” from Making History: IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, edited by Nancy Mithlo (2020); “Setting the Photographs Aside: Native North American Photography Since 1990,” from Native Art Now, edited by Veronica Passalacqua and Kate Morris (2017). She earned her Ph.D. in art history at the University of New Mexico in 2005, specializing in contemporary Native American art.

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Additional information about parking registration coming soon.

The Zimmerli’s operations, exhibitions, and programs are funded in part by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and income from the Avenir Endowment Fund and the Andrew W. Mellon Endowment Fund. Additional support comes from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the donors, members, and friends of the museum.

Generous support for bilingual text was provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program.

Grant funding has been provided by the Middlesex County Board of County Commissioners through a grant award from the Middlesex County Cultural and Arts Trust Fund. For information on events, go to MiddlesexCountyCulture.com