Artist Self-Empowerment + Support

NEW Signature Initiative

10 year initiative • Artist driven community

engagement projects • Addressing community issues• Engaging community on

multiple platforms, providing spaces for dialogue and exploration.

• Pilot projects begin in 2014.

Awards up to $150K

Native artists have always worked outside of the norms of artist support systems.

Tradition is a vital piece of cultural continuums, no doubt. But culture, too, is fluid and exploration, adaptation, borrowing and necessity is as embedded

within Native “arts” practice as a millennium of practical convention.

Native peoples are not trapped in amber.

Postcommodity

Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary arts collective comprised of Nathan Young, Raven Chacon, Cristobal Martinez and Kade Twist.

Postcommodity’s art functions as a shared Indigenous lens and voice to engage the

assaultive manifestations of the global market and its supporting institutions, public

perceptions, beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding,

multinational, multiracial and multiethnic colonizing force that is defining the 21st

Century through ever increasing velocities and complex forms of violence.

This winter, the multi-disciplinary art collective Postcommodity will

work in collaboration with communities in New Mexico,

Arizona and Northern Mexico, to create public art and multi-media

installations - communities divided and united by international borders

of the U.S., Mexico and Native Nations.

Repellent Fence - Installation Forthcoming in October 2015

Game Remains: Golden Horseshoe (Guelph) – 2013 Game Remains combines video game technology with community collaboration to create a site-specific, generative, music performance and installation environment. Utilizing a ceremonial conceptual framework, collaborators engage a significant community issue and co-determine a set of values and protocols to guide the logic and interactivity of the game in a manner that best articulates a shared vision of community agency.

Do You Remember When? (Sydney Bieannale) – 2012

Kealoha (Native Hawaiian)

MIT Graduate, Physics

Poet

As an internationally acclaimed poet and storyteller, he has performed throughout the world -- from the White House to the `Iolani Palace, from Brazil to Switzerland. He is the first poet in Hawai`i's history to perform at a governor's inauguration, and in 2010 he was selected as a master artist for a National Endowment for the Arts program.

Kealoha was featured on HBO’s Brave New Voices series presented by Russel Simmons

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