Wendy Red Star: Bíilukaa Rare

I do not make work about Filipino identity; I make work about the white gaze, and those are two totally different things.

— Stephanie Syjuco

The Unruly Archive is Syjuco’s first monograph, weaving together her research-based practice with a substantial array of visual source material. Bound in a unique format with different types of paper, the pages are cut and layered to simulate the process of physically excavating folders in an archive. In Syjuco’s own words, the book is "a type of forensics...what it is like to piece together a vision of an entire country and people—the Philippines, Filipinos, and by extension, Filipinx Americans—through the lens of the American colonial archive."

By examining the blind spots, holes, and fragments of these collections, she examines the ways photography, anthropology, and national archives produce and proliferate images of exclusion and cultural Othering. Using techniques of layering, blocking, digital manipulation, pixelating, blowing up, and taping together, the artist’s work ultimately seeks to “talk back” to the archive and find agency in challenging its images.

Now Rare: $150

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art exhibition Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography provides a major institutional examination of contemporary Indigenous photography across the US. This groundbreaking project summarizes how these artists have taken over the conversation about how their cultures and lives are depicted through their dynamic embrace of three interwoven themes: Survivance, Nation, and Indigenous Visuality. The photographers demand that their existence, perspectives, and troubling history be acknowledged, as they enact a key shift away from privileging settler-colonialism, foregrounding instead an Indigenous sense of community and visuality.

This volume reveals and examines these Indigenous artists’ explorations of themes like identity, the contribution of customary practice to contemporary life, belonging, and the assistance that Indigenous worldviews can provide to building healthier relationships with each other and the earth. Like the exhibition, the book is comprised of four sections bridged by transitions and ending with a globalization of the discussion. Texts by key Indigenous scholars are followed by a series of plates illustrating many of the exhibition works. Not an exhibition catalogue per se, Speaking with Light is a statement about the preoccupations and dynamism of Indigenous photography today.

SOLD OUT

Indigenous artists worldwide respond to environmental destruction.

Documenting international Indigenous artists’ responses to the impacts of nuclear testing, nuclear accidents and uranium mining on Native peoples and the environment, Exposure gives artists a voice to address the long-term effects of these manmade disasters on Indigenous communities in the United States and around the world. Indigenous artists from Australia, Canada, Greenland, Japan, the Pacific Islands and the US utilize local and tribal knowledge, as well as Indigenous and contemporary art forms as visual strategies for their works.

Huey’s book begins and ends with a traditional Lakota prayer, suggesting that the intervening images may be analogous to a transformative ceremonial experience.

Photographs and texts by Aaron Huey

Hardcover
12.5 x 9.5 inches
208 pages / 134 color images
ISBN: 9781934435519