Upcoming

"Native Visual Sovereignty: A Reader on Art and Performance" Book Launch (Movement) | Forge Project x Open Room

Name: "Native Visual Sovereignty: A Reader on Art and Performance" Book Launch (Movement) | Forge Project x Open Room | Forge Project
Start: 2025-11-11
Location: Performance Space New York

Performance Space New York

Nov 11, 2025

Tuesday, November 11, from 7–10pm, join us for an evening of readings, performance screenings, and discussion on occasion of the launch of the new publication Native Visual Sovereignty: A Reader on Art and Performance.

With 48 contributors, newly commissioned essays and artist notes, 20 reprinted critical texts, and oral history interviews with leaders of the field, Native Visual Sovereignty is the first reader on contemporary Native art to use performance and performativity as its praxis. The book seeks to make the case that there is now a shift from sovereignty in a visual sense, to sovereignty in a performative sense.

A reading by book editor, Candice Hopkins (Citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation), a conversation with Gloria Miguel (Guna/Rappahannock) and Muriel Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock) of the legendary Spiderwoman Theater, and a screening of DON’T MAKE ME OVER (2023) starring Arielle Twist (Nehiyaw [Cree]), the first theater work of Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and Cherokee), are the basis of the evening.

The book takes its impetus from a modest yet significant document—a 1969 treatise named Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Progress, published by the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Each text, be it a script, a song, or a note, is positioned by the authors as a possible framework or idea for performance: as the texts make clear, all were intended to be tested on stage. It is the first known attempt to define “New Native Theater,” and with this, it sparked the contemporary Native theater movement. The treatise was published on the eve of the Self-Determination Era, initiated by another form of activist performance: the Indians of All Tribes occupation of Alcatraz Island in November 1969 for nineteen months. Their move, which was broadly covered in mainstream and alternative media, ushered in mainstream awareness for Native rights not just to land and water, but to self-determined education, food justice, language, and culture. Little known is that many of the leaders of this groundshift, came to the movement having practiced radical street theater.

Native Visual Sovereignty is co-published by Dancing Foxes Press, in association with the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Forge Project; MacKenzie Art Gallery; and SITE SANTA FE on occasion of the touring exhibition Indian Theater: Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, curated by Hopkins and originating at the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College in 2023.

The publication will be available for purchase in-person on November 11 at Performance Space New York. It is additionally available online via Dancing Foxes Press.

Candice Hopkins (citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation) explores the intersections of history, contemporary art, and Indigeneity in her writing and curatorial practice. She is Executive Director and Chief Curator of Forge Project, Taghkanic, NY and Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies at Bard College. Most recently, she curated Indian Theater: Performance, Art and Self-Determination, at the Hessel Museum of Art (touring), and with Raven Chacon, Impossible Music for the Miller ICA and Tufts University Art Galleries. She was part of the curatorial team of the Canadian Pavilion at the fifty-eighth Venice Biennale, the SITE Santa Fe Biennial; and documenta 14, Athens and Kassel. Her notable essays include “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier,” (documenta Reader) and “The Appropriation Debates (or The Gallows of History),” New Museum/MIT Press. Photo by Thatcher Keats.

Gloria Miguel is an elder from the Guna and Rappahannock nations and an actor, playwright, and educator. She is a founding member of Spiderwoman Theater. She has toured Europe, Australia, New Zealand and to Beijing, China for the UN Fourth World Conference on Women. She toured Canada as Pelaija Patchnose in the original Native Earth production of The Rez Sisters. She was Coyote/Ritalinc in Jessica (Northern Lights Productions) and nominated for a Sterling Award for best supporting actress. Recent acting credits include Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way with daughter, Monique Mojica; Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue and Misdemeanor Dream. She has a Honorary DFA from Miami University in Oxford, OH and is a lifetime member of the Lee Strasberg Institute. Photo courtesy Spiderwoman Theater.

Muriel Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock) is the founder & Artistic Director of Spiderwoman Theater, the longest running Native feminist theater in the Americas. Miguel is an award-winning activist artist, director, choreographer, actor and educator and has worked and toured extensively across the globe for over sixty years. She is a United States Artists Fellow, a Doris Duke Artist and last year was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She holds an honorary DFA from Miami University in Ohio and an honorary Doctor of Letters from Trent University in Canada. Muriel has developed storyweaving, Spiderwoman Theater's signature Indigenous performance practice and she is active in the training of Indigenous actors in this culturally based method. She has presented Making the Connections: A Retrospective alongside storyweaving workshops and residencies in theaters and universities in the US, Canada and Europe. Photo courtesy Spiderwoman Theater.

Jeffrey Gibson (American, b. 1972) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and convener celebrated for his work in painting, installation, video, and performance. For over two decades, he has examined how language, pattern, and music construct meaning, synthesizing Indigenous and Western traditions through vibrant color, complex patterning, and layered sound. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee, Gibson represented the U.S. at the 2024 Venice Biennale with his acclaimed exhibition the space in which to place me, which made its U.S. debut at The Broad in Los Angeles in May 2025. In June 2025 he unveiled a site-specific installation at Kunsthaus Zurich. Gibson was selected for the Metropolitan Museum’s 2025 Genesis Facade Commission and will present new work for the historic exterior this September. His work is held in major collections including MoMA, the Whitney, and the National Gallery of Art. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley and is artist-in-residence at Bard College. Photo by Brian Barlow.

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