As interest in contemporary Native practice grows, Nicholas Galanin, a Tlingit-Unangakos artist and member of the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, is creating a career that is entirely dedicated to Original multimedia practices that recover and champion Aboriginal narratives are making a name for themselves in the contemporary art world. His work envisions a future where culture, land and identity are protected and celebrated.
Based in Alaska, when not traveling for his multiple projects, Galanin brings Tlingit traditions, symbology, and techniques into contemporary art practices to express powerful statements of indigenous resistance and survival against history On the trauma of being removed and appropriated. Through his multimedia and multifaceted practice, he addresses the complexities of Indigenous identity at the intersection of colonial erasure, collective amnesia, and cultural appropriation. Kalanin has always acted politically and been publicly outspoken on his stance, cultivating an artistic practice that has at times attracted controversy. Notably, he was one of the first artists to request that his work be removed from the 2019 Whitney Biennial in protest of Warren B. Kanders’s appearance at on the museum board.
Garanin has participated in multiple biennials (his work is currently at the Toronto Biennale and the inaugural Abu Dhabi Biennale), and several high-profile institutional acquisitions have further cemented his relevance. You can find his work in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Academy of Fine Arts. Garanin was also recently awarded the prestigious Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s Don Tyson Award, a $200,000 award given every two years to “change the way we see, think, or experience American art.” individual or organization.
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During Art Basel Miami Beach, the artist once again made headlines, not with the flashy artwork we’d expect in this context, but with another provocative site-specific public work, Seletega (to run and see if people are coming/corre a ver si viene gente) Installed at the Fenner Hotel. There, 45-foot-tall white sails tower over the luxurious waterfront like a 15th-century galleon buried beneath the sand, now emerging with a heavy colonial past. “When many of our communities were first introduced, these sails were the first things we saw on the horizon,” Galanin told the Observer a week after the installation debuted. “This work is dedicated to the collective liberation of humanity. It talks about how capitalism is at the heart of some of the colonial violence that communities face.
Painted on the fluttering white sails are two questions: “What will we give up to burn the sails of empire? What will we build for collective liberation? To finish the job, Galanin answered these provocative questions by inviting Indigenous artist Jaque Frague (from Jemez Pueblo) to launch the installation through a graffiti performance. “Back to the Land” emphasizes the red graffiti, echoing the entire Aboriginal movement. “This is about returning land to indigenous peoples,” Galanin said. “It’s not just the land that’s being returned, it’s the culture, the rituals and the language.” The now-iconic public project calls for Indigenous sovereignty while broadening the conversation to counter capitalism and anthropocentricity by reclaiming Indigenous knowledge. behavior, thereby revolutionizing our relationship with the land.
The Miami installation echoes and expands on Galanin’s current exhibition at Peter Bloom in New York, The Persistence of Land Claims in a Changing Climate, in which he further elaborates on the relationship between land claims and environmental causes. The connections between indigenous peoples underscore the enduring need to protect their land in the face of large-scale exploitation. As the artist explained during our conversation, the exhibition looks at the methods of dividing and removing Aboriginal people from the land, as well as their cultural memory and knowledge of responsibility for the land, highlighting this process through photography and sculpture ’s timeline and looks back at some of the key moments when our civilization solidified this harmful and perverse paradigm. He reminds us that violence still happens and that we often acknowledge memories of Aboriginal trauma to please ourselves rather than because of any particular sense of guilt. pause applause Universal land confirmation text is displayed on two teleprompters on either side of the mirror. Visitors are invited to approach the installation, read the words silently or aloud to the reflection in the mirror, and think about the weight and futility of these words without action.
Another piece of the play explores how Christian faith provided the colonizers with the justification and ideological framework to treat indigenous peoples as fauna or subhumans, allowing them to simply occupy land and completely ignore the inherent human rights violations. “The question is, can you dismantle the tools of oppression? Can you eliminate oppression using the tools provided by the oppressor?
exist reenactment (reversal)In a revealing reversal of the destruction of Native totem poles by colonists and missionaries along the Alaska coast, Galanin shows in photographs a pile of wood cut from a burning fake totem pole. Another captivating image depicts the artist carrying a forged totem on his shoulders, bent like Christ carrying the cross, appropriating and reactivating this classic Christian iconography. The imposition of Catholicism and subsequent erasure of ancestral indigenous wisdom and spirituality, as well as the parallel appropriation and objectification of its iconography, are themes evoked in this powerful photographic self-portrait.
Other works in the exhibition include reliquaries, tools and other objects embedded in Aboriginal knowledge and culture that are powerful symbols of resilience and survival that must stand the test of time so that modern people can connect with past generations. For Galanin, these cultural artifacts become vehicles of collective memory and identity—both powerful tools for resistance to erasure and markers of new placemaking practices. His approach to objects raises questions about belonging, identity or appropriation. Galanin writes in “Eurocentrism”: “Indigenous art has often been romanticized, fetishized, and homogenized through a Eurocentric lens, all about who we have been, who we are, and what we can be. Whose lies. An article from Art News After he withdrew from the Whitney Biennial. Years later, he continues to revitalize art’s traditional role as a cultural symbol, reuniting communities around shared narratives and values, while tracing authentic Aboriginal heritage through contemporary art to combat its manipulation and fight against its erasure.
Nicholas Galanin’s “The persistence of land claims in a changing climatewill be on display at Peter Blum Gallery through January 18th.
