Event

Please join us for a virtual conversation with artists Alan Michelson and Sky Hopinka moderated by art historian Christopher Green, part of a special series celebrating Storm King’s 60th anniversary and the power of art and nature. This virtual program is free, registration is required.

Alan Michelson is an internationally recognized New York-based artist, curator, writer, lecturer and Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River.

For over thirty years, he has been a leading practitioner of a socially engaged, critically aware, site-specific art grounded in local context and informed by the retrieval of repressed histories. Recent exhibitions include Wolf Nation, Whitney Museum of American Art, Volume 0, Zuecca Projects, Venice, and Citizenship: A Practice of Society, MCA Denver.

His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. His essays have recently appeared in Frieze and October.

Public art is also part of his diverse practice, and Mantle, his large-scale monument honoring Virginia’s Indian nations was dedicated at the capitol in Richmond in 2018.

Michelson is co-founder and co-curator, with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, of the groundbreaking Indigenous New York series.

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and currently teaches at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts.

His work has played at various festivals including Imagine NATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, and Projections. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the 2018 FRONT Triennial. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and was a part of Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He was awarded jury prizes at the Onion City Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Emerging artist category for 2018. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018- 2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, a recipient of an Alpert Award for Film/Video, and is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.

Christopher Green is a writer and art historian based in New York. His research and writing focus on modern and contemporary Indigenous art and primitivisms of the historic and the neo-avant-garde. His criticism, essays, and reviews have appeared in Aperture, Art in America, Frieze, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other publications; his scholarly research has been published in ARTMargins, Winterthur Portfolio, ab-Original, and BC Studies. He holds a PhD from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of art history at the University of North Texas.

Alan Michelson, Still from Wolf Nation, 2018. Video, color, sound by Laura Ortman, 9:59 minutes. © Alan Michelson