ACCESSIBILITY
CART captioning will be provided.
Artist Conversation: Emily Johnson, Raven Chacon, Drew Michael, and Holly Mititquq Nordlum. Moderated by Erin Boberg Doughton.
DESCRIPTION
Emily Johnson and collaborators on her TBA project Being Future Being—including Raven Chacon, Drew Michael, and Holly Mititquq Nordlum—will share insights into their creative and collaborative processes in making a work of performance, installation, sound, and ancestral landscapes that propose new futures and relationalities with each other and our world.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land and water protector and an organizer for justice, sovereignty, and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, she is based in Lenapehoking/New York City. Emily is of the Yup’ik Nation, and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions; they engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment, interacting with a place's architecture, peoples, history, and role in building futures. Emily is trying to make a world where performance is part of life—where performance is an integral connection to each other, our environment, our stories, and our past, present, and future.
Her choreography and gatherings have been presented across the United States and Australia. Recently she choreographed the Santa Fe Opera production of Doctor Atomic, directed by Peter Sellars. Her large-scale project Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars is an all-night outdoor performance gathering taking place amongst 84 community-hand-made quilts. It premiered in Lenapehoking (NYC) in 2017, and was presented in Zhigaagoong (Chicago) in 2019. Her new work in development, Being Future Being, considers future creation stories and present joy.
Emily's writing has been published and commissioned by ArtsLink Australia, unMagazine, Dance Research Journal (University of Cambridge Press), SFMOMA, Transmotion (University of Kent), Movement Research, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, and the compilation Imagined Theaters (Routledge), edited by Daniel Sack. She was an advisory committee member for Creative Time's 10th Anniversary Summit and a Phase One working group member of Creating New Futures. She serves on the advisory committee for the Advancing Indigenous Performance Initiative of Western Arts Alliance, the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, and the Native American Arts Program Expansion Committee for Idyllwild Arts. Emily is the Pueblo Arts Collaborative Diplomat at Santa Fe Opera, and a lead organizer of First Nations Dialogues.
Emily hosts monthly ceremonial fires on the Lower East Side of Mannahatta in partnership with Abrons Arts Center. She is part of a US-based advisory group—including Reuben Roqueni, Ed Bourgeois, Lori Pourier, Ronee Penoi, and Vallejo Gantner—which is developing a First Nations Performing Arts Network.
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Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of a United States Artists fellowship in music, a Creative Capital award in visual arts, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.
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Drew Michael was born in Bethel, Alaska, and raised in Eagle River, Alaska. He started his art career at the University of Alaska Anchorage in a carving class with Joe Senungetuk in 1997. From there, his practice has developed through the study of other artists' work and through his own experience in trial and error. He has learned under the guidance of Kathleen Carlo and Larry Ahvakana in Anchorage, AK.
His art is deeply influenced by the people and events he has encountered in his life. Currently, his work uses imagery of religious iconography blended with traditional mask making with the hopes of bringing to light different ways of healing. His work is created with a focus on using new materials and combinations of mixed media. He uses carving as a form of expression, to draw understanding and compassion from within, and is constantly using new materials to broaden the form of his work.
"With everything I create I aim to exemplify my thoughts on how our humanity exists within this world, emotions about my relationships with others, perceptions of energy in all things and the constant acceptance into balance. As I learn about my own path I blend my traditional knowledge with everyday living experience and somehow try to connect with that ancestral wisdom that I see us all having within and around."
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Holly Mititquq Nordlum is an Iñupiaq (Inuit) artist who comes from the northern village of Kotzebue, Alaska. Nordlum works in a variety of media, using each to best cast light on Indigenous people. Her tattoo work and traditional markings revitalization effort is based on a 10,000-year Inuit history and is a machine-free process that facilitates healing, pride, and celebration from the traumas of colonization and individual experience. She organizes trainings, using traditional patterns in in-depth sessions to foster real change for people—in the end, creating community in the marks left behind. Nordlum’s public artwork educates about the still-surviving tribes of Alaska: their stories, histories, and cultures. Holly speaks publicly about the systems which continue to oppress her people and prevent their thriving.
In 2004 she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Alaska, and in the last five years she has received a Time Warner Fellowship from Sundance, an Art Matters grant, an Alaska Humanities Forum grant, an Alaska Native Visionary Award, a Rasmuson Artist Project Grant and Fellowship, an NDN Collective Indigenous Artists Grant, and she was part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Artist Leadership Program.
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Erin Boberg Doughton, (she/her) Artistic Director & Curator of Performance at PICA, works collaboratively to curate and produce performance programs including dance, music, theatre, and multi-disciplinary projects as part of PICA’s TBA (Time-Based Art) Festival as well as year-round presentations, commissions and residencies including the Creative Exchange Lab. She also teaches performance as an Assistant Professor and Mentor at PNCA (Pacific Northwest College of Art.) She serves on the advisory council for the National Performance Network (NPN) and is a former National Dance Project hubsite advisor. Erin grew up in Portland and studied dance, music, and theatre at Lewis & Clark College, and has worked at PICA in various roles, starting as a volunteer, since the organization’s founding in 1995.
ABOUT TBA:21 INSTITUTE
TBA Institute is a series of free, public programs that connect artists and audiences through deep discussion and critical conversation and serve to illuminate the ideas and inquiries behind festival artists' projects. Through the Institute, artists share their processes of creating and collaborating; their forms of engagement with communities and publics; and the social, political, cultural, and aesthetic contexts and concerns surrounding their work. Through guest artist lectures, panels and dialogues with invited moderators, and interactive workshops, the TBA Institute offers a range of ways to engage more deeply with the festival and with each other.
Please note that some TBA Institute events will be virtual (streamed online), while others will be held in-person for a limited-capacity, masked audience/participant group in the PICA Pavilion (back lot of PICA). We know that not everyone is able to gather in place right now. As such, most in-person events will be recorded and made available and accessible online shortly thereafter. Some of these recorded videos will be captioned.
Please refer to the TBA Festival website for a full Institute schedule, specific information about each event, accessibility, and other details.
Please note that a few events will require pre-registration, with instructions provided on the event webpage.
All virtual events (streamed online) will be captioned via auto- or CART captioning.
Some virtual events and some live, in-person events will be ASL-interpreted. These will be noted on each event listing on the TBA website.
All of the above information regarding access will be updated as confirmed.