The Oxford College Library is proud to present a book display for Native American Heritage Month. This year, the library chose to make a display that was themed around contemporary Native American and Indigenous visual art. Librarian Jacob Lackner selected the books to be used for the display. Library Specialist Sara Nazarian arranged the books and artwork to accompany the books. The library is excited to showcase this selection of Native American arts and culture, and we hope that students, staff, and faculty enjoy the display!
Resources on display:
Land Back: Indigenous Landscapes of Resurgence and Freedom highlights the ways Indigenous peoples and anti-colonial co-resistors understand land relations for political resurgence and freedom across the Americas. Contributors place Indigenous practices of freedom within the particularities of Indigenous place-based laws, cosmologies, and diplomacies, while also demonstrating how Indigeneity is shaped across colonial borders.
Making history: the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts edited by Nancy Marie Mithlo
Making History: The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts is a unique contribution to the fields of visual culture, arts education, and American Indian studies. Written by scholars actively producing Native art resources, this book guides readers-students, educators, collectors, and the public-in how to learn about Indigenous cultures as visualized in our creative endeavors. By highlighting the rich resources and history of the Institute of American Indian Arts, the only tribal college in the nation devoted to the arts whose collections reflect the full tribal diversity of Turtle Island, these essays present a best-practices approach to understanding Indigenous art from a Native-centric point of view.
Aesthetics of repair: Indigenous art and the form of reconciliation by Eugenia Kisin
Drawing on contemporary imaginaries of repair, the book asks how diverse forms of collective reckoning with settler-colonial harm resonate with urgent conversations about aesthetics of care in art. The discussion moves across urban and remote spaces of display for Northwest Coast-style Indigenous art, including galleries and museums, pipeline protests, digital exhibitions, an Indigenous-run art school, and a totem pole repatriation site. The book focuses on the practices around art and artworks as forms of critical Indigenous philosophy, arguing that art’s efficacies in this moment draw on Indigenous protocols for enacting justice between persons, things, and territories.
Because the Land is Who We Are is an exploration of environmental repossession, told through a collaborative case study approach, and engaging with Indigenous communities in Canada (Anishinaabe), Hawai’i (Kanaka Maoli) and Aotearoa (Maori). The co-authors are all Indigenous scholars, community leaders and activists who are actively engaged in the movements underway in these locations, and able to describe the unique and common strategies of repossession practices taking place in each community.
Organized by guest curator Nancy Strickland Fields (Lumbee), director/curator of the Museum of the Southeast American Indian at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, the upcoming exhibition To Take Shape and Meaning: Form and Design in Contemporary American Indian Art features works by 75 Indigenous artists from over 50 tribes throughout the United States and Canada, including eight from North Carolina. To Take Shape and Meaning brings together a wide range of Indigenous world views, ideas, experiences, traditions, cultures, and media and emphasizes the continuity and evolution of Native arts, both collective and individual expressions of Native America. The exhibition, composed exclusively of 3-D artworks, includes baskets made of blown glass, cars transformed into works of art, and cutting-edge fashion ensembles embellished with elaborate beadwork and feathers
Here, Now: Indigenous Arts of North America at the Denver Art Museum features two hundred of the museum’s most notable Indigenous artworks. It reinterprets the collection and reveals new insights in the historic and contemporary work of Indigenous artists. Additional contributions by Indigenous authors reflect on the collection and current issues
Learn more about about contemporary Native American artists at National Gallery of Art. Explore the videos, images, and stories of Native American Artists.
Book descriptions taken from publisher.