Hosted by Katherine Rochester, Feb 24th at 7 PM EST. Featured panelists are Jeffrey Gibson, Candice Hopkins, Kite, and Dare Turner.
The production of knowledge takes many forms and has numerous agents today, such as publishing urgent research that stems from artistic, experimental, and oral traditions; scripting AI protocols to iterate liberatory narratives; and building museum collections that radically recontextualize the ethnographic as the artistic. In recent years, Indigenous artists and curators based in North America have spearheaded pathbreaking initiatives that reorient both the contemporary art landscape and the art-historical canon. For this panel discussion, four distinguished Indigenous artists and curators will speak about producing knowledge with Indigenous research frameworks.
Jeffrey Gibson conceived and coedited the landmark volume An Indigenous Present (2023), which showcases diverse approaches to Indigenous concepts, forms, and media, one year before becoming the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States at the 60th Venice Biennale Arte. Also in 2023, Candice Hopkins curated the landmark exhibition Indian Theater: Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, and in 2025 published its accompanying catalogue, Native Visual Sovereignty: A Reader on Art and Performance, which theorizes performance as a conceptual framework for understanding Indigenous arts practices. Forging another approach to Indigenous studies, Suzanne Kite founded the Wíhaŋble S’a Center for Indigenous AI in 2024 at Bard College, a media lab that explores how Indigenous AI protocols and ethical machine learning can be harnessed to generate new understandings of contemporary Lakȟóta ontology. Meanwhile, Dare Turner began her tenure as the Brooklyn Museum’s first Curator of Indigenous Art in 2023, and has since fundamentally reconceived the collection strategies and presentation of artworks from the Americas spanning 3000 B.C.E. to the present. In this panel, editor, art historian, and MA Curatorial Practice faculty member Katherine Rochester invites key figures in the field of Indigenous knowledge production to discuss how they have navigated the foundational work of establishing a relatively new field of study.
Jeffrey Gibson 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 descent, Gibson represented the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale with his acclaimed exhibition, the space in which to place me, which made its US 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. His work is held in major collections, including MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley and is an artist-in-residence at Bard College.
Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Red Hook, New York. Her writing and curatorial practice explore the intersections of history, contemporary art, and Indigeneity. She is Executive Director of Forge Project, Taghkanic, NY, and was Senior Curator for the 2019 and 2022 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art. She was part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale Arte, featuring the work of the media art collective Isuma, and co-curator of numerous notable exhibitions, including Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 (2023), Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York; the national traveling survey Art for New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now; SITElines.2018: Casa Tomada, SITE Santa Fe; documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; and Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Noteworthy essays include “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier,” in the documenta 14 Reader; “Outlawed Social Life,” in South as a State of Mind; and “The Appropriation Debates (or The Gallows of History),” in Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (New Museum/MIT Press). In 2025, she edited Native Visual Sovereignty: A Reader on Art and Performance (Dancing Foxes Press).
Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta) is an artist, composer, and scholar whose work merges Lakȟóta knowledge systems with performance, sound, sculpture, and computational media. She holds a PhD from Concordia University, Montréal. Kite is Director of the Wíhaŋble S’a Center for Indigenous AI, a National Endowment for the Humanities–designated Humanities Research Center at Bard College, where she is Distinguished Artist in Residence and Assistant Professor of American & Indigenous Studies. She is also Co-PI and Co-Director of the international Abundant Intelligences Research Program. Major projects include Cosmologyscape (Creative Time, 2022–24); Dreaming with AI (Institute of American Indian Arts Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 2025); List Projects 31: Kite (MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2025); and Wičháȟpi Owihaŋke Waníča Kiŋ (Infinite Collapsing Star) (Bockley Gallery, 2025). Her work has been featured internationally at the Guatemala Biennial, Whitney Biennial, São Paulo Biennial, and the Shanghai Biennale. Kite is an enrolled citizen of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and lives in Catskill, NY.
Dare Turner
Dare Turner is an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe of California, an art historian, and the Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum. In 2024, she co-organized the museum-wide initiative titled "Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum" at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which included nine exhibitions, interpretative interventions across the museum, a publication guided by Native methodologies, and an array of public programs. At the Brooklyn Museum, she has curated Aaniin: I See Your Light, which utilized beadwork designs by Nico Williams to transform the museum’s outdoor plaza, and co-curated Towards Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, a radical reimagining of the American Wing guided by Indigenous ways of knowing and Black feminist theory. Her writing has been featured in exhibition catalogs, including Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum; Towards Joy: New Frameworks for American Art; Into the Time Horizon: Nevada Museum of Art; Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth-century American Landscapes; and Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place.
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