Visualizing Genocide

Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives, and Museums

Edited by Yve Chavez and Nancy Marie Mithlo; Foreword by Charlene Villaseñor Black

The University of Arizona Press

Visualizing Genocide examines how creative arts and memory institutions selectively commemorate or often outright ignore stark histories of colonialism. The essays confront outdated narratives and institutional methods by investigating contemporary artistic and scholarly interventions documenting settler colonialisms including land theft, incarceration, intergenerational trauma, and genocide. Interdisciplinary approaches, including oral histories, exhibition practices, artistic critiques, archival investigations, and public arts, are among the many decolonizing methods incorporated in contemporary curatorial practices.

Rather than dwelling simply in celebratory appraisals of Indigenous survival, this unprecedented volume tracks how massacres, disease, removals, abrogated treaties, religious intolerance, theft of land, and relocation are conceived by contemporary academics and artists. Contributors address indigeneity in the United States, Norway, Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean in scholarly essays, poems, and artist narratives. Missions, cemeteries, archives, exhibitions, photography, printmaking, painting, installations, performance, music, and museums are documented by fourteen authors from a variety of disciplines and illustrated with forty-three original artworks.

The authors offer honest critique, but in so doing they give hopeful and concrete strategies for the future. This powerful collection of voices employs Indigenous epistemologies and decolonial strategies, providing essential perspectives on art and visual culture.

Contributors
T. Christopher Aplin
Emily Arthur
Marwin Begaye
Charlene Villaseñor Black
Yve Chavez
Iris Colburn
Ellen Fernandez-Sacco
Stephen Gilchrist
John Hitchcock
Michelle J. Lanteri
Jérémie McGowan
Nancy Marie Mithlo
Anne May Olli
Emily Voelker
Richard Ray Whitman

Reviews
Editor

This powerful and rich volume offers deep examinations of history and contemporary practice among Indigenous artists working across multiple genres, confronting the legacies of settler colonialism and genocide.’—Virginia Scharff, author of The Women Jefferson Loved

Yve Chavez (Gabrieleno Tongva San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians) is an assistant professor of art history in the School of Visual Arts at the University of Oklahoma. She has published in Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture and Arts. She has earned fellowships through the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and the Mellon Foundation.

Nancy Marie Mithlo (Fort Sill Chiricahua Warm Springs Apache) is a professor of gender studies and American Indian studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Mithlo’s curatorial work has resulted in nine exhibits at the Venice Biennale. Mithlo has taught at the University of New Mexico, the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe Community College, Smith College, California Institute of the Arts, Occidental College, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Knowing Native Arts. www.nancymariemithlo.com.

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