Public Programs: Indigenous Rights, Art, and Environmental Justice

Mobéy Lola Irizarry (they/she) is a genderqueer composer, improviser, multi-instrumentalist, and transdisciplinary artist. Based in Brooklyn, they hail from the Puerto Rican diaspora in Hartford, Connecticut, and are a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. She makes within the lineages of decolonial uprisings, collections of tiny mirrors at queer clubs, and things that come from trees.

george emilio sanchez is a writer, performance artist, and advocate for Indigenous rights and sovereignty. Currently, he is touring the US with his recent performance collaboration with visual artist Patty Ortiz, titled In the Court of the Conqueror. This piece focuses on the 200-year-old history of US Supreme Court rulings that have diminished the tribal sovereignty of Native Nations, while also interlacing his individual journey of acknowledging his own Indigeneity while being raised in an Ecuadorian immigrant household. In the Court of the Conqueror premiered at Abrons Arts Center in New York City in March 2022 and has since toured to five states. sanchez is also the performance director for Emergenyc, a program that experiments with the intersection of arts and activism and is celebrating its 15th-year anniversary in 2023. He was named the inaugural recipient of the Keith Haring Fellow at MacDowell in 2021.

Joe Baker (Delaware Tribe of Indians) is a direct-line descendent of notable Lenape leaders, including Simon Whiteturkey, Captain Anderson Sarcoxie (Treaty of Greenville, 1795), Captain White Eyes (Treaty of Fort Pitt, 1778), Netawatwees or King Newcomer (Treaty of Conestoga, 1763), Tamanend, King Tammany (1625 – 1701), and Chief Nutimus (who signed the confirmation deed, Walking Purchase, 1737).

Baker is co-founder and executive director of Lenape Center in Manhattan as well as an artist, educator, curator, and activist who has been working in the field of Native Arts for the past 30 years. Baker is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work in New York and was recently visiting professor of museum studies at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. He serves as a board member for The Endangered Language Fund, CUNY, and is on the Advisory Committee for the National Public Art Consortium, New York. Baker is also a cultural advisor for the new CBS series Ghosts.

In his capacity as executive director for Lenape Center, Baker has guided partnerships with the Metropolitan Museum of Art (his work is currently on exhibit there), Brooklyn Museum of Art, American Ballet Theater, Moulin Rouge on Broadway, The Whitney Museum of Art, and others. He served as a consultant for BKSK Architects for the renovation of the international award–winning Tammany Hall in New York and is cultural consultant for Inwood Scared Sites for the development and conceptual design of a project in the Inwood community, Manhattan. In partnership with Farm Hub in the Hudson River Valley, Baker and Lenape Center are championing the return of ancestral seeds in the homeland through a seed rematriation project. This seed saving project, now in its second year, has done much to contribute to the cultural foodways of the Lenape diaspora.

In partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library, Baker is the curator of the first ever Lenape exhibition of cultural arts in the city of New York, opening January 2021. Baker graduated from the University of Tulsa with a BFA degree in design and an MFA in painting and drawing, and completed postgraduate study at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, MDP program.

João Biehl is Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Brazil LAB at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. In his ethnographic and historical work, Biehl explores how people’s plasticity and environmental attunements disrupt and exceed dominant ways of knowing and acting, thus opening new vistas for storytelling and critical theory. As he dissects past and current regimes of power/knowledge, Biehl considers the array of human-nonhuman alignments, affects, ideas, technologies, and forces that shape survival in contexts of stark inequality and living together in frontier zones. In attending to insurgent archivings and advancing an anthropology of becomings, Biehl’s work seeks to restore a sense of wonder and movement to ethical and political debates and to creative expression.

Samara Pataxó was born in Coroa Vermelha village in the traditional homelands of the Pataxó people in Porto Seguro, Bahia, Brazil. She is a lawyer, PhD candidate in law at the University of Brasília, and since graduating from the Federal University of Bahia has studied and worked deeply within the field of Indigenous territorial rights. She is currently chief advisor for inclusion and diversity at the General Secretariat of the Presidency of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE). She has served as legal advisor to numerous Indigenous organizations, including the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Apib).

Txai Suruí (Walelasoetxeige Paiter Suruí) is a young leader of the Suruí people, from the Sete de Setembro Indigenous Land of the Brazilian state of Rondônia. She has been recognized worldwide for fighting against deforestation and for the protection of the rights indigenous peoples and other traditional Amazonian communities. Txai Suruí is the founder and coordinator of the Indigenous Youth Movement of Rondonia and, in November 2021, was a keynote speaker at the Climate Conference (COP26) in Glasgow.

Curtis Zunigha is an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians in Oklahoma. He has 40 years of experience in tribal government and administration, community development, telecommunications, and cultural preservation. He is a specialist in Delaware/Lenape culture, language, and traditional practices. Zunigha is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a veteran of the US Air Force.

Mr. Zunigha is co-founder and co-director of Lenape Center based in Manhattan and led by Lenape elders. Lenape Center has the mission of continuing Lenapehoking, the original homeland in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, through community, culture, and the arts. Since 2009, Lenape Center has created programs, exhibitions, workshops, performances, symposia, land acknowledgment, and ceremonies to continue the Lenape presence. Lenape Center is working towards the creation of a physical culture center.

Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Red Hook, New York. Her writing and curatorial practice explores the intersections of history, contemporary art, and Indigeneity. She worked as senior curator for the 2019 and 2022 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art and was part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media art collective Isuma. She is co-curator of notable exhibitions including Art for New Understanding: Native Voices 1950s to Now; the 2018 SITE Santa Fe biennial, Casa Tomada; documenta 14 in Athens, Greece, and Kassel, Germany; Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada; and Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Her essays include “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier,” for the documenta 14 Reader; “Outlawed Social Life” for South as a State of Mind; and “The Appropriation Debates (or The Gallows of History),” for New Museum/MIT Press. In 2021, she was a recipient of the inaugural Noah Davis Prize, along with Thomas Lax and Jamillah James.

Mirian Masaquiza Jerez is a Kichwa (one of the Indigenous peoples in Ecuador) woman from Salasaca with an extensive background in Indigenous issues for more than 25 years and 19 years of experience at the international level.

Masaquiza Jerez rejoined the UN in 2010 as a social affairs officer at the Indigenous Peoples and Development Branch–Secretariat of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in DESA, the office that supports the implementation of the mandate of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PFII) as well as the substantive office on Indigenous issues at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Most of the work is related to the rights of Indigenous peoples as well as a range of issues such as gender, climate change, cultural and educational matters, interagency affairs, outreach, political analysis, and non-governmental organizations. Her geographic area of responsibility is Central and South America and the Caribbean.

Before her current position, Masaquiza Jerez worked at the Ministry of Cultural and National Heritage in Ecuador (adviser). She is the first Indigenous diplomat in the Permanent Mission of Ecuador to the UN in New York. Also, Masaquiza Jerez has worked at the Cabinet of the Presidency of the 34th session of the UN General Assembly (adviser). From 2004–08, she worked at the Secretariat of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in DESA as an associate social affairs officer. Before that, she worked at one of the three main national Indigenous peoples’ organizations in Ecuador as well as performed some consultancy work for IFAD and the IADB. Masaquiza Jerez speaks Kichwa, her Indigenous language, as well as Spanish and English.

Jennifer Kreisberg is an Emmy-nominated singer/composer with 30 years of experience in musical performance, soundtracks, scoring, teaching, and workshop facilitation. Music for film credits include the Emmy Award–winning Dawnland, Raven West’s Unnatural & Accidental, Miramax’s Smoke Signals, Rumble, TBS’s Music for the Native Americans, The Business of Fancydancing, Anagram Films’s Elijah, Palm Pictures’s One Giant Leap, and countless others.

A soloist musician, composer, and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Jeffrey Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Demian DinéYazhi, and In Defense of Memory. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and amplified violin, often sings through a megaphone, and is a producer of capacious field recordings.

She has performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Artists Space, the Venice Biennale, The Stone residency, the New Museum, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, the Toronto Biennial, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, and Europe.

In 2008, Ortman founded the Coast Orchestra, an all–Native American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all–Native American cast. Ortman is the recipient of the 2023 Institute of American Indian Arts Artist-In-Residence, 2022 Forge Project Fellowship, 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists, 2020 Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, 2017 Jerome Foundation Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship, 2016 Art Matters Grant, 2016 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Residency, 2014–15 Rauschenberg Residency, and 2010 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room. She was also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Ortman lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Cecilia Vicuña is a poet, artist, activist, and filmmaker whose work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world, including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been in exile since the early 1970s after the military coup against the president Salvador Allende. In London, she was a co- founder of Artists for Democracy in 1974.

She coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid-1960s in Chile as a new, independent and non- colonized category for her precarious works composed of debris—structures that disappear in the landscape, which include her quipus (“knot” in Quechua), envisioned as poems in space. Vicuña has reinvented the ancient Pre-Columbian quipu system of non-writing with knots through ritual acts that weave the urban landscape, rivers, and oceans, as well as people, to reconstruct a sense of unity and awareness of interconnectivity. These works bridge art and poetry as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” Her poetry and Palabrarmas (word-weapons) stem from a deep inquiry into the roots of language. Her early work as a poet in the 60s was simultaneously celebrated by avant-garde poetry magazines, such as El Corno Emplumado (Mexico City, 1961–68), and censored and/or suppressed for many decades in Chile and Latin America.

Solo exhibitions of Vicuña’s work have been organized at a number of major institutions, including, most recently, the Tate Modern, London (2022); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2022); Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia (MAMU), Bogotá (2022); Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Madrid (2021); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2020); and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2020). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions and appears in major museum collections around the world.

Vicuña’s work was included in documenta 14, Athens and Kassel, 2017, and the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022, where she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. The author of more than 30 volumes of art and poetry published in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, her most recent books are Libro Venado (Direcciones, Buenos Aires, 2022), Sudor de Futuro (Altazor, Chile, 2021), Cruz del Sur (Lumen, Chile, 2020), Minga del Cielo Oscuro (CCE, Chile, 2020), and New & Selected Poems of Cecilia Vicuña, edited and translated by Rosa Alcalá (Kelsey Street Press, 2018).

Claudia Andujar was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland in 1931 and grew up in Transylvania. During the Second World War, Claudia’s father, who was Jewish, was deported to Dachau where he was killed along with most of her paternal relatives. Andujar fled with her mother to Switzerland, immigrated first to the United States in 1946, then to Brazil in 1955 where she began a career as a photojournalist before becoming an activist. She is 92 years old, currently lives in São Paulo, and dedicates most of her time to the Yanomami cause.

Dário Vitório Kopenawa (b. 1982, Watorikɨ) is a Yanomami leader known for defending Indigenous people. He is also the Vice President of Hutukara Associação Yanomami. As the son of Davi Kopenawa, he joined the struggle to protect Yanomami land at a young age. He is a teacher to his community, leading the intercultural bilingual education project with an emphasis on valuing the Yanomami language. In recent years, Dário has brought numerous complaints of violations against his people to the Brazilian authorities. He has participated in several national and international meetings to bring awareness to the illegal invasion of the largest protected Indigenous territory in Brazil. Dário currently studies territorial management at the Federal University of Roraima.

Davi Kopenawa (b. ca. 1956, Mõra mahi araopë community, Marakana region) is a shaman and the main spokesperson for the Brazilian Yanomami, advocating for their rights and territory. His mother died from a measles epidemic brought to his community by American New Tribes missionaries, who also gave him his Christian name Davi. Kopenawa (whose chosen Yanomami name derives from the kopena wasp) left the Yanomami territory to work for non-Indigenous people in his youth. At the age of 15, he started to work for the Brazilian National Foundation for Indigenous People (FUNAI), a federal agency for Indigenous people, as a guide and translator. In the 1970s, he moved back to his community. Since the 1980s, Kopenawa has been traveling the world to advocate for the legal recognition of his territory and the protection of his people. He is one of the most important Indigenous leaders in Latin America. His words gained a new international audience with the publication of the seminal The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (co-authored with anthropologist Bruce Albert, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), for which he developed the drawings shown in the exhibition. His words and quotes from the book appear throughout this exhibition.

Ehuana Yaira (b. 1984, Watorikɨ [Demini]) is an artist and researcher. She is the first known Yanomami woman to become a teacher in the region and to write a book in Yanomae, her own language. Her research on the transformation of the rituals around a young woman’s first period was published as Written Words on Menstruation (2017). She has also researched and illustrated books about traditional Yanomami medicines and languages. In 2018, she coordinated the 11th Annual Yanomami Women Event. She was the protagonist of A Film for Ehuana (Louise Botkay, 2018) and interpreter for the feature film The Last Forest (Luiz Bolognesi, 2021). Yaira is one of the few Yanomami women to draw on paper, making her an innovator for a new generation. Her drawings are usually densely colored and depict the daily activities of women. Her work has been exhibited by the Fondation Cartier in Paris (2019), Shanghai (2021), and Lille, France (2022), and will be shown in Milan in 2023. This is her first exhibition in North America.

Joseca Mokahesi (b. 1971, Watorikɨ [Demini]) is an employee at Brazil’s Federal Indigenous health agency and an artist. He was the first language scholar, teacher, and health agent of his community. He has produced and illustrated Yanomami-Portuguese publications for educational and health programs. He began drawing and woodcarving in the early 2000s. Not a shaman himself, Mokahesi usually draws the xapiri (a shaman’s spirit helpers) in their human and animal forms based on the visions narrated to him by shamans. His drawings depict a story that is invisible to non-shamans with the intention of sharing and promoting the Yanomami cosmovision. Since 2003, Mokahesi’s work has been exhibited in many art institutions in Brazil and abroad. His work has been exhibited by the Fondation Cartier in Paris (2012 and 2019), Shanghai (2021), London (2022), and Lille, France (2022), and will be shown in Milan in 2023. In 2022, his first solo exhibition, Our Earth-Land (Kami yamak-i urihipë), opened at Museu de Arte de São Paulo. He lives in Watorikɨ with his wife and five children. This is his first exhibition in North America.

Morzaniel Ɨramari (b. 1980, Watorikɨ [Demini]) is an interpreter and one of the first Yanomami artists working in cinema. He was trained as a filmmaker through the Video nas Aldeias (Video in the Communities) project, a groundbreaking initiative to strengthen Indigenous rights through audiovisual production. His first short film, House of Spirits (co-directed with Dario Kopenawa), was made in 2010. The feature film Earth-Forest Shamans (2014) won the award for Best Film at the Forumdoc.BH festival. He has participated in the 4th Week of Directors in Rio de Janeiro (2014) and in the Biennial of Indigenous Cinema in São Paulo (2016). He has coordinated communications for Hutukara Associação Yanomami. He has participated in the filming of the feature The Falling Sky (to be released), directed by Eryk Rocha and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha and based on the book by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert.

Valentina Tong is the assistant curator of the exhibitions Claudia Andujar: in the place of the other (Instituto Moreira Salles, 2015) and The Yanomami Struggle (Instituto Moreira Salles, 2018 – 23).