Community/Nation/Tribe: Mohawk member of Six Nations of the Grand River
Materials/Processes: video; installation; mixed media; sound art; photography
Themes: (re)historying; land and place; (de)colonization; contemporary Indigenous life
Online Resources:
- https://www.alanmichelson.com/
- Hyperallergic Podcast – Alan Michelson’s Answer to the “Vanishing Indian” Myth
Statements/Bios in Artists’ Words:
Alan Michelson is an internationally recognized New York-based artist, curator, writer, lecturer and Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River.
For over twenty-five years, he has been a leading practitioner of a socially engaged, critically aware, site-specific art grounded in local context and informed by the retrieval of repressed histories. Sourcing from both indigenous and western culture, he works in a varied range of media and materials, among them painting, sculpture, photography, sound, video, glass, and stone.
He is the recipient of several awards, including an NEA Visual Artists Fellowship, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship, and the GSA Design Award, Citation in Art. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Canada, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
His practice includes public art, and Mantle, his large-scale monument honoring Virginia’s Indian nations, was recently dedicated on Capitol Square in Richmond. Michelson is co-founder and co-curator, with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, of the Indigenous New York series.
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Alan Michelson (b. 1953) has critically and poetically foregrounded Indigenous models of political, social, and environmental relationships for more than thirty years. A New York-based Mohawk member of Six Nations of the Grand River, Michelson draws upon historical memory and Indigenous philosophy to reveal and challenge disturbing colonial legacies. His methodically researched, site-based multimedia works uncover suppressed histories to envision more equitable relationships.
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