Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck sponsored one artist per year for the duration of the grant, from 2022-2025. Chosen through on-campus collaborations and curators (including The DRE: Disturbance, Re-animation, and Emergent Archives, the 2022 Rethinking Place Conference, Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, curated by Candice Hopkins, and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts), Rethinking Place supports fellows in creative responses to the spirit of Rethinking Place, which champions an enhanced relationship with Bard College’s Land Acknowledgement and aims to deeply consider the entangled histories of the multiple communities in the space in which the college is now located.

Sayo’:kl^ (It Snows Again) Kindness-Williams, Turtle Clan of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin is a beadwork artist. She was born in Chicago, IL and began beading at the age of 8 years old. She became interested in art at a young age. She learned to bead from a family friend and also took moccasin making class at the Oneida Summer School. Sayo’Kla attended Santa Fe Indian High School and received her bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College in 1997 and an M.B.A. from Kaplan University in 2008. She is currently enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts-Studio Arts Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM and recently returned from Indigenous Art School Residency in Venice, Italy.

Sayo’:kla began participating in art shows in 1998, winning 1 st place in Beadwork at the IAIA High School Art Competition. She has participated in regional art shows including: the Woodland Indian Art Show, Green Bay, WI (Best of Show-2022 & 2023 and only artist to sweep a category with 1 st , 2cd and 3 rd place), the Hodinohso:ni Art Show at Ganondagan (1 st place Beadwork 2020), Haudenosaunee Art Show-Spring (1 st place Beadwork). She also participates in larger art markets including Santa Fe Indian Market (SWAIA, 2023 Classification VIII: Beadwork and Quillwork-Best of Division A: Articles of Attire and VIIIA Category 2901-Beaded Clothing, Non-Woven-1 st Place Winner), Heard Museum Indian Fair and Market (2023 Judge’s Choice Award), Eiteljorg Museum Indian Market (Beadwork/Quillwork-Honorable Mention)

Sayo’:kla has exhibited art at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee, WI (2022 Healing Coat Exhibit) and the Opalka Gallery in Albany, NY (2023 To-Be Named Exhibit, writing a companion essay included in the To-Be-Named Volume of work at the Smithsonian Museum of Anthropology. Sayo’:kla’s fully beaded Land Back sign is featured in the Tia Collection (Santa Fe) and will be displayed at the 2024 Inaugural exhibit Driving the Market at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

In 2024, Krista Belle Stewart taught as a part of the Photography program for the Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

Krista Belle Stewart was raised within the Syilx Nation and currently divides her time between Berlin and Vienna. She focuses among and between multiple registers—familial histories, archival research, land, place, and story—to build artworks that engage larger questions about truth, trauma and authenticity, and the ways they unfold across cultural and geographic borders. Her work has been shown at MUDAM, Luxembourg; Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; Kunstverein Hamburg; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; 39th Eva International, Limerick; and MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, Manhattan. 

She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University in photography, an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, and is at present a PhD in Practice candidate at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien.

2023, Rebecca Belmore, Sawkill, performed in collaboration with the Center of Curatorial Studies at Bard as a part of the opening of Indian Theater: Native performance, art, and self determination since 1969.

A member of the Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe), Rebecca Belmore is an internationally recognized multidisciplinary artist. She was the first Native woman artist to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale. Her works are rooted in the political and social realities of Indigenous communities and make evocative connections between bodies, land, and language.

Saw Kill Creek is a tributary of the Mahicannituck (the waters that flow both ways), the original name for the Hudson River in Mohican. The performance Sawkill (2023) begins with performers gathering at the eponymous creek and walking together, in a procession, carrying creek water and clay for the making of a monument on the grounds of the Hessel Museum. The durational performance took place over the full day of the exhibition opening and culminate in front of Belmore’s large-scale commission, which was mounted on the facade of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, for the run of Indian Theater. Composed of one of Belmore’s signature motifs, used work coveralls, the tapestry reflected her commitments to labor, to the working class, and to lesser-told, sometimes forcibly obscured stories, histories, and lives.

Rebecca Belmore, a member of the Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe), is an internationally recognized multidisciplinary artist who creates evocative connections between bodies, land, and language, rooted in the political and social realities of Indigenous communities.

Daina Warren, curator and scholar, is a member of the Montana Cree Nation in Maskwacis (Bear Hills), Alberta. Warren is Artist-in-Residence (A-i-R) Program Manager at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). She was formerly the director of Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Photo credit is Karl Rabe.

“Sawkill” by Rebecca Belmore, featuring Daina Warren, as part of “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969”, which was on view June 24 – November 26, 2023 at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

2022, Suzanne Kite, Makhóčheowápi Akézaptaŋ (Fifteen Maps), performed at Fisher Center of the Performing Arts at Bard as a part of The DRE: Disturbance, Re-animation, and Emergent Archives, the 2022 Rethinking Place Conference.

Makȟóčheowápi Akézaptaŋ (Fifteen Maps) explores the Hudson River site known as Cruger Island, which was “purchased” in the 19th century by John Cruger, who used it as a backdrop for stolen Mayan ruins he transported as casts from Honduras. By the 1960s, Cruger Island had become a place for archeological excavations that displaced Indigenous artifacts and remains now held by the New York State Museum. Confronting those histories, Kite interrogates these knowledge systems and explores how AI might function as a conduit for alternative ways of nonhuman knowing. In this experimental lecture, multimedia artist Kite will explore how artificial intelligence reproduces the logics of coloniality, flattening land, people, and lifeworlds into objects of knowledge—data points to be extracted.

Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University for the forthcoming dissertation, sound and video work, and interactive installation Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). Kite’s scholarship and practice explores contemporary Lakota ontology through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Kite often works in collaboration, especially with family and community members. Her art practice includes developing Machine Learning and compositional systems for body interface movement performances, interactive and static sculpture, immersive video and sound installations, poetry and experimental lectures, experimental video, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Her work has been featured in various publications, including the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, the Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), with the award-winning article, “Making Kin with Machines”, and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) (2019) was featured on the cover of Canadian Art.