Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan of Native Art Department International will give a Brown Bag Lunch Presentation on Thursday, April 18, at 12:15 pm. Their talk is entitled “Everything Sacred is Far Away: The Franz Boas Episodes.”

Native Art Department International is a Brooklyn-based collaborative project of the wife-and-husband pair of artists Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan. Together they curate group exhibitions in which they sometimes show and occasionally make work together as a way to counter the pigeonholing of contemporary art by Native Americans and people of First Nations descent. They are in residence in the Bard Graduate Center Gallery until July 7. During their residency, they will turn their studio space into a television set where they will shoot a program dramatizing sequences from the life of anthropologist Franz Boas, the subject of the spring exhibition The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology. The media aesthetic of their project is loosely based on Potato Wolf TV, a series of fictional news segments and satirical takes on mainstream media developed by Lower East Side activist-artist collective Collaborative Projects (Colab) in the early 1970s. Join us to learn more about this project.

Based in Brooklyn New York, Maria Hupfield is an interdisciplinary artist and a member of the Anishinaabek Nation from Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Canada. Her recent traveling solo exhibition The One Who Keeps on Giving opened the 30th anniversary season of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, in partnership with Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal; Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, Halifax; and Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris. She is the first Indigenous artist in residence at ISCP in Brooklyn, and her upcoming solo exhibition at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, opens in December 2019.

Jason Lujan is originally from Marfa, Texas. His multidisciplinary work sidesteps labels of Native American identity to focus on transnational experiences and aesthetics. Lujan has recently exhibited at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; National Museum of the American Indian, New York, NY; Curitiba Biennial, Brazil; and I Bienal Continental de Artes Indígenas Contemporáneas at the Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares in Mexico City, Mexico. He curates and co-organizes exhibitions and is a board chair at the New York City arts nonprofit ABC No Rio.