Come to First Wednesdays and visit the Bard Graduate Center Gallery’s 2019 artists-in-residence Native Art Department International! Artists Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan will screen their short film titled Everything Sacred is Far Away: The Franz Boas Episodes 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.
Native Art Department International is a Brooklyn-based collaborative project of the wife-and-husband pair of artists Maria Hupfield (b. 1975) and Jason Lujan (b. 1971). 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.
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.
Leading support for Public Programs at Bard Graduate Center comes from Gregory Soros and other generous donors
