“Instead of just thinking about these treasures as something that exists within these institutions, you have to think about them being taken from their communities and from, you know, the centers that they thrive in and that they exist in and now they exist in these institutions that are white dominated, that are separated and that isolate them from their oral histories.”


In This Episode
Jessie Mordine Young speaks with Larissa Nez about her contributions to the exhibition Color Riot at the Montclair Art Museum, where she currently is an Art Table Fellow. They also discuss how, in her curatorial career, she is advocating for decolonial disciplines and talk about the individual and collective experience of life on the reservation during a global pandemic.

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Download transcript here.

Larissa Nez is an enrolled citizen of the Diné (Navajo) Nation. She was born and raised in the Navajo Nation, in a small community in northern Arizona. She is of the Mud People and was born to the Mountain Cove People. Her maternal grandfather is of the Red Running into the Water People, and her paternal grandfather is of the Big Water People. Nez earned a BA in art history with a minor in sociology from the University of Notre Dame and an MA in public humanities from Brown University. She is currently a PhD student in ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research explores the intersections between art history, cultural studies, critical theory, Indigenous studies, and Black studies.

Jessie Mordine Young is a Brooklyn-based artist who researches, writes about, curates, makes, and teaches textile art. She earned her MA from Bard Graduate Center in 2021. She works as an adjunct professor in the MFA Textiles Program and the School of Constructed Environments at the Parsons School of Design in New York City.

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