Date: 20.03.2019
By invitation of WONA, Nancy Marie Mithlo, Professor of Gender Studies and an Affiliated Faculty with the American Indian Studies Center at University of California Los Angeles gave a public lecture entitled Knowing Native Art.
Using interviews from key contemporary American Indian women artists over a 20-year time frame, her first manuscript, “Our Indian Princess”: Subverting the Stereotype, (School of Advanced Research Press 2009) demonstrated how derogatory images that can and do inflict harm may also be mobilized through creative inversion, re-appropriation and critique as inert and useful interpretative formats. Mithlo’s scholarly intervention considers the Venice Biennale as a site of knowledge-production – an inert space where various agendas of inclusion and exclusion can be experienced, debated and ultimately theorized. Her manuscript A/Part of This World: Indigenous Curation at the Venice Biennale is under contract with the State University of New York Press. A volume of her collected essays titled Knowing Native Arts will be published with the University of Nebraska Press.