Indian Theater, Native Performances, Art and Self Determination since 1969

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination,  since 1969 at Site Santa Fe takes its impetus from a significant document: “Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Progress”, published by the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in 1969 and written by Lloyd Kiva New, then President of IAIA and Rolland R. Meinholtz, together with IAIA students.

The document initiated the New Native Theater movement, which offered a radically different way to contextualize the long-standing practice of performance in Native societies across Turtle Island. It also created a template for its future. It is a methodology and an origin point for this exhibition. In the artworks and archival materials in Indian Theater, visual sovereignty is enacted via strategies and long traditions of material agency and invention; storytelling and testimony; blanketing and adornment (as material and method); masking, and taking on new identities; representations of the body and its absence; Native music; inauthenticity and fabrication; racy humor; historical and contemporary secret societies; Native and non-colonial economies; #LandBack and #WaterBack movements; and Native resistance movements, of the present and the past.

Site Santa Fe is open Thursday – Monday from 10 am-5 pm and closed on Tues & Weds

For detailed information about the show, go HERE