May 13, 2021, 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM

That Image of a Dead Man on DuSable Bridge

Online

Henry Herring, Defense (detail), 1928, located on the southwest pylon of the DuSable Bridge, Chicago. Photo: Andrea Carlson.

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Indigenous people often walk in built landscapes filled with irony and violence. In a sweeping and long-overdue conversation, artist Andrea Carlson (Ojibwe) and scholar Jenny L. Davis (Chickasaw) discuss ideas and misconceptions about Native American history and culture represented in public art, the problems with settler monuments to themselves, the looted and destroyed effigy mounds of Zhegagoynak (Chicago in the Potawatomi language), and how institutions in the land now known as Illinois thwart the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990).

This online event is presented by the newly formed Center for Native Futures, a Native, Black-Native, and Indigenous Artist resource and platform.

About the presenters:

Andrea Carlson (Ojibwe) is a visual artist currently living in Chicago. Through painting and drawing, Carlson cites entangled cultural narratives and challenges colonial institutional authority relating to Indigenous objects. Current research activities include Indigenous Futurism and assimilation metaphors in film.

Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program.