Native Visual Sovereignty: A Reader on Art and Performance

Forge Project will publish “Native Visual Sovereignty: A Reader on Art and Performance,” a volume that builds upon and expands the content created for the exhibition “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969,” presented at the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard College, in 2023. Candice Hopkins, the exhibition’s curator and executive director of Forge Project, is leading the project as co-editor and contributing author. Created to fill an urgent need in the field, the Native Visual Sovereignty reader employs an Indigenous-led editorial model to survey the field by and for Native cultural workers in a way that is based on new priorities, many of which extend beyond the confines of usual art historical discourse. The generously illustrated, 350-page reader will include four long-form essays by leading Indigenous scholars, 20 commissioned artist notes, oral history interviews, and an edited selection of key texts from the fields of Native contemporary art, art history, and theory. The reader, to be released in Fall 2024, is co-published by Forge Project, Hessel Museum, and Dancing Foxes Press. Forge anticipates that the publication will be widely used by curators and museum directors, Native and non-Native artists, scholars, students, university faculty, and teachers. Copies will be made available free-of-charge to tribal museums, universities, and archives.