As part of the Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture exhibit at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, there was a symposium on December 5, 2013 entitled The Culture Makers: Conversations on Art and Cultural Adaptation. This is an 18-minute interview with three of the participants: symposium curator Candice Hopkins and artists Dylan Miner and Geronimo Inutiq (bios below). Interview by Greg Macdougall, EquitableEducation.ca
Candice Hopkins (Tlingit) is an independent curator and writer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has published extensively on history, art and vernacular architecture, and has lectured at venues including Witte de With, Tate Modern and the Dakar Biennale. In 2012, Hopkins presented a keynote lecture on the topic of the “sovereign imagination” for dOCUMENTA 13. Her recent projects include Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, a multi-site exhibition in Winnipeg co-curated with Steve Loft, Jenny Western and Lee-Ann Martin, and Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art—the National Gallery of Canada’s largest survey of recent Indigenous art—co-curated with Greg Hill and Christine Lalonde. With Lucia Sanroman, Irene Hoffmann and Janet Dees, she is curator of the 2014 SITE Santa Fe biennial exhibition, Unsettled Landscapes.
Dylan Miner (Métis) is Associate Professor at Michigan State University, where he coordinates a new Indigenous Contemporary Art Initiative. He holds a PhD from the University of New Mexico and has published more than fifty journal articles, book chapters, critical essays and encyclopedia entries. In 2010, he was awarded an Artist Leadership Fellowship from the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institution). Since 2010, he has been featured in thirteen solo exhibitions and been artist-in-residence at institutions such as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, École supérieure des beaux-arts in Nantes and Santa Fe Art Institute. His work has been the subject of articles in publications including ARTnews, Indian Country Today, First American Art Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian and Chicago Sun-Times. Miner is descended from the Miner-Brissette-L’Hirondelle-Kennedy families with ancestral ties to Indigenous communities in the Great Lakes, Prairies and subarctic regions. dylanminer.com
madeskimo is the ongoing project of Geronimo Inutiq, an Inuk electronic artist, music producer and DJ drawing on the use of instruments, digital and analogue synthesizers, as well as the remixing and processing of samples from a large variety of sources—including traditional Inuit, Aboriginal, modern electronic and urban music—in order to create an experimental platform. madeskimo has performed at numerous events and festivals, including the Igloolik Rockin’ Walrus Arts Festival, Sakahàn in Ottawa, 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics Four Host First Nations Pavilion, Winnipeg Aboriginal Music Week, Québec 400e Hip Hop Tout en Couleurs with Maison des cultures nomades, and Berlin’s Transmediale and Club Transmediale. His multimedia works have been shown in group exhibitions at grunt gallery in Vancouver, Musée de la civilisation in Québec City, Vancouver Art Gallery and the Cerny gallery in Berne, Switzerland, among others. He is an active member of the Montréal Aboriginal community and has studied anthropology and sociology at Concordia University. umati.ca
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