Art & Power: Centering the Voices of Native Artists

This event is co-sponsored by PSU College of Arts.

How are Native artists reclaiming space and building community in Portland? What are the current successes and challenges? How can art institutions better support, celebrate, and amplify the voices of Native artists and communities? Join us for the last Art & Power of 2018 as we listen, learn, and reflect with Portland-based artists, Anthony Hudson, Jacqueline Keeler, and Rose High Bear as they discuss their experience navigating Portland as Native peoples and practicing artists and the intersection of these and other identities.

Please contact Humberto Marquez Mendez at hmarquezmendez@racc.org if you have any questions or need accommodations to fully participate in this program.

Art & Power is RACC’s newest conversation series focused on the experiences of historically underserved communities in the arts to engage in safe and intentional dialogue. These conversations are free and open to the public.

About the Artists:

Jacqueline Keeler is a Diné/Ihanktonwan Dakota writer and contributor to The Nation, Yes! Magazine, Truthout, The New York Times, High Country News and many other publications. Her book “The Edge of Morning: Native Voices Speak for the Bears Ears” is available from Torrey House Press and the forthcoming “Standing Rock to the Bundy Standoff: Occupation, Native Sovereignty, and the Fight for Sacred Landscapes” will be released next year.

ANTHONY HUDSON (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, performer, and filmmaker perhaps best known as Portland’s premier drag clown CARLA ROSSI, an immortal trickster whose attempts at realness almost always result in fantastic failure. Anthony & Carla host and program QUEER HORROR – the only exclusively LGBTQ horror screening series in the country – bimonthly at the historic Hollywood Theatre, where Anthony also serves a role as the Community Programmer. In 2018, Anthony was named a National Artist Fellow in Artistic Innovation by the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation and among the inaugural cohort of the Western Arts Alliance’s Native Launchpad program to advance Indigenous performance. Anthony’s new play STILL LOOKING FOR TIGER LILY is in development through Artists Repertory Theatre’s On the Workbench program with a production on the horizon thanks to the generous support of a 2018 Creative Heights award from the Oregon Community Foundation; in the mean time, Anthony’s first evening-length show as Carla Rossi since 2014, CLOWN DOWN: FAILED TO MOUNT, will premiere at PNCA in Spring 2019 and is funded in part by Anthony’s third Artist Focus Project Grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council. Find out more at TheCarlaRossi.com.

Wisdom Co-founder and Executive Producer Rose High Bear (Deg Hit’an Dine) was born and raised in a remote subarctic Athabascan village of McGrath along Alaska’s Kuskoquim River. Following graduation from Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR (B.S.), she made Portland, OR her home where, in 1993, she co-founded Wisdom of the Elders, Inc. (Wisdom). For the past 25 years, she has dedicated herself to Wisdom’s mission and vision of Native American cultural sustainability, multimedia education and race reconciliation. She has been Wisdom’s Executive Director and now serves as Senior Consultant.

Also an Alaskan Native artist, Rose created and funded Wisdom’s multimedia programs, including Wisdom of the Elders Radio Series, the Native Wisdom Documentary Film Series and Discovering Our Story Television Program. She also helped to form the Northwest Indian Storytellers Association in 2004 which provided annual Native storytelling gatherings and trainings for emerging Native storytellers in Portland and Seattle for over a decade.

[from the Eventbrite page]