Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and Amistad Research Center welcome curator, artist, and author of Reclaiming Artistic Research, Lucy Cotter into our community. Please join us for her free public lecture, Artistic Research: Re-imagining Knowledge in a World on Fire on Tuesday January 14th at the Marigny Opera House, including a special screening of artist Christine Howard Sandoval’s film, Niniwas, To Belong Here.

Cotter’s lecture is held in coordination with our on-going co-organized program, The Prepared Table, through which we welcome local artists each month into the archive to see their practices and commitments intersect with material history. Cotter meaningfully troubles naturalized paradigms of knowledge construction—inside and outside of the archive—and asks how art can make space for the spectrum of ways of knowing and being in the world.

Location:
The Marigny Opera House
725 St. Ferdinand Street
New Orleans, LA 70117

Doors open at 6:00pm, the conversation will begin promptly at 6:30pm.
To R.S.V.P., please visit our Eventbrite page.
Attendance is free and open to the public.

Lucy Cotter’s multidisciplinary practice engages with art as a site of knowledge and cultural transformation. With academic credentials including a PhD in Cultural Analysis, she has addressed the cultural agency of curating in a decolonizing world and was Curator of the Dutch Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, 2017. She developed one of Europe’s first MAs in artistic research at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. She is widely published in books and such journals as Flash Art, Third Text, Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic and Mousse. Her recent book Reclaiming Artistic Research foregrounds art’s forms of embodied, material, choreographic, and spatial knowledge, and highlights artists’ contributions to the decolonization, Indigenization, and accessibility of knowledge. Irish-born, she is based in Portland, where she is 2024-5 project resident at Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation. She is currently curating a year-long program entitled Artistic Research in a World on Fire and making new work engaging with embodied language.

About Christine Howard Sandoval’s Ninwas, To Belong Here (2023):

Filmed with a wearable camera, artist Christine Howard Sandoval’s film Niniwas, To Belong Here documents her passage across the grounds of Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, commonly known as Mission Soledad, a Spanish mission located in Soledad, California. Surveillance imagery is used to slowly scan the surface of the land, cultural objects on display, and the adobe ruin of the original architecture of the historic mission turned museum. It is one of the 21 former missions of California that now function as museums, none of which explicitly acknowledge their role in the state’s colonial history.

The museum site is re-examined through Howard Sandoval’s personal history, as the artist’s direct ancestors were some of the first Indigenous captives in the mission in the mid 1700’s. Imposing self-made drawings of the absent architecture of the buildings where her ancestors lived, her work contains additional historic documents and images, as well as the artist’s documentation of her 4th grade mission project which was common to California public school curriculum until 2017, allowing little or no room to acknowledge history from an Indigenous perspective.

Christine Howard Sandoval is a multidisciplinary artist who questions the boundaries of representation, access, and habitation, where what is held in the land and what is held within state sponsored archives negotiate shared spaces of meaning.
Howard Sandoval’s work has exhibited nationally and internationally including: The Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo (Brazil), The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC), Oregon Contemporary (Portland, OR), El Museo Del Barrio (New York, NY), Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, NY), amongst others.

Howard Sandoval is represented in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, the private research collection of Indigenous art at Forge Projects (NY), the San Jose Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and is represented by parrasch heijnen (LA). She currently lives in the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam First Nations and is an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Praxis at Emily Carr University (Vancouver, BC). Howard Sandoval is an enrolled member of the Chalon Nation in Bakersfield, CA.