This Portrait is NOT an Indian
An evening of talks and performances to accompany the exhibition
Sovereign Acts III at The James Gallery
Conceived and hosted by Wanda Nanibush
April 15, 2026, 4:00 – 8:00pm
Program:
4:00pm Welcome by Claire Bishop and Wanda Nanibush
4:25 To Be a Good NDN: A Poem in Curation, Joe Sedano
4:30pm Creation Squared, Kent Monkman (lecture)
5:00pm Playing ‘Indian’, Jackson Polys (lecture)
5:30pm break
5:50pm Visual Sovereignty: Alan Michelson, Joseph M. Pierce, and Jolene Rickard, moderated by Wanda Nanibush (panel)
6:50 An Infected Sunset, Demian DinéYazhi’ with music by Rain From Heaven (performance)
Participant biographies:
Demian DinéYazhi’ is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over-accumulative and supremacist nature of hetero-cisgender communities. DinéYazhi’s praxis interrogates normative spaces by refusing to settle or perform for exploitative galleries and publishers that act as gatekeepers to the lethargic, toxic legacy of Western paradigms. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center its politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land it occupies and refuses to give back. DinéYazhi´ has recently exhibited at the Hessel Museum of Art, Honolulu Biennial, Biennale of Sydney; among other institutions. They are the author of Ancestral Memory, An Infected Sunset, and We Left Them Nothing.
Alan Michelson is an internationally recognized New York-based artist, curator, writer, lecturer and Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River. For over twenty-five years, he has been a leading practitioner of a socially engaged, critically aware, site-specific art grounded in local context and informed by the retrieval of repressed histories. Sourcing from both indigenous and western culture, he works in a varied range of media and materials, among them painting, sculpture, photography, sound, video, glass, and stone. He is the recipient of several awards, including an NEA Visual Artists Fellowship, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship, and the GSA Design Award, Citation in Art. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Canada, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. His practice includes public art, and Mantle, his large-scale monument honoring Virginia’s Indian nations, was recently dedicated on Capitol Square in Richmond. Michelson is co-founder and co-curator, with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, of the Indigenous New York series.
Kent Monkman (b. 1965) is an interdisciplinary Cree visual artist. A member of ocêkwi sîpiy (Fisher River Cree Nation) in Treaty 5 Territory (Manitoba, Canada), he lives and works between New York City and Toronto. Known for his provocative interventions into Western European and American art history, Monkman explores themes of colonization, sexuality, loss, and resilience—the complexities of historic and contemporary Indigenous experiences—across various media. Monkman’s gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle often appears in his work as a time-travelling, shape-shifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples. Monkman’s artworks are held in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Denver Art Museum; the Hood Museum of Art. Private collections that house his works include Art Bridges; the Tia Collection; the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation; Forge Project. Monkman is the recipient of many accolades and recognition, including the Ontario Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts (2017), an honorary doctorate degree from Queen’s University (2024). In 2023, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 2025, he received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation. Currently, she is the Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at CUNY. She is also teaching in the Masters of Visual Studies program at the University of Toronto, and part of the curatorial team for Counterpublic 2026, St. Louis’ Triennial. She is also the Barker Fairley Distinguished Visitor, University of Toronto, 2025/6. Nanibush is the founding director of aabaakwad, an international yearly gathering of over 80 Indigenous curators, writers, and artists for talks and performances. She won the 2023 Toronto Book Award for her co-authored book Moving the Museum which chronicles some of her groundbreaking work at the Art Gallery of Ontario as the Inaugural curator of Indigenous Art. She has curated survey, group, and retrospective exhibitions including: Robert Houle, Red is Beautiful; Rebecca Belmore, Facing the Monumental; and Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971 – 1989l. She received her M.A. in Visual Studies from University of Toronto. She is Adjunct Faculty at York University. Nanibush has published widely on Indigenous art, politics, history, feminism and sexuality.
Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. He is the author of two books, Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (Duke University Press, 2025). He co-edited Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of Gay and Lesbian Studies Quarterly, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable,” and has published work in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, Latin American Research Review, and Art Journal, as well as in popular outlets such as Hyperallergic, TruthOut, and Indian Country Today. Along with S.J. Norman (Wiradjuri) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds, and in 2024-2025 he was a Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
Jackson Polys (Tlingit) is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working between what are currently called Alaska and New York whose work examines the limits and viability of desires for Indigenous growth. He was advisor to Indigenous New York with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and is a core contributor to the New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society who, with an interdisciplinary network of Informants, co-produce video, performance, and installation works that confront desires for indigeneity, and settler colonial tendencies and obstacles to Indigenous growth and agency. His works have have appeared with Artists Space, Boston Public Art Triennial, Counterpublic, Creative Time, MoMA, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, New York Film Festival, Sharjah Biennial, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Biennial of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other institutions.
Jolene Rickard is an Associate Professor at Cornell University in the departments of History of Art and Art. She’s also a visual historian, artist and curator interested in the intersection of Indigenous art, cultural theory and the forces of settler colonialism. Her current role as a consultant to the Niagara Falls State Park interpretive museum and the Royal Ontario Museum contributes to updating Indigenous perspectives in public spaces. Jolene’s current book project, Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ Stone Carving and Shaping Time, sets in dialogue the work of master soapstone (steatite) carver Joseph Jacobs (Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ / Cayuga Nation) with Haudenosaunee cosmological perspectives as an illustration of relationships to more than human beings. Highlights of Jolene’s recent art exhibitions include Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography, Amon Carter Museum of American Art (2022), among many others. She is on the editorial board of American Art, a founding board member for the Otsego Institute for Native American Art and an advisor to GRASAC – The Great Lakes Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Culture and is part of the Inaugural Forge Project’s Indigenous Steering Council. She is from the Skarù·ręʔ / Tuscarora Nation, Hodinöhsö:ni Confederacy.
Rain from Heaven is the music project of vocalist and producer Isabel Vazquez. Her debut album petra-coeur was released in 2025.
Joel Sedano (they/them) is a queer and Trans* poet scholar of Mexican, P’urhépecha, and Wixárika descent. Joel has a B.A. in English and Gender & Women’s Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.F.A. in Writing from Columbia University and M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University. They are a secondyear PhD student in Theatre & Performance at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Their research centers on contemporary Indigiqueer and queer Black artists’ creative practice, and their poetry will be publishe in Black, Indigenous, & Trans of Color Histories Lab’s Indigenous Worldmaking zine, vol. 2.