Land, Place, Identity: Inaugural Symposium on American Art

Saturday, November 9 & Sunday, November 10, 2024

General Admission: $15/day, ($10/day for PAAM members)
Early Bird Ticket sales have closed.

PAAM presents a weekend-long gathering of art historians, artists, and curators whose work converges around art’s relationship to land and place.

With a particular emphasis on art forms and scholarship that expand beyond western art-historical frameworks, presentation topics include: the advancement of Native art and sovereignty through making, curation, and sustainability practices; Kerry James Marshall and the Black landscape tradition; Seong Moy’s abstracted Outer Cape landscapes; and a collaborative public art project contending with Boston’s urban infrastructure as it intersects with Black histories of displacement and liberation. See presentation information below for more details. 

A concurrent exhibition of PAAM Collection artworks provides a backdrop for the weekend, featuring historic and contemporary painting and photography.

The symposium and exhibition build upon the landscape tradition and reverence for place at the heart of Provincetown’s art history and community, while also recognizing a lack in conversation and preservation of marginalized histories and practices, particularly Indigenous ones. Land, Place, Identity represents a reparative effort to tell a more complete story of our past, present and future. 

PAAM is pleased to honor Tess Lukey, enrolled member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah, and Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Trustees of the Reservations, as the keynote speaker. 

In keeping with the symposium’s values of repair and restoration, PAAM invites attendees to include a donation to Aquinnah Cultural Center when registering for the event. Aquinnah Cultural Center is at the forefront of protecting, preserving, and stewarding Aquinnah Wampanoag art and culture into the future. PAAM’s invitation to donate is a small gesture of gratitude for their work, and an acknowledgement of our museum’s location on unceded Native land. 

THANK YOU

Thank you to our presentation proposal readers: Maura Coughlin, Megan Hinton, and James Stanley.

PAAM is grateful for the support of our symposium sponsors and partners: Arts Foundation of Cape Cod; Provincetown Economic Development Committee; The Lexvest Group; Aquinnah Cultural Center; Far Land Provisions; East End Market; and Angel Foods.

The Program

Presenters: Asia Adomanis, Elizabeth James-Perry, crystal am nelson, Ryan Rice, LaRissa Rogers

Keynote: Tess Lukey

SCHEDULE

Saturday

Individual Presentations:

10am: Elizabeth James-Perry 

11am: Ryan Rice 

12pm: Keynote: Tess Lukey 

Sunday

10am – 12pm: Panel presentations & moderated discussion: Asia Adomanis, crystal am nelson, LaRissa Rogers. Moderator: James Everett Stanley.

PRESENTATION INFORMATION

Tess Lukey is an enrolled citizen of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head Aquinnah and the Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Trustees of the Reservations. She is based at both Fruitlands Museum and the deCordova Sculpture Park & Museum. She specializes in pre-20th-century Native American materials, but also has experience in NAGPRA, Mayan art history and folk art.

She received her MA in Art History from UNM with a minor in Museum Studies and a dual BFA in Art History and Ceramics from MassArt. She has co-curated shows Collecting Stories: The Invention of Folk Art (2021) and A Little Bit of the Southwest (2022) at the MFA Boston and Beauty and Usefulness (2023) at Fruitlands Museum. Previously she has held positions at the Society of Arts and Crafts, the John Sommers Gallery, the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, and the Hibben Center for Archaeology Studies.

Lukey’s most recent exhibitions at Fruitlands Museum – Across Boundaries Across Barriers, Place of Intersection: Survivance in the American West, and A Surreal Place: Sky Hopinka and Cannupa Hanska Luger – feature historic and contemporary works of Native American art whose display and interpretation are driven by indigenous frameworks and values. This is a new strategy for this museum that is drawing on Lukey’s work to overhaul the Fruitlands museums’ interpretive strategies and collections practices.

She is also working on a larger independent project that draws on her work with public art as an independent curator. Opening in Summer 2025, The Boston Public Art Triennial will deliver 15 compelling new public art commissions across the city of Boston, created by visionary local, national, and international artists. Works ranging from sculptures to interactive exhibits will extend to hundreds of performance-based community-led programs in multiple Boston neighborhoods. 

In her spare time, she is also a traditional potter and basket weaver practicing the techniques of her own Indigenous community.

Elizabeth James-Perry – Internationally known 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Heritage Fellow Elizabeth James-Perry is an enrolled Aquinnah Wampanoag whaling descendant who engages with Northeastern Woodlands cultural expressions primarily in sculptural wampum carving, naturally dyed textiles, and watercolor paintings including the Bear Map series. Her work explores the connections between the arts, sustainability, Native identity and sovereignty, maritime traditions and environmentally restorative Native gardening. Her garden project Raven Reshapes Boston was part of a year-long collaboration with artist Ekua Holmes to bring diversity to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. James-Perry has a Marine Science degree from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, attended Shoals Marine Lab, and Rhode Island School of Design CE, and holds a certificate in Digital Tribal Stewardship from Washington State University. She was an advisor for many years for the New England Foundation of the Arts Native program, and gave workshops in the Evergreen College Longhouse Program. For over a decade she was employed first with the Natural Resource Department and then the Aquinnah Tribal Historic Preservation Office, where she was the Federal Tribal Co-lead of the Northeast Regional Ocean Planning Body and participated in the United South and Eastern Tribal Conferences as a member of the Heritage and Culture committee. 

See her current work on exhibit in Seals and Society, Interwoven Power and in Shifting Boundaries. 

Website: www.elizabethjamesperry.com

Ryan Rice, Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawake, is a curator, critic and creative consultant. His curatorial career spans 30 years in community, museums, artist run centres, public spaces and galleries. Rice focuses his extensive curatorial research and writing on contemporary and Onkwehón:we art. He has been published in numerous periodicals, journals and exhibition catalogues including Rendezvous with the Indigenous Art Collection: how to raise a flag in Curating Lively Objects, (Routledge Press 2021), Bait: Couzyn Van Heuvelen (Artspace 2019) and Taiakoia’tenhatie / Freefall: The Photography of Shelley Niro for Shelley Niro: Scotiabank Award (Steidl/Scotiabank 2018). In 2022, he presented three solo exhibitions; Jordan Bennett: Souvenir at Onsite Gallery, Pageant: Natalie King at Centre [3] and Versification: January Rogers at daphne Art Centre and advanced two public art commissions as the Indigenous Public Art Curator with Waterfront Toronto. He received the 2022 Changemakers BIPOC Award from Galeries Ontario / Ontario Galleries (GOG), recognizing his contributions to community, leadership, and organizational experience, which includes co-founder of the Aboriginal (Indigenous) Curatorial Collective, the Inuit Art Foundation Board, and an advisory member of Longhouse Labs. He is the Executive Director of OCAD University’s Onsite Gallery in addition to his 2021 appointment as its Curator, Indigenous Art. 

Presentation: Recounting a historical precedent through a lens of creativity to recuperate the memory of the land and spirit forgotten can enable our imagination to acknowledge relationships to place and each other. To do so, deep contemplation needs to be enacted; active listening, looking and self reflection need to be withstood and confirmed. Building on a forensic capacity of what research can offer, creative practices are capable of digging deeper to render and expand myths ascribed onto sites on the land to further substantiate and bear witness to time immemorial. In this presentation, curator and critic Ryan Rice will reflect on his experience addressing and attending to the 3 P’s – placemaking, placekeeping and placetaking — as a vital tool to amplify and advance Indigenous sovereignty. While placemaking has gained popularity in the realm of city infrastructure and urban planning as a way to bring context to a location, Indigenous communities have a long history of establishing their cultural and spiritual values in the places they live. Those activities have been disrupted over time, but recent cultural shifts have led to new opportunities for exploring the 3 P’s through an Indigenous lens.

Asia Adomanis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art at The Ohio State University studying twentieth-century American art with a focus on Asian American artists. Asia’s dissertation, currently in progress, focuses on the relationship between abstraction and race and the politics of style in the work of Chinese American artists active at midcentury. Outside of the department, Asia has been in residency as a Predoctoral Fellow of Asian American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 

Presentation: Seong Moy (1921-2013) was a Chinese American painter and printmaker whose works navigate identity and subjectivity through a negotiation of representation and abstraction. Born in China and raised in Minnesota after the age of ten, Moy’s art education began in the Midwest and continued in New York throughout the 1940s. In 1955, Moy established a summer studio/residence and an art school in Provincetown. The onset of Moy’s summers spent in Provincetown coincided with a gradual shift in his oeuvre away from semi-figural adaptations of themes drawn from literature and theater to more emphatically abstract works inspired by documentary and landscape photography as well as his local environment. From the late 1950s onwards, he produced several woodcuts and silkscreen prints titled after specific locations around Provincetown yet abstracted beyond recognizability, prompting the viewer to approach the image as both a representation of the landscape and an expression of the artist’s subjectivity. Working within the context of scholarship on both mid-century American landscapes broadly and on the experiences of immigrant artists specifically–particularly Asian American artists–this project analyzes Moy’s Long Nook Beach (1982-83) and other landscape prints to consider how abstraction can mediate questions about identity differently than figuration. 

crystal am nelson, PhD, is Assistant Professor of African/Diasporic Visual Studies in the Department of Art & Art History at CU Boulder. Prior to joining the faculty at CU Boulder, they were a Just Transformations Postdoctoral Fellow at Pennsylvania State University. They teach about race and representation, Black art histories, and Blackness in the visual field. nelson’s writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Feminist Media Histories, Art Journal, The Art Bulletin, Woman’s Art Journal, Visual Studies, Contact Sheet, Brooklyn Rail, Art Practical, and other venues. Their current manuscript, The Audacity of Pleasure, examines the visual culture of pleasure and the aesthetics of joy and safe space in quotidian Blackness. 

Presentation: Renowned painter, Kerry James Marshall, is known for his use of various values of the color black to render his figures in salon size paintings. What has been little discussed is his utilization of the outdoors and landscape in his production of alternative spaces where Black people are free to gather without interruption or surveillance. Sarah Jane Cervenak refers to this as an ecological imagination. Its roots can be traced to the Black Romantics of the 19th century whose landscapes revealed a Black interpretation of the landscape through painting. Using ecoaesthetics, Black aesthetics, and Black geographies, this paper proposes to frame Marshall’s artistic practice within the roots of a tradition of Black landscape painting as well as a radical break from that tradition by virtue of his use of the black/Black figure.

LaRissa Rogers is a visual artist and educator born in Charlottesville, VA. She holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a MFA from the University of California Los Angeles. Rogers has exhibited and performed in institutions such as Documenta 15 (Germany), The Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art (CA), The California Museum of Photography, Riverside (CA), The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (VA), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LA), California State University, Fullerton (CA), and The Fuller Craft Museum (MA). She received the Visual Arts fellowship at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2022) and The Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (2023-2024). She held residencies at BEMIS Center of Contemporary Art (2022) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2024). Rogers was named 2024 Forbes 30 under 30 in Art and Style and co-founded the alternative monument and community gathering space “Operations of Care” with Luis Vasquez La Roche, located in Charlottesville, VA.

Rogers is a Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Sculpture within the Department of Art at The University of Virginia, and is currently represented by Super Dakota.

Presentation: Rogers will offer “Going to Ground,” a presentation on her research and public sculpture commissioned by the Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston, that explores the importance of place as a conduit for memory, history, and experiences, posing questions about survival and the impacts of displacement. Drawing connections between monumentality, land ownership, arrival, and notions of home in the afterlife of slavery, the ghostly soil sculpture uses the blueprint of Zipporah Potter Atkins’s residence to pay homage to Black aliveness, resilience, and liberation through the interconnected histories of land and soil on the Rose Kennedy Greenway. 

The Boston Harbor was critical to the ecology and infrastructure of the Transatlantic slave trade. In the 1980s, the City of Boston displaced 10,000 primarily Black, Brown, and Immigrant residents to build the John F. Fitzgerald Expressway, which caved amid financial and construction constraints. The second conversion project known as “The Big Dig,” was a failed megaproject and the nation’s most expensive highway project. In 2008, the City converted the Expressway into a mile-and-a-half-long public park. The collaboration sits on the site of both Atkins’ home and among the lived experiences of thousands of residents who built lives there.