Curator’s Choice: Marie Watt and Nancy Marie Mithlo

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Join the Fowler Museum, independent curator Nancy Marie Mithlo, and artist Marie Watt for a conversation about American Indian art, intellectual traditions, social activism, and the foundational practice of gratitude in Native communities. We’ll take a look at some of Watt’s most important, powerfully symbolic sculptural works informed by Indigenous knowledge, Iroquois proto-feminism, and American Indian matriarchal structures. Watt uses textiles, beads, cedar, and other materials conceptually attached to American Indian narratives in her work, which explores what it means to be a true “companion species.”

A Fowler Member-only virtual Happy Hour and Studio Visit with Marie and Nancy will follow the program. Click here to become a Fowler Member.

Presented in partnership with UCLA American Indian Studies Center.

Marie Watt (b. 1967) is an American artist with partial German-Scot heritage and a citizen of the Seneca Nation. She earned her M.F.A. in painting and printmaking from Yale University; has degrees from Willamette University and the Institute of American Indian Arts; and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Willamette University in 2016. Through collaborative actions, she instigates multigenerational and cross-disciplinary conversations affirming Native peoples’ connections to place, one another, and the universe. Watt lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Nancy Marie Mithlo, Ph.D., is an Indigenous (Chiricahua Apache) scholar of race and representation. She is Professor in the UCLA Department of Gender Studies and affiliated faculty in the UCLA American Indian Studies Interdepartmental Program. Her training as a cultural anthropologist (Stanford University Ph.D., 1993) informs how she examines cultural, institutional, and political systems that often mask the normalization of bias in contested realms of power. Mithlo, whose work engages comparative global Indigeneity movements in the arts, curated nine exhibitions at the Venice Biennale.

Curator’s Choice: Join curators for lively conversations about their passions and projects that inspire audiences to engage with different world views and find joy in the diversity of human experiences.