Form and Relation: Centering Indigenous Knowledges in Curatorial Practice
The PMA is excited to welcome Jami Powell, Associate Curator of Native American Art, Hood Museum of Art & Faculty Lecturer, Native American Studies, Dartmouth College, as 2021’s Barnet Scholar.
Photography by Eli Burakian
As museums across the country continue to reckon with foundational legacies of colonialism, greater emphasis has been placed on decolonization. Rather than a one size fits all approach, however, decolonizing is an ongoing—and frankly unending—process that must also coincide with other anti-racist and justice-based approaches to the collecting, curation, exhibition, and educational missions of our institutions.
Shedding light on the complexity, nuance, and even absurdity involved in this work, Powell will discuss shifts in her own curatorial practice and how she has approached recent and ongoing projects at the Hood Museum of Art through the centering of Indigenous knowledges.
Form and Relation installed in the Hood Museum’s Citrin and Engles Galleries. Works pictured from left to right: Ruben Olguin's Songs of Our Fathers, Anita Field's So Many Ways to Be Human, and Cannupa Hanska Luger's Every One (#MMIWT Bead Project). Photo by Alison Palizzolo.
Jami Powell is the Hood’s first associate curator of Native American art and was recently appointed as a lecturer in Native American Studies at Dartmouth. Powell is a citizen of the Osage Nation and has a PhD in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Powell’s research examines the representations of Indigenous peoples in museums as well as the interventions contemporary Indigenous artists make through creative acts of self-representation.
Powell is currently working on a book manuscript titled Stitching an Osage Future: Aesthetic Resistance and Self-Representation. She has also published articles in Museum Anthropology, Panorama, Museum Management and Curatorship, and is an editorial advisor for First American Art Magazine. Powell has served on curatorial advisory boards for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. She is a recipient of the 2020 New Leadership Award from ArtTable, the foremost professional organization dedicated to advancing the leadership of women in the visual arts.