SITE Santa Fe

SITE SANTA FE, in Sante Fe, NM, brings together Dyani White Hawk (2023), Sterlin Harjo (2024), and Sky Hopinka (2022) for a public panel as part of its ‘Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969’ exhibit, running from June 5 to September 7, 2026. The panel centers on the principle of narrative sovereignty, which asserts the right of Native people to tell their own stories, on their own terms and in their own voices. The Fellows connect Indigenous storytelling methods to film, television, and visual art forms, and host a hands-on workshop with students from the Institute for American Indian Art’s MFA program to offer further exploration of narrative sovereignty practice. 

The exhibit, Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson, is an artist-driven model of exhibition-making. Both Fernández’s and Smithson’s artistic research is rooted in conceptual questions that engage matter, materiality, land, and place. Fernández's insistence on situating site and landscape in relation to human beings opens a reexamination of Smithson’s work that considers the urgencies of the present.

Funding is to support adjacent programming in a day-long series of presentations and discussions on who has agency in “land art,” meditations on land and water, and freeform conversation among the three MacArthur Fellows.  Fernández poetically challenges ideas of site and landscape by exposing the history of colonization and the inherent violence embedded in how we imagine and define place, and, by extension, one another. Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among sound, space, and people. He activates spaces of performance where history and encroachment upon the land can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined.  Natalie Diaz is a poet connecting her own experiences as a Mojave American and Latina woman to widely recognized cultural and mythological touchstones and creating a personal mythology that viscerally conveys the oppression and violence that continue to afflict Indigenous Americans in a variety of forms. Candace Hopkins, Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Forge Project, moderates the panel conversation that closes out the day of programming. 

In support of general operations.