Photo Courtesy of The Artist
Art takes on many meanings in the work of Kade L. Twist (Cherokee). The multidisciplinary artist and educator’s practice cuts so wide a swath physically speaking, too—from music to video to varying-scale installation projects—that you’d be hard-pressed to define him in singular terms. Twist has shown internationally at galleries, academic institutions, museums and even along the US/Mexico border. As a co-founder of the Postcommodity art collective, he engages audiences with, among other concepts, the unresolved conflicts between consumerism and Indigenous cultural self-determination. As an educator at Otis College, he’s also working with future generations to better engage rapidly evolving artistic and socially impactful ideas and projects. Twist will appear at the Santa Fe Art Institute this week through the auspices of Sci Art Santa Fe to deliver a talk dubbed The Sovereignty of Context (8 pm Thursday, June 8. Free. Santa Fe Art Institute, 1600 St. Michael’s Drive, sciartsantafe.org). We spoke with the artist to learn more.
What are the goals of your art?
In art, my goals have been to be an Indian person looking out at the world and to share a particular perspective about that which I inhabit, I suppose. As an artist, I’ve always had a full-time job. I used to do public affairs work on tribal issues for about 17 years, worked in a think tank, did a lot of writing and testified for the US Senate a couple times. I studied tribal policy and economic development at the University of Oklahoma. I have done a lot of research. I consider my art practice as research, and I feel as if I’ve contributed a fair amount to that type of discourse and will continue to do so. Since I started making art and writing I’ve had that same goal, that same perspective. It’s just to share ideas and to tell stories, and try to connect with people.
What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a project at the Grand Central Art Center. It’s a socially engaged project that’s interrogating power around the concept of BIPOC and its racializing force. And that’ll go on for a couple years and culminate in a lot of collaborative work and then an exhibition...The performance and the work will all be made by the people participating in the project, not by me personally. But that’s happening over the next couple years. The engagement starts in the fall. And I mean, it’ll be really fun. I’ll be using a couple of my foremost former students.
And I’m trying to work with younger people, just to look at the dilemmas that exist within lumping Black, Indigenous and people of color together. It’s one of the challenges that I’ve faced as an educator, being a professor at Otis [College] and going through this moment that we’re experiencing in history, and all the diversity, equity, inclusion, work that’s going on. I’ve looked at the institutional policies and goals that have been emerging and are being talked about in the media and in academic writings and things like that, and it seems like people are maybe focusing too much on race and not enough on worldview and culture. And so, in the project I’m really wanting to interrogate the idea of racialization and focus on culture and worldview rather than simple notions of race—or even complex notions of race. I think it’s going to be a really fun project and I’m really excited about it. One of the reasons why I’m working on that is because, American Indians, we don’t perceive ourselves as a race. We are a tribal people and race was an idea that was brought to us by colonizers. So it’s very much a position within the framework of the Judeo-Christian, Western-scientific worldview as it relates to colonization in this hemisphere. I really want to think through that with the younger generation of people and see what they arrive at and see where that goes.
Do you think that these differences will ever be reconciled?
That’s tough. I think it takes practice. People have to sit with each other and weather the storm of discomfort and misinformation. It’s challenging. We’ve had 500 years...and it hasn’t been very dialogical yet. And if it never reaches the point of being dialogical, then no, it won’t happen. But if it does reach a point of being dialogical and where we can learn about each other’s values and worldviews, and make meaning together respecting those things, then there definitely is hope. That’s it. That’s what we’re all after—to be able to sit together and not hold some type of grudge.
