Zoom Registration Required: https://bit.ly/3qEtFC9
Free and open to the public
45 minute presentation / 20 minute Q&A and final mahalo
Building Our Own Canoe: Activating Indigenous Authority in Art, Museums and Community
A Conversation with l frank, Carolyn Kuali‘i and Ian Kuali‘i (Online)
Description: Diving deep into their experiences as artists, educators, curators and activists, this esteemed hui of ‘ohana will share valuable insights into their work affirming the continued existence of Indigenous people and their efforts to heal and empower communities by increasing representation and authority in museums and community. We’ll hear about some of the radical and unorthodox strategies they have employed to make museum collections, cultural treasures and art more accessible to Indigenous communities.
About the Artists
l frank is the nom d’arte of L. Frank Manriquez, a Tongva, Ajachemem and Rarámuri artist, writer, tribal scholar, and activist. She brings extensive knowledge of California Indian cultural affairs. l frank has exhibited her artwork (paintings, sculpture, weavings, photography, cartoons, regalia) in museums and galleries locally, nationally, and internationally. She works to revitalize Indigenous languages and is the co-founder of Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival. l frank is also a board member of The Cultural Conservancy as well as Neshkanukat, and for fifteen years served on the board of directors of the California Indian Basketweavers Association.
Carolyn Melenani Kuali‘i is a descendent of Native Hawaiian and Apache ancestry and the co-founder and director of Kua‘aina Associates, Inc., an Indigenous art/culture organization. For the past thirty-years, Carolyn has worked as a capacity building specialist providing consultation to Native Hawaiian, American Indian, Alaska Native and Pacific Island communities in culture preservation programs, culture exchange, special projects and fellowship programs for Indigenous artists. Carolyn worked on the Royal Hawaiian Featherworks: Na Hulu Ali‘i, at the de Young Fine Arts Museum, and was a consultant for the museum’s Global Artist Fellows program. She was a contributor to The Pacific Worlds exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California, which won numerous awards such as the American Alliance of Museums award for Excellence in Exhibitions Award, with Special Achievement for Contextualizing Collections with the Community and the 2016 Autry Public History Prize from the Western History Association. In 2019 she was the curator of Continuous Thread: Celebrating Our Interwoven Histories, Identities and Contributions, a photographic exhibit at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery as part of the Commissions’ Native American Initiative, celebrating the contributions of the San Francisco Bay Area’s Native community. That same year Carolyn co-produced the Ancestral Ink Symposium, which was a convening of Indigenous tattoo and cultural practitioners at the Santa Fe Art Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Carolyn’s is currently the guest curator at the Heard Museum for the exhibit He‘e Nalu: The Art and Legacy of Hawaiian Surfing and the co-producer and director of a video and social media project in partnership with Indian Health Service tilted, HISstory, HERstroy, THEIRstory, OURstory: Storytelling as Resilience.
Ian Kuali‘i is a multi-disciplinary self-taught artist of Hawaiian and Apache ancestry working in the forms of large-scale hand cut-paper, murals, prints, and site-specific installations. From a single sheet of paper using only an x-acto blade as Kuali‘i’s tool, his detailed hand-cut paper portraits; journal entries and scenes are masterfully rendered with a blend of loose urban contemporary techniques. “One can’t erase a razor line so the process teaches me to be patient and gentle while at the same time destroying to create.” The process is meditative at its core. Ian’s hand-cut method explores ideas of indigeneity, modern progress, biodiversity and the foundation of one’s own history.
As a mid-career artist, Kuali‘i’s art practice has evolved into a reflection of his personal journey, a dichotomy between urban grit and ancestral spirit, chaotic energy and refined control, ultimately unifying the delicate and the rough in symbiotic representation.
Featured artwork by Ian Kuali‘i, ‘A‘ole Ke Ki‘i Holo‘oko‘a / Not the Whole Picture (1-3), 2023, Hand-cut fermented and watermarked kapa with pia verso
This exhibition is made possible through a partnership with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and funding from the Laila Twigg-Smith Art Fund and Robert C. & Helen F. Nichols Fund of the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation, the Hawaiʻi Council for the Humanities through support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts Biennium Grant, and County of Hawaiʻi Contingency Funds from Dr. Holeka Goro Inaba and Rebecca Villegas.
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