Group exhibition YOUNG ELDER
Participating Artists: Andrea Carlson, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Tyrrell Tapaha, and Nico Williams
Curated by Natalie Ball and Zach Feuer
James Fuentes Gallery, New York
September 8 - October 14, 2023
Video by L.A. Art Documents / www.laartdocuments.com
Text Source: www.jamesfuentes.com
James Fuentes is pleased to present Young Elder, featuring work by Andrea Carlson, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Tyrrell Tapaha, and Nico Williams and curated by Natalie Ball and Zach Feuer. In an episode of Reservation Dogs, a TV series about the lives of Indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma, two influencers are invited to a community center for a Native American Reclamation and Decolonization Symposium. While rattling off self-righteous accolades, one of the speakers refers to himself as a “young elder”—an oxymoron that inspires a communal eye roll from the audience. The scene’s satire invites the question: what does it mean to express the wisdom of millennia through a contemporary practice? In Young Elder, four artists—emerging and mid-career—present recent work that references or applies Indigenous material and pictorial traditions as they are considered and carried on in the current day.