Native American Heritage Month is ending. Here’s how our Native News team celebrated

By in Native

Native American Heritage Month is ending. Here’s how our Native News team celebrated

Every month is Native American Heritage Month here at MPR’s Native News Initiative. Reporter Melissa Olson and I spend time with our own communities in various ways throughout the year, so November tends to feel like any other month.

However, now we have the honor of building Native News at MPR and making decisions in how we’d like to approach our reporting.

The Native News team put our heads together and decided to get out into community, while sharing events with the public via MPR News’ social media channels. Each of these gatherings brought laughter and conversation, and I hope these highlights provide a connection for you as well.

Statewide one-read program launch in St. Paul

Native News kicked off the month by attending the launch of the statewide one-read program for Minnesota classrooms. The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community and Minnesota Historical Society Press celebrated the book giveaway Nov. 1 with the authors of “Voices from Pejuhutazizi: Dakota Stories and Storytellers.” The event took place at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul.

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Rebecca Crooks-Stratton, secretary-treasurer of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, announced a large donation as a part of its Understand Native Minnesota campaign.

“Through this program we, the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, are donating 20,000 copies of ‘Voices from Pejuhutazizi’ in response to more than 800 school requests across the state,” Crooks-Stratton said.

We also spoke with authors Walter “Super” LaBatte and Teresa Peterson.

Artist reception at AICHO Galleries in Duluth

On Nov. 4, I went to Duluth for the artist reception for the exhibit, “Mazinibii’igewininiwag: Two Woodland Artists.” Artists Gordon Coons and Steven StandingCloud presented their work to a full house at the American Indian Community Housing Organization (AICHO) Gallery.

As the title of the exhibit suggests, both Coons and StandingCloud create art that reflects the Ojibwe Woodlands style. The art style emphasizes heavy outlines of the figures, which contrasts with a vivid color palette.

StandingCloud said, “My grandmother who actually inspired me a long time ago to be creative and formulate some art pieces. And so she did a lot of floral work on her bead work. And so since I was at a very young age, she actually instilled in me, these images of floral designs.”

“She was giving me some instructions about my identity. So it really meant a lot to me.”

This event was also featured on Art Hounds.

Election Day at Native voter headquarters in Minneapolis

The Native American Community Development Institute (NACDI) in Minneapolis hosted the “Election Day Native Voter Headquarters” event on Nov. 7, which is part of their ongoing program called “Make Voting a Tradition.”

Melissa Olson braved the cold and spoke with event organizers, voters and community members who attended, highlighting their perspectives and experiences regarding civic engagement and the significance of voting in Native communities.

John Williams works at NACDI and said the nonprofit is helping community members understand that their voice matters all year long.

“It’s not just around election time. We take an intergenerational approach to our work. So we’re always talking to elders and to youth about the importance of being involved in your community,” Williams said.

Celebration of American Indian OIC’s impact in Minneapolis

The American Indian Opportunities Industrialization Center (AIOIC) provides education, training and human services to Native people in an environment that embraces culture. The Minneapolis center was created by the American Indian Movement in 1979.

On Nov. 17, 275 guests gathered on the 50th floor of the IDS Center to recognize the work of AIOIC, bid in a silent auction, listen to speakers and have dinner as a community. I saw people taking photos of the city below, lots of Native fashion and happy encounters of people unexpectedly reconnecting with old friends.

The Native Rise event included speakers Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, actress Cara Jade Myers (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), and AIOIC’s president and CEO Dr. Joe Hobot.

“We have an amazing staff and we work with nearly 1,000 of our community members every year,” said Hobot. “So this is our chance to kind of come together and celebrate our successes and really celebrate our community that is doing the work and making a huge impact and stabilizing their lives and lifting up the entire community in the cities and in the state of Minnesota.”

Thank you for joining Native News in our social media event coverage for Native American Heritage Month. I met new people and saw many I hadn’t connected with in a long time.

These community gatherings are such beautiful opportunities to connect, and I’m happy I could share these. I also learned of so many other community celebrations around the state during this process, and I look forward to next year and adventuring out around Minnesota even more so.

St Charles Native Kyle Hamilton Exhibiting During Art Basel Miami Beach

By in Native

St Charles Native Kyle Hamilton Exhibiting During Art Basel Miami Beach

Kyle Hamilton Fine Art is excited to announce participation in Satellite Art Show Miami Beach featuring the works of Artists Lucas Bononi, Ivey Holt, Justyna Kisielewicz and Nereida Patricia.  This exhibition will feature works in various formats including Paintings, Wood Cut out, Light Sculptures, Mirrors and reliefs.  What unifies this group of Artists is their journey for excellence in their chosen crafts.  Kyle Hamilton curates artists he feels are the best in their chosen mediums and conveying their messages in groundbreaking ways.  Request Preview via E-Mail to kyle@KyleHamiltonFineArt.com  

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By the Numbers: A Breakdown of Results From Christie’s Hong Kong’s 20th/21st Century Evening Sale, November 2023

By in Art World News

By the Numbers: A Breakdown of Results From Christie’s Hong Kong’s 20th/21st Century Evening Sale, November 2023

Christie’s Hong Kong concluded its autumn evening art sales on Tuesday (November 28) with two auctions held back to back: the 20th/21st Century Art Evening Sale, which we will focus on in this report, and the Post-Millennium Evening Sale.

The main event of the night, the 20th/21st Century sale, delivered respectable results despite the gloomy vibe that has hovered over auctions in the region throughout 2023. The hammer total slightly surpassed the presale low estimate, even accounting for withdrawn lots.

Although the top lot successfully found a buyer, several blue-chip names went unsold or sold at prices that were below or just barely met their low estimates. Works by the likes of Lee Ufan, Rudolf Stingel, Liu Ye, Takashi Murakami, George Condo, and Liu Wei did not find buyers. Paintings by Zhang Xiaogang and Yoshitomo Nara hammered at prices well below their estimates. Withdrawals included works by Wassily Kandinsky, Nara, Keith Haring, and Wang Xingwei.

Nonetheless, the sale set several records. Italian artist Salvo’s colorful 1994 landscape painting Il Mattino (The Morning) hammered at HK$6.9 million ($889,845), or HK$8.7 million ($1.1 million) with fees, a new record for the artist. Nature’s Inspiration (1963), an enigmatic canvas by Cheong Soo Pieng, set a new record for the Singaporean artist, achieving a hammer price of HK$9.2 million ($1.2 million) after a long bidding war between two phone bidders. The third-party guaranteed work made a total of HK$11.5 million ($1.5 million) including fees.

Sanyu Christie's

Sanyu, Femme nue sur un tapis (Nude on Tapestry) (1929). Photo: courtesy of Christie’s.

Below, the story by the numbers…

20th/21st Century Art Evening Sale

  • Total Sales After Fees: HK$694 million ($89 million)
  • Hammer Total: HK$570.7 million ($73 million)
  • Top Seller: Lot 11, Sanyu’s Femme nue sur un tapis (Nude on Tapestry), the cover lot of this sale. The painting executed in 1929 is said to be the Chinese-French artist’s first major nude painting. The work came from the Dreyfus Collection in Paris. It hammered at HK$160 million ($20.6 million), above the presale expectations. It made more than HK$187 million ($24 million) after fees, the sixth most expensive Sanyu work sold at auction, according to Artnet’s Price Database.
  • Lots on Offer: 53
  • Lots Withdrawn: 4
  • Lots Sold: 46
  • Lots Bought In: 7
  • Sell-through Rate: 81 percent (46/57)
  • Sell-through Rate After Withdrawals: 87 percent (46/53)
  • Presale Low Estimate: HK$570.2 million ($73 million)
  • Presale Low Estimate After Withdrawals: HK$496.2 million ($64 million)
  • Hammer Total vs. Presale Low Estimate: +HK$530,000 ($67,943)
  • Hammer Total vs. Presale Low Estimate (revised after withdrawals): +HK$74.5 million ($9.5 million)
  • Total Sales of Equivalent Sale Last Year: HK$678 million ($86.9 million)
  • Lots Guaranteed: 8
  • Lots With House Guarantees: 4
  • Lots With Third-Party Guarantees: 4
  • Total Low Estimate of Withdrawn Lots: HK$74 million ($9.5 million)
  • Total Low Estimate of Guaranteed Lots: HK$208.8 million ($26.7 million, 37 percent of total presale low estimate)
  • Total Low Estimate of Third-Party Guaranteed Lots: HK$101.8 million ($13 million, 12 percent of total presale low estimate)
  • Quote of the Night: “It’s an auction. Can’t wait forever,” auctioneer Georgina Hilton said, nudging her colleagues on the phone with bidders who were taking too much time to decide whether to place the next bid. Even an experienced auctioneer like Hilton who’s skilled at keeping things moving was challenged by the slow pace of the Hong Kong sales.
  • Lasting Memory: The moment when the excited Prapavadee Sophonpanich, Christie’s general manager for Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, won two bids back to back. She was acting on behalf of the same client on the phone for works by Thai artists Thawan Duchanee and Pratuang Emjaroen. Each sold for the same price, HK$6 million ($775,081).

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Local Motion: Regional Roundup

By in Printmaking

Local Motion: Regional Roundup
On this Local Motion, we’ll hear about the prominence of the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado politics in the 1920s, a collaboration between a Colorado printmaker and a Texas musician on the children’s book “Who Built the Moon? (KSJD)” and spoken word poetry from a world poetry slam champion, a poet laureate of Dallas, Texas.

Missoula Art Museum calling for Indigenous artists to contribute to new summer exhibit

By in Native

Missoula Art Museum calling for Indigenous artists to contribute to new summer exhibit

MISSOULA — As a free resource for the community, the Missoula Art Museum (MAN) is using it’s galleries to spread awareness on an important issue.

The Museum will host a new exhibition in the Summer of 2024, featuring work by Indigenous and Native descendant artists.

The goal is to spread awareness on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP) crisis in Montana.

The museum is currently calling for artists across the state to submit work for the exhibition.

The submission deadline for artists is January 5, 2023.

Artists must be indigenous or Indigenous-descendant but can be affiliated with Tribes outside of Montana.

The Missoula Art Museum has invited Rachel Allen to serve as guest curator on the project.

An Indigenous art expert who was born in Great Falls, Allen now works at the Northwestern Museum of Art and Culture in Spokane.

The MAM has stayed committed to showcasing Indigenous art since 1997 when the Lynda Frost Gallery was opened, according to senior curator, Brandon Reintjes.

The Lynda Frost Gallery on the third floor of the museum is dedicated to contemporary Indigenous art.

The current art call, however, is unique to the museum.

“A specialized focus for Indigenous artists and tribal people is something that we haven’t done before, so we’re excited about different ways of inviting people in and being able to showcase art, or become aware of artists that we might not usually work with,” Reintjes says.

The exhibition dedicated to the state’s MMIP crisis will run from May 3 until September 7, 2024.

The artists who are accepted into the exhibition will be notified sometime in February, and a preview of the show for artists and their families will be held on April 22.

The exhibition’s theme is a serious topic, but Reintjes says art can be a great way to spread awareness about one of the state’s toughest issues.

“The more you learn about it and the deeper you go, the more shocking and terrible it is. And it’s one thing that artists’ voices can really lend awareness to and help us understand in different ways. So we’re really hoping that a lot of the submissions that we get, and Rachel’s expert eye with curating, have a way of bringing it together to be outward facing and interact with a broader public.”

Artists can submit applications for the exhibition online, or by emailing Reintjes directly at brandon@missoulaartmuseum.org.

PhotoVogue is Failing Photographers in a Big Way

By in Photography

PhotoVogue is Failing Photographers in a Big Way

In a baffling move that was certain to disappoint, PhotoVogue has stuck to its decision to feature AI-generated content alongside real photography in the latest edition of their festival. As usual, we at The Phoblographer are on the side of Photography as an Art made by humans. But this is far more alarming than we think. To recap on how alarming this is, Gizmodo Spain recently laid off their entire staff to replace them with AI. Sports Illustrated, too, was caught publishing articles made by AI. So with PhotoVogue, a branch of a long respected place for photographers, now adhering to and sticking to this decision, when will photographers be next? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

Paraphrasing writer Talia Lavin, we think things should stay human in this business — at the very least, as human as humanly possible.

The head of Global PhotoVogue, Alessia Glaviano, does not appear to share this point of view, even though she makes a bit of an effort to hide this behind an ultimately hollow statement on her Instagram page.

It’s crucial to differentiate the contexts in which photography is used. When it acts as a journalistic document, the act of bearing witness is paramount, and we must fiercely guard its integrity. This form of “witness photography,” a term I encountered in a conversation with @alexcartagenamex , beautifully encapsulates its essence. But when photography transitions into the realm of art, it’s a vehicle for one’s imagination. If we view photography as a canvas, where pixels replace paint, can we then use A.I. to manifest our most profound thoughts? Can we so swiftly denounce A.I.-generated images in art? Is art not about conveying our ideas, regardless of the medium?

While the expression “witness photography” by itself makes me cry a little bit, what interests me the most is the fact that Miss Glaviano seems to forget AI content doesn’t come out of nowhere but from millions of images sourced from artists who did not give their permission nor received any compensation. Thankfully, every coin has two sides, and the Festival —held in Milan from November 16 to 19th— came with a series of really fascinating lectures.

These lectures were collectively called, “What makes us human? Image in the age of AI,” and we’ve gone through some of them.

Filippo Venturi and His “Broken Mirror”

Filippo Venturi is a documentary photographer with a degree in computer science and more than a few photography projects in his portfolio. He’s been wondering about what he calls syntography and its uses and effects in the real world, from the way Amnesty International used AI imagery to protect Colombian protesters to its influence in fashion and advertising. In the journalism ethics world, there’s a lot wrong with that — but Amnesty International isn’t an accredited journalistic publication.

In the end, despite all of this pondering, he decided to use AI to try and portray “the totalitarian dictatorship that characterizes North Korea,” a country he had already visited and captured with his camera.

For this purpose, he used “insects and spiders,” varying in size and number, to symbolize the submission of the North Korean citizens.

As he acknowledges, the creative process was largely done by the software itself, leaving him to select the final images, a compromise between what he wanted to achieve and what was offered by the machine.

This makes me think, is it your work if all you’ve got to offer is your veto capability?

Luckily, Filippo Venturi comes out at the end: “after several months fully immersed in this technology, I felt a strong need to return to photographing people.”

See his lecture here.

Mutale Nkonde, “Pretty Girls Look Like This”

Mutale Mkonde is the coauthor of the report “Racial Literacy In Tech” and founder of the non-profit AI For The People. In her lecture, she talks about how AI —and AI Products like Lensa— is affecting young people’s self-esteem and self-image.

This brings up various questions, of course: What is beauty? Why is its canon so Eurocentric? How is AI harming our mental health, regardless of gender? What policies should an app have during development to assure accuracy and avoid harming people?

She believes in the need for legal frameworks that include all of us, not just in images, but in the value those images bring.

See her lecture here.

Refik Anadol About “A.I., Photography, and Our Futures”

Refik Anadol has one of the most interesting lectures in the Festival. He touches how about most of the images we take today, using our cellphones, are nothing but algorithmic imaginations.

The sky turned orange because of the wildfires in Canada, and when you made a picture with your cellphone, the sky looked blue because the cell phone didn’t understand that a sky could be orange”.

Indeed this is true because of how much the processor does the work. Though at the same time, we can apply this idea to modern digital photography with things like in-camera lens corrections, firmware updates, and all.

In this case, the first victim is credibility. Our own phones do not capture what we see, so why should we believe in images we see on the Internet? In certain ways, photography has driven our behavior in the past two centuries; from the aid dispatched to the Dust Bowl thanks to Dorothea Lange to the withdrawal from Vietnam caused by the picture of Kim Phuc taken by Nick Ut, photography has managed to galvanize humanity into action again and again.

Right now, though, there are dozens of AI-generated images of the conflict in Gaza. Who does that serve? What’s the purpose? What’s the use of fake content about a real tragedy?

As Refik says, “the problem with AI isn’t the actual images, it’s the fact that any image may be AI, so you begin to be skeptical of all images,” which leads to inaction.

See his lecture here.

A Quick Overview

These are not all the lectures given in the festival, of course; you may go ahead and watch Addressing Ethical Dilemmas by Millie Tran, the talk on Multimedia Forensics by Paolo Bestagini, Navigating Truth on the age of AI by Daniele Moretti or the very interesting panel on “Envisioning Tomorrow: A.I. and the Future of Visual Narratives” starring Chiara Bardelli Nonino.

The fact that PhotoVogue is willing to exhibit AI content next to what is real photography is disappointing, yes – but the discussions and lectures they’ve held on the future of our craft are not to be lightly discarded.

I really, really recommend a watch.

Cover image by Jvdas Berra, Vogue Photographer, as published on his thoughts on AI imagery. Additional reporting was provided by Chris Gampat

Kerala artist’s Italian ‘Dream’ comes true

By in Native

Kerala artist’s Italian ‘Dream’ comes true

Express News Service

KOCHI:  Salvador Dali blended the worlds of reality and dreams in most of his artworks. The Spanish legend and his surreal paintings have awed and inspired countless art enthusiasts worldwide, and artist C B Shibu is one among them.

Piqued by Dali’s artworks, which nudge one to explore the subconscious mind, Shibu recently made an oil painting titled ‘Dream’. And that frame has now bagged the second prize at the ongoing Biennale Internazionale dell’ Umorismo nell’ Arte (Festival of Humour in Art) in Italy.

The 32nd edition of the fest, organised by the municipality of Tolentino, showcases 2,400 works by 745 artists from 40 countries. Shibu shared the second spot with Italian artist Sergio Tessarolo. “This was my maiden attempt at this Italian biennale. I wanted the work to be out-of-the-box, surreal,” says Shibu, who hails from Cherai. 

“I have been researching the works of Salvador Dali. His dream-like images have nuanced layers, and that inspired me to come up with the painting ‘Dream’.” The work features a vast sea with crimson shimmers of the setting sun. By the shore, two children gaze towards the horizon. Though the description seems like any other sunset painting, on close observation, one notices the sun is ‘setting’ in the middle of the sea.

“The painting can be interpreted in several ways,” explains Shibu. “When we dream, our subconscious mind form multiple random images. Some don’t sync with the real world. Moreover, there was a time when ancient Indians talked about the various suns. The imagery in the ‘Dream’ could well be something set in a parallel universe.” 

Though buoyed by the biennale delight, Shibu says financial constraints would not let him travel to Italy. “Artists will have to bear their entire expense. It’s a great opportunity, but I don’t have the wherewithal,” he adds. The 44-year-old has been pursuing art for over two decades now. His big break was receiving the third position in the Aydin Dogan International Cartoon competition held in Turkey in 2007. 

Last year, his work, titled ‘The Tree’, received a silver medal in the International Cartoon and Illustration Exhibition conducted by the Chinese government.

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