A Red Becoming: Speculative Engagements with Indigenous Art - Joseph M. Pierce
"A Red Becoming: Speculative Engagements with Indigenous Art"
This presentation explores how three contemporary Indigenous artists are reimagining Indigenous embodiment. Focusing on Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Jeffrey Gibson, and Raven Halfmoon, each artist offers a distinct though related technique for speculating on the possibilities of Indigenous representation. I open with the history of representation of Indigenous bodies, defined in colonial race categories as "red" (red skin, red men), to later propose Indigenous becoming—the process of creative, speculative relations that I recognize in the work of these contemporary artists—as a method of upending colonial expectations of Indigenous absence. It is not the absence of the Indian that defines our representational possibilities, but our emergent innovations on story, survivance, and imagination.
Joseph M. Pierce is a 2024-25 Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Founding Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (Duke University Press, 2025), co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of Gay and Lesbian Studies Quarterly, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” He has published work in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, Latin American Research Review, and Art Journal, as well as in popular outlets such as Hyperallergic, TruthOut, and Indian Country Today. Along with S.J. Norman (Wiradjuri) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
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