Minor Matters Books

NICHOLAS GALANIN: NEVER FORGET
NICHOLAS GALANIN: NEVER FORGET
NICHOLAS GALANIN: NEVER FORGET
NICHOLAS GALANIN: NEVER FORGET
NICHOLAS GALANIN: NEVER FORGET

NICHOLAS GALANIN: NEVER FORGET

$250.00

SOLD OUT Limited quantities available through Peter Blum Gallery: $250

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8.5 x 12 inches vertical, 48 pages (accordion); hardcover with slipcase; edition of 600 produced by Hemlock Printers, BC and hand-bound by Roswell in Arizona

Texts by Candice Hopkins, Merritt Johnson, Gerald Clarke Jr, and Neville Wakefield. Photographs by Lance Gerber.

Nicholas Galanin's artist's book is dedicated to a single work, Never Forget,  a 60- feet by 360-feet installation on view from March until August 2021 through the Desert X festival in Palm Springs, California. 

From the artist's statement: "... The term "Indian" is a refusal to acknowledge sovereignty, and seeks to erase the diversity of over five hundred distinct nations preexisting the invasion of this continent by Europeans. Never Forget refuses to legitimize settler occupation, and reframes a word of generic reduction to a call for collective action."

The piece, beyond the visual installation, includes a call to action to support the concept and action of the LANDBACK campaign. 

The book was designed and constructed to reinforce the cyclical and neverending presence of indigenous peoples and knowledge. Every entry point to the book, and to the installation photographs of the work, includes text to create different points of context for the viewer.

CONTRIBUTORS

Candice Hopkins (b. 1977, Whitehorse, Yukon) is an independent curator and writer whose work focuses on art and indigeneity. Hopkins is a citizen of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation. She is currently senior curator of the 2019 and 2021 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art, and in 2018 was co-curator of the SITElines Biennial in New Mexico. Hopkins was co-curator of the Canadian pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale featuring the media collective Isuma, and a curator for documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany.

A graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Hopkins has been widely published and has received awards including the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art, and the 2016 Prix pour un essai critique sur l’art contemporain by the Foundation Prince Pierre de Monaco.

Merritt Johnson (b. 1977, Baltimore, Maryland)  is a multidisciplinary artist and mother. She holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (Boston). Johnson’s works are containers for story, feeling, and thought: images of what cannot be seen, exercises for existence, and containers for ideas. The materials and processes Johnson employs embody her multiplicity—advocating for connection, agency, and allegiance to land, water, and culture.  Her ancestry is a mix of Kanien’keha:ká (Mohawk), Irish, Blackfoot, Jamaican, and Swedish, though she is not a citizen of any of the nations from which she descends. Johnson's work is represented by Accola Griefen FIne Art. She lives and works with her family on Lingít Aani, her partner’s home territory, in Sitka, Alaska. 

 

Gerald Clarke Jr. (born 1967, Hemet, California) is an enrolled member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians, and currently lives on the Cahuilla Indian reservation located in Southern California. As a visual artist, he has exhibited his work extensively and can be seen in numerous exhibitions as well as major museum collections. In 2007, Gerald was awarded an Eiteljorg Museum Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, and served as an Artist-in-Residence at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2015. Gerald received a Harpo Foundation Native American Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center in 2016.

Clarke currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California-Riverside and teaches classes in California indigenous history and culture, contemporary Native American art and related social issues. Clarke is a traditional singer and participates in Bird Singing, a traditional form of singing that tells the cosmology of the Cahuilla people.

Neville Wakefield (b. 1963, United Kingdom) is a modern curator interested in exploring the ways in which art behaves outside of institutional contexts. This interest led him to co-found Elevation1049, a site-specific biennial in Gstaad, Switzerland, while shaping the recurring Desert X exhibitions in the Coachella
Valley region of Southern California, beginning with the 2017 iteration. As senior curatorial advisor for PS1 MoMA and curator of Frieze Projects, he gained a reputation for challenging the conditions that shape art in both commercial and noncommercial contexts. He has worked extensively with international institutions, including the Schaulager Switzerland, where he curated the Matthew Barney retrospective “Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail.”

Internationally acclaimed artist NICHOLAS GALANIN/YÉIL YA-TSEEN (b. 1979, Sitka, Alaska) is a Tlingit/Unangax/multi-disciplinary artist. He has exhibited at the Sydney Biennale, 2020, Australia; the Whitney Biennial, 2019, New York; and his 2020 solo show at Peter Blum Gallery, New York, "Carry A Song, Disrupt An Anthem," received significant press despite early closure due to the pandemic. Galanin has been named a 2020 Fellow of the Open Society Foundation, and is featured on the PBS series "Storytellers: Craft in America," among other accolades in the last year.

His works are in over twenty museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art; the Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia; the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; the National Museum of the American Indian, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; the Portland Museum of Art; and the Humboldt Forum, Berlin; among many others.

Galanin has apprenticed with master carvers and jewelers. He earned his BFA at London Guildhall University in Jewelry Design, and his MFA in Indigenous Visual Arts at Massey University in New Zealand. He is represented by Peter Blum Gallery, New York, and lives with his family in Sitka, Alaska.