♪ethereal ambient music♪
[bells jingling]
- [Cannupa VO] I think we all struggle
with what it means to belong to a place.
As an Indigenous person in North America,
there are complex identities that are at play.
I am a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes.
So I was born
in Standing Rock Reservation right on the Missouri River.
I think in its most honest form, I'm river people,
and I'm living up here in the mountains in New Mexico.
So I feel a little displaced.
After my family moved us off of the reservation,
it felt as though my existence in both
of these worlds was in a liminal space between the two.
[man] Okay, Cannupa, you ready?
[Cannupa] Yeah, hold on.
[indistinct chatter]
[Cannupa VO] So I exist in the world between places.
What I'm trying to do is remove the idea
of art as an object and think
of art as a process.
Something in action, something living.
[bells jingling] -♪sparse curious synths♪
I am building things.
I'm building things that aren't these objects,
but conduits to share information from culture to culture.
♪♪♪
There's a tendency to perpetuate this Romantic
historical narrative of native people,
which is, "This is primitive, this is ancient,
this is not present."
And so I started a whole series
of projects that were called,
and it's kind of an ongoing set of ideas,
but it's called Future Ancestral Technology.
It's science fiction, it's speculative fiction.
It's imagining what and how our culture shifts
and changes into the future.
♪airy ethereal music♪ And if it's hard to express what it means
to be Indigenous today, what does it look
like if I bypass today,
and consider what it means to be in a distant future?
♪♪♪
So like all of the stuff that we're using right now
is gonna be around for a while, sitting in landfills,
and rather than recycling it
and turning it into new products,
I'm like, "What do we do if we just transform this material?"
[Cannupa] These are hockey gloves.
This is an old crochet blanket.
I maintain a hunter-gatherer of practice
in the 21st century, but the fields that I navigate
are different.
All of the wool that I get secondhand, it's leftover.
So there's very few things in the making
of any of this work that is dependent
on firsthand manufacturing.
Anytime I go to a thrift store, if they've got an Afghan
and I like its color story, I will dive in...
and it's like navigating the detritus of America.
And it's important to tell these stories
for future generations because a lot of Indigenous cosmology
is based on sustainability.
Like, "You are an extension of the land,
you belong to the land."
Could I imagine a future
where we all understood that collectively?
- [newscaster] A protest in North Dakota against a major oil pipeline
continues to grow.
Over 100 Native American tribes have joined the fight
against the project,
saying that it threatens one tribe's water supply
and its sacred land.
- [Cannupa VO] In Standing Rock, that was described as protest.
But the reality
of that situation was everybody who came there
was standing to protect water more than against oil.
Seeing a riot police line,
the gear that they wear is just completely dehumanizing.
And so I was inspired by civil unrest that unfolded
in Ukraine where people were bringing mirrors
to the front line so that the police could see themselves.
I went to a hardware store and designed
and made these mirrored shields in the parking lot,
and made a video to show how to make them.
♪energetic inspiring music♪
The main thing is that it's an empathetic response
to violence.
♪♪♪
At the time that we were bringing
500 shields into Standing Rock, the police
and these private security forces,
they were confiscating anything
that could be considered a weapon.
And we decided
that the best way to hide these pieces
was to utilize my privilege as an artist.
♪♪♪
And we were like, "No, these aren't shields.
It's just an art piece."
[footsteps in gravel]
- Mm. There were antelope horns on this piece,
and I think I locked moisture in and they exploded.
The unfortunate thing is they fell on some of my son's work.
My oldest boy, EO, made this little guy, he says
it's a monkey, and my youngest, we've got this,
I don't know,
it looks like a Texas toast hamburger with a face on it?
And here's my spider head.
♪sparse ethereal music♪ Oh, here's the fam.
Hey boys.
[Ginger VO] During the pandemic, everything shut down.
Before that, Cannupa was traveling 80,
80, 90 percent of the time, of the time,
and it wasn't sustainable.
- Thanks guys.
I don't know where my art practice is different than my life
and they're a part of my life.
Hey, if you guys want to make something alongside me
you can go grab some clay outta my studio.
- [Ginger VO] This past year we've been traveling
with our whole family.
- [Cannupa VO] We homeschool our children,
had been homeschooling 'em even prior to the pandemic.
Bringing them along
on these trips is a important part of their education.
- And we thought that doing
that would create a healthier bond
with all of us.
[Cannupa] What do they say?
"You've got to get your own house in order...
[chuckling] before you start telling somebody else to clean up."
♪♪♪
I have a hard time with the title of artist,
that's what you do.
That's who you are.
You're an artist.
You are what you do, right?
So I'm an artist, because I make art.
And I'm like, "Do I, though?"
I always like to think of myself as an engineer,
and I talk about bridge-building as an artist.
And the gap that I'm trying to span is the gap
between all of the different communities
and cultures that I interact with.
[Cannupa] So we're just rolling these cubes into spheres,
and once they're spheres, you'll take one
of these little skewer sticks
and pierce the clay into a bead.
The grasslands where I'm from are dependent on buffalo.
And so the 20,000 that are living wild today,
I thought it would be a great gesture
that we make a bead to represent each of them.
Even just rolling that clay in your palm,
there is no two that will be the same.
And the idea is us in relationship with one another.
♪pensive ethereal music♪ [Cannupa VO] So the Bison Bead project is part
of this ongoing series called 'Counting Coup.'
and the intentions were basically just trying
to re-humanize data, you know?
The first work in that series is called 'Every One,'
and the number of beads represents missing
and murdered Indigenous relatives.
[bells jingling] 0:10:59.040,1193:02:47.295
♪♪♪ Indian and American history aren't told
in an honest format.
They're told as a myth.
It is the myth of the individual
who had to raise themselves up out of nothing.
- I like the shoulder pads with it.
- All right, you got that pod?
[Ginger] Yeah, I got it.
I think it comes from a group of men who decided
that they were no longer gonna be a part of England.
They were gonna remove their self
from their ancestral place,
and the violence that that displacement inflicts
on everybody else around it,
you have to have this myth
in place that justifies the brutality of individualism.
-Papa. -[Cannupa] Yeah?
- Do this. [bells jingling]
[Cannupa VO] But it's just a myth and it's just a story.
- Okay, that's great.
- When we do it again, spend a little more time going back
like featuring your back.
- [sighs] Okay.
- [Ginger] There is an entire ecosystem around successful artists.
They're getting support from their partners,
from their parents, from their friends.
- Thank you, Ginger!
♪curious ethereal music♪
- I wanna be artist/game designer/YouTuber.
- All I wanna do when I grow up is figure out
what I wanna do when I grow up.
- I believe that when my children are my age,
the definition and the exploration
of what art is hopefully is so much broader.
It's like, "Can you do whatever you do beautifully in your life?
Can you make your life beautiful?"
Today we celebrate individuals, we celebrate genius.
But it's not sustainable.
♪tender synth music♪ - [Ginger] Careful, buddy.
- [Cnnupa VO] We are dependent not just on each other,
but our relationships to the environment and other species.
♪♪♪
The truth of our daily lived life is one
of integration, is one of integrity.
That's how we survive the future.
♪ethereal ambient music♪ ♪♪♪
Hello, my name is Azikiwe Mohammed.
I am happy to have been featured by Art21 in their series New York Close Up.
As you may or may not have seen, I do a lot of different stuff,
and trying to explain it to people can be a little chewy sometimes.
Now, I can say I make a lot of stuff and then point them
somewhere.
That is all thanks to Art21.
If you like watching people make some stuff,
Art21 is an unlimited 24/7 resource of all kinds of stuff from all different people.
There's educational resources, engaging public programs,
and workshops for teachers that can help bring art into the classroom,
which, very often,
is a burden left on the teachers.
But Art21 helps lift that burden by letting us,
the people who make some of the stuff,
bring some of the stuff into the classroom
via the films and resources that Art21 provides
free of charge.
Art is limitless, and Art21 is for everyone.
Please consider giving to Art21 to help make the stuff that
we make through Art21
available for free to everybody for years and years to come.
Thank you.