F I E L DWO R K
Voice of Resistance SEAL OF APPROVAL
Native Alaskan artist Nicholas Galanin uses his art to fight cultural erasure. By RACHEL GALLAHER NEARLY SIX YEARS AGO, in the summer of 2014, I visited Your Feast Has Ended, an exhibition of the work of three young minority artists (Nicholas Galanin, Nep Sidhu, and Maikoyo Alley-Barnes) who take a no-holds-barred approach to their practice, at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum. Vibrant and ranging across numerous media—carving, painting, clothing design, video, and sculpture— the show addressed communities facing economic and social barriers and investigated issues of power, race, class, ideology, and creative and personal freedoms. A taxidermied gray wolf (actually two wolves sewn together) took the spotlight in the center of the last gallery, its front half intact, head high, paws reaching out as if to drag itself across the floor. Its back half—splayed, immobile, and outlined in scalloped black felt—was a startling visual metaphor for the
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structures that hold us, and society at large, back from progress. Titled Inert (2009), the piece held me in a conflicted grip of fascination and repulsion. It made me feel uncomfortable, as do most pieces that speak to the complex social systems that benefit some (white, cis, middle- and upper-class individuals) while excluding others. I walked around that wolf multiple times and returned to the Frye again and again during the run of the exhibition. Years later, I’m still talking about that wolf, and for its creator—Sitka, Alaska–based multidisciplinary artist Galanin—that’s the point. “I’ve had people become upset when faced with these kinds of conversations, but I’m not concerned with that at all,” Galanin said to me across the table at a Seattle coffee shop last November. His wife, Merritt Johnson, sat between us with their eight-month-old son, At Tugáni,
snuggled in a baby wrap. We’d been talking about the under-discussed cultural and actual genocide of Native Americans as a result of white colonization and hegemony. “For me, this [work] is about empowering our community, our next generations, and getting into spaces where we’re not generally accepted or even allowed to be. Once I get into a space [such as a museum], it’s important to not change my practice in order to ‘fit into’ it. These spaces need to change; we don’t.”
