Critical Issues in Indigenous American Art and Visual Culture Roundtable Discussion

This roundtable will focus on the various, asymptotic approaches employed in recent scholarship on the indigenous art and visual culture of the Americas. In light of the broadening of the “American” art category to encompass Native American, Latin American, and the Black Atlantic, we seek to bring together specialists of the indigenous art and visual culture of the regions now known as North, Central, and South America, including the Caribbean, and begin a conversation that has been stymied and, we contend, made necessary by the enduring legacies of colonial hegemony.

We propose two main objectives: First, to identify the obstacles inherent to the study of indigenous American visual culture, including genocide, the suppression of native epistemologies, archival erasure, the loss of material culture, the environmental impact of stolen lands, and multigenerational trauma. The discussion will be particularly interested in understanding how the legacies of colonizing powers have impacted the represented geographic subfields of study. Second, to share the methodological and theoretical approaches employed in scholarship on indigenous art and visual culture. The first part of a larger conversation, this roundtable will be a critical intervention in the shaping of a quickly-growing field.