This talk calls for an Oceanic reorientation of scale, asking how contemporary art can recenter Indigenous epistemologies and anti-colonial perspectives. In conversation with Indigenous mixed-media practices, Dr. Furtado traces how radical acts of cultural expression articulate sovereignty, foreground sustainability, and activate ancestral knowledge to imagine futures otherwise.

About the Speaker: Dr. Nicole Kuʻuleinapuananiolikoʻawapuhimelemeleolani Furtado is a Kanaka Maoli writer and Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the History of Art and Visual Culture department. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside. Her research builds on the methodology of moʻolelo, or Kānaka Maoli storytelling, as a way to (re)imagine Indigenous futurities that move us beyond a “here-and-now” temporality and that which supports critical fabulations of Native relationality.

Image: A frame from the VR project Biidaaban: First Light (2018) by Lisa Jackson. Image source: https://www.nfb.ca/interactive/biidaaban_first_light

This lecture is part of the "Reparative Histories of Art", a project of the Department of History of Art & Architecture and funded by the A W Mellon Foundation.