RYAN RICE

She:kon Akwe:kon, my name is Ryan Rice. I am from the Mohawk Nation at Kahnawake, Quebec. I have spent the last 20 years learning, working, and being involved in some capacity in the realm of fine art and Aboriginal matters pertaining to exhibitions and institutions of the arts. I attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, where I built a foundation that launched my career as an artist. Art has taken me on a journey of reflection as well as scholarship, allowing me to gain invaluable experience not only in the expertise and techniques associated with making art but also with an abundance of skills related to marketing, management, administration, public speaking, writing and research that led me to consider my role within my community, the arts community and the Aboriginal community across the nation.

Although I have been successful in achieving my artistic goals and visions, I was led by several experiences to pursue a different career path within the field of arts, as a curator, because I felt it was an important cultural, critical as well as political, step to take. In witnessing first hand the issues related to inclusion/exclusion, interpretation and representation within the arts, where Indigenous art and artists are still subjected to the peripheries of the mainstream, I felt compelled to focus my curatorial career goals towards establishing a greater presence for our arts to thrive and flourish. Since then, I have specialized in contemporary Aboriginal art, and have had the opportunity to work with dozens of artists across Canada and the United States. Over the last ten years, I have served in an interpretive, educational and curatorial capacity for several institutions including the Iroquois Indian Museum, the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Indian Art Centre, Indian and Northern Affairs, Canada. . I have also had the opportunity to present my research at various conferences that address Aboriginal peoples and art, promoting as well as educating the general public (both native and non-native) on a contemporary Aboriginal art discourse.

NATION TO NATION

My first venture into the curatorial realm was through co-founding Nation to Nation, a collective of First Nations artists and now, curators, whose main goals are to function as a catalyst for Indigenous creative expression. Nation To Nation began officially in April 1994 when artists Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, Eric Robertson and myself banded together to present the creativity found within our communities. For over 10 years, Nation to Nation has been actively pursuing its mandate and presented the following events - A Celebration of Art (1994), Vision To Vision (1994), Art Bingo (1994) and the exhibitions, Native Love (1995-97), Six of the Nation (1997), TattooNation (1997) and the online projects CyberPowwow (1997), Cyberpowwow 2 (1999), CPWY2K (2001) and CPW04 (2004).

Since its inception, Nation to Nation has worked with over 65 artists, writers, and curators across the country, as well as several artist run-centres, museums and institutions. Our exhibition series, Six of the Nation, was a stimulus for Kahnawake’s Kanien'kehaka Onkwawén:na Raotitiohkwa Cultural Centre’s exhibition program. The collective aspect of Nation To Nation shifts from project to project.

I am working on a new project, At The Water’s Edge/ Project: Seaway, a site-specific public art and culture project to be installed along the waterfront of the St. Lawrence Seaway in Kahnawake, QC in the summer (2006). Funded through the Caisse Populaire’s Kahnawake Community Development Project Fund, the project will survey the historical, cultural and social impact of the St. Lawrence Seaway on the community of Kahnawake and identify the fifty-year anniversary of the development (2004 - 2009) . The St. Lawrence Seaway, regarded as a modern engineering marvel by Western standards, paved the way for international shipping along long utilized river routes that reach from the Atlantic Ocean to the interior of Turtle Island in the Great Lakes. The construction of the seaway, from 1954 to 1959, reduced Kahnawake's land base by expropriating 1,262 acres and severed the community's access to the river. By 1959, Kahnawake faced more than an identity crisis because the shoreline, "by the rapids," had been eradicated forever. The project will also promote the history, language and culture of Kahnawake local artists and may also be a catalyst for future projects on Kahnawake's complex history. Sondra Cross and Skawennati Trica Fragnito, have been commissioned to research and design panels that will incorporate and include issues related to Kahnawake, the St.Lawrence Seaway/River and information specific to the site.

INDIAN ART CENTRE

From 1998 - 2002, I worked with the Indian Art Centre’s National Indian Art Collection at Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, alongside Barry Ace, to overhaul the acquisition program into an exhibition/acquisition program. In five years of working with the collection and program, we coordinated over 40 solo or two person exhibitions. Some of the artists include George Littlechild, Kent Monkman, Rosalie Favell, Eric Robertson, Nadia Myre, Lionel Peyachew / Heather Henry, Judith Morgan, Greg Staats, Mary Ann Barkhouse, and many others. The exhibition program also gave us the opportunity to commission curators and writers to write critical essays for the exhibitions. Catherine Mattes, Audra Simpson, Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, Leanne L’Hirondelle and William Kingfisher were among the contributors. I also co-curated with Barry Pottle (of the Inuit Art Centre) the traveling exhibition Transitions 2: Contemporary Indian and Inuit Art of Canada.

FLOCK

In 2004, I graduated with a Master of Arts degree in Curatorial Studies at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. My thesis and exhibition, FLOCK, included five indigenous artists: Michael Belmore, Alan Michelson, Tracey Moffatt, Shelley Niro and Frank Shebageget from nations situated within Australia, Canada, and the United States whose work often explore the complexities of community and nationhood through individual experiences and collective histories. In FLOCK, their art works examined the distinctive status and existence of sovereign nations within a nation, the relationships formed among them, as well as their fragile boundaries. FLOCK recognized and revealed the existence of indigenous nations within the nation-state and reinforced the desire and need to establish relationships based on co-existence and accord. The multiple aspect of each work alluded to the whimsical nature of a flock, suggesting the presence and energy of community that includes facets of collectivity, movement, ritual, and place. FLOCK was about being and belonging, rooted in the tradition and culture that distinguishes the core of community inherited at birth.

RESIDENT

In September (2005), I began a curatorial residency at Carleton University’s Art Gallery where I co-curated with Diana Nemiroff, FLYING STILL: CARL BEAM 1943-2005, an exhibition honoring the late Ojibwe artist. Carl Beam, R.C.A. (1943-2005), was a painter, printmaker, potter and builder. Winner of a coveted Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts earlier this year, Carl died on July 30, leaving behind a large legacy. Flying Still charted the philosophical and spiritual parameters of Beam’s artistic vision, situating Aboriginal and colonial history within a contemporary world view. By simultaneously collapsing past and present, Beam provided a window for exploring local and global perspectives that remain provocative. To each viewer he assigned a duty to re-read history and reconciled pre-determined attitudes with the moral responsibility to get it right. In so doing, he reclaimed a space for himself and other Aboriginal artists within the mainstream of contemporary Canadian art practice. His discursive strategy allowed him to situate the realities of a world-view that embraced hostility, tragedy, spirituality, scientific inadequacies, and oppression. His work challenges the linear form of Western literature embedded in the imagination of mainstream society. By exposing the disparity that exists between indigenous oral tradition and Euro-American historical accounts, Beam unraveled a complex ideology of conquest and discovery, and reveals a philosophy of survival. This idea, introduced by writer and critic Gerald Vizenor, provides a subtext to Beam’s work, which resists dominance and acknowledges a true indigenous presence and persistent will to live.

NEW

Other exhibitions I am currently working on are Playing Tricks, an exhibition featuring Barry Ace (Ottawa, ON) and Maria Hupfield (Toronto, ON), that will run from March 24 to April 29, 2006 at the American Indian Community House Gallery, 708 Broadway, 2nd floor in New York, NY, and Requicken: Works By Glenna Matoush that will open in May 2006 at the Carleton University Art Gallery.

Playing Tricks is an exhibition that will emphasize the importance of traditional relevance and cultural continuity in First Nations communities. Artists Barry Ace and Maria Hupfield address and explore in their work, issues related to history, culture and memory, through a playfulness that contains subtle notions of humor, irony and mischief. Inspired by Nanabush’s teachings, an Anishnaabe trickster, the artists reveal an insight into the everyday flux of indigenous experiences being in constant transition to place, technology and tenacity.

Glenna Matoush's expressionistic paintings that move fluidly between the figurative and the abstract will be highlighted in this solo exhibition. Matoush addresses contemporary social and political Aboriginal issues in her work, including the environmental destruction she has witnessed in Cree territory in Northern Quebec, and the despair caused by AIDS and the residential school system.

The concept of requickening (to reanimate or to give new life) is key to engaging with Matoush's paintings, for they are infused with hope and with a sense of her coming to terms with past injustices in order to move to higher ground. The exhibition will feature new paintings by Matoush, accompanied by paintings borrowed from public and private collections.

I intend to continue to engage in curatorial practice and present important, creative and innovative works of art pulled together in both the critical format of an exhibition and /or the more cordial atmosphere of a social event. Tradition, transition and innovation will continue to be part of my focus as well as the issue of art and community. I will continue researching Aboriginal sovereignty in terms of its own historical art discourse and within the context of forms of nationhood and creative forms of addressing an Iroquoian philosophy of power, peace and righteousness.