Native Art Department International is a Toronto-based collaborative project of the wife-and-husband pair of artists Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan. Together they curate group exhibitions in which they sometimes show and occasionally make work together as a way to counter the pigeonholing of contemporary art by Native Americans and people of First Nations descent.
History
Hupfield is First Nations AnishinaabeOjibwe, and Lujan is Chiricahua Apache and Mexican. Hupfield has said "It’s important for artists to generate and frame our own content so we’re not always looking at institutions to co-opt and define it outside of our awareness." Lujan told the Tacoma Art Museum website, "There is a lot of value to Native artists representing anything they want today, not just their own cultures. The field is wide open. I think artists have a lot of good things to say about anything and everything, and there is plenty of room for all of that." In 2015 they established a blog that documents their activities as Native Art Department and publishes interviews with artists and scholars and articles on subjects of interest such as South African magazine Chimurenga and early Japanese American photographer Frank Matsura. In addition to exhibitions, they have screened their work and curated those of others at Artists Space in New York.
Curatorial projects
Exhibitions by Native Art Department International include
"free play" at Trestle Projects in Brooklyn
"Chez BRKLYN" in Galerie Se Konst in Falun, Sweden in 2016 and
Curatorial projects in which their own work isn't a part include
"First Things Don't Come First," at the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film, Durham, Ontario, Canada in 2017
"Without Us There Is No You," a screening of six video works by indigenous artists at Artists Space to mark Art in America's inaugural indigenous contemporary art issue the same year
"Oh So You've Had an Indian Friend?," an evening in 2018 celebrating the life and work of Diane Burns, with artist Sky Hopinka and representatives from the organizations Amerinda, the St. Mark's Poetry Project, and the Endangered Language Institute at Downtown Arts
Inclusion in group shows, residencies, and talks
"There Is No Then and Now; Only Is and Is Not," video projection featuring artist Dennis Redmoon Darkeem in the 2018 group exhibition "The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness" at the Kitchen, curated by the organization's curatorial team, Claudia Rankine, and eight others.
In his interview of the couple about their work in the 2016 Brooklyn show "free play," Christopher Green of Hyperallergic noted the contrast between their individual styles. He described Lujan's use of the Zuni print as "graphically intense" and Hupfield's materiality as "soft." A Swedish reporter said of their subsequent show "Chez BRKLYN" in Galerie Se Konst, "The artists... put people at the center, shrinking the world and succeeding in showing how much we are one regardless of home address. It is inspiring, rich with energy, and hopeful. We hope these Brooklyn artists return soon."
