BEAT NATION: ART, HIP HOP AND ABORIGINAL CULTURE
Central Gallery
June 29 to September 7, 2013
Curated by Tania Willard, Vancouver Art Gallery, Kathleen Ritter
Beat Nation describes a generation of artists who juxtapose urban youth culture with Aboriginal identity to create innovative and unexpected new works—in painting, sculpture, installation, performance and video—that reflect the current realities of Aboriginal peoples today.
Since the early 1990s, hip hop has been a driving force of activism for urban Aboriginal youth in communities across the Americas. The roots of this music have been influential across disciplines and have been transformed to create dynamic forums for storytelling and indigenous languages, as well as new modes of political expression. In the visual arts, artists remix, mash up and weave together the old with the new, the rural with the urban, traditional and contemporary as a means to rediscover and reinterpret Aboriginal culture within the shifting terrain of the mainstream.
While this exhibition takes its starting point from hip hop, it branches out to refer to pop culture, graffiti, fashion and other elements of urban life. Artists create unique cultural hybrids that include graffiti murals with Haida figures, sculptures carved out of skateboard decks, abstract paintings with form-line design, live video remixes with Hollywood films, and hip hop performances in Aboriginal dialects, to name a few. Beat Nationbrings together artists from across the continent—from the West Coast as far north as Alaska and Nunavut, as far east as Labrador and south to New Mexico—and reveals the shared connections between those working in vastly different places.
As Aboriginal identity and culture continue to change, and as artists reinvent older traditions into new forms of expression, their commitment to politics, to storytelling, to Aboriginal languages, to the land and rights remains constant, whether these are stated with drums skins or turntables, natural pigments or spray paint, ceremonial dancing or break dancing.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue, published by the Vancouver Art Gallery and available at the Gallery Store.
Organized and circulated by the Vancouver Art Gallery and based on an initiative of grunt gallery.
Generously sponsored by Killy Foundation, Rick Erickson & Donna Partridge, Gary R. Bell, Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts, Mark McCain & Caro MacDonald/ Eye and I
Installation view of Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture
Photo: Kamloops Art Gallery
