Emerging from the Underside: Rethinking Scale, Spatiality, and Relationality in Native Public Art

NATIVE CULTURES OF THE AMERICAS

SPEAKER: Karen Kramer, Harvard University and Peabody Essex Museum

For five months in 2024, Cannupa Hanska Luger's Attrition (2024) occupied New York City's City Hall Park, his ten-foot-long steel buffalo skeleton rising from a bed of native grasses, its empty eye sockets gazing at the Broadway Avenue traffic. Luger (citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation; Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian) works across sculpture, performance, and installation. He sited Attrition on Lenape homelands, near the courthouse and Wall Street, the seat of the financial and legal power that planned and profited from the destruction of Buffalo Nation. Just twelve blocks away, the Charging Bull sculpture at the foot of Wall Street symbolizes the market power that demanded this attrition. Luger's skeletal buffalo serves as both witness and critic.

This presentation argues that scale and spatiality are vital analytic tools for the artists in the first chapter of Kramer’s dissertation, who use them to make Indigenous relationality legible in their public art. Through a close reading of Attrition, she develops the concept of "scale-in-place" to show how a single artwork connects a hyper-local site to continental histories of genocide. Turning to two supporting case studies, public artworks by Alan Michelson (Mohawk, Six Nations of the Grand River) and Bob Haozous (Chiricahua Apache and Diné), she demonstrates how these strategic interventions use scale and spatiality in the urban fabric to presence obscured histories and conjure an Indigenous presence centered on relationality, challenging colonial narratives of absence.

About the speaker

Karen Kramer is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Harvard University, where her dissertation examines how Native artists enact relationality, land-centered literacy, survivance, and visual sovereignty in American public art from 1969 to the present. Her project blends Native art history, Indigenous Studies, and spatial theory, bringing to this work more than two decades of experience as a curator in Indigenous art and culture. She is also the Stuart W. and Elizabeth F. Pratt Curator of Native American and Oceanic Art and Culture at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM).

At PEM, she co-curated On This Ground: Being and Belonging in America, which opened in 2022. She curated the nationally touring exhibitions T.C. Cannon: At the Edge of America, Native Fashion Now, and Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art. She has directed PEM's Native American Fellowship Program for eleven years, training rising Native leaders in the cultural heritage sector.