Summary: The ASU Library Channel presents the eleventh installment of The Simon Ortiz and Labriola Center Lecture on Indigenous Land, Culture, and Community with James Luna’s “Phantasmagoria” Click to view interactive Transcript James Luna surveys 30 years of his exhibitions and performances with examples of visual presentations and performance works. His entertaining and painful anecdotes tackle issues of strife, misconceptions, and commodification of all ethnicity and expose issues faced by Native Americans. This presentation is unique among the Simon Ortiz and Labriola Center lecture series as James Luna notes, “Performance isn’t something that you talk about. It’s something you do. The visuals talk for themselves.” View more videos from the series on YouTube. Download Presentation (mp4) Lecture Video available for download at the Internet Archive. Recorded Thursday, Mar. 21, 2013 Bio: Internationally renowned performance and installation artist James Luna (Puyukitchum/Luiseño) resides on the La Jolla Indian Reservation in North County San Diego, California. With over 30 years of exhibition and performance experience, Luna has given voice to Native American cultural issues, pursued innovative and versatile media within his disciplines, and charted waters for other artists to follow. His powerful works transform gallery spaces into battlefields, where the audience is confronted with the nature of cultural identity, the tensions generated by cultural isolation, and the dangers of cultural misinterpretations, all from an Indigenous perspective. Since 1975, he has had over 41 solo exhibitions, participated in 85 group exhibitions and has performed internationally at venues that include the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, and Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Santa Fe, NM. He has received numerous grants and awards throughout his career and most notably in 2005, he was selected as the first Sponsored Artist of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian presented at the 2005 Venice Biennale’s 51st International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy. In 2012 Luna received an honorary doctorate from the Institute of American Indian Arts, IAIA, the premier institute for Native Americans art of all kinds. “It is my feeling that artwork in the media of performance and installation offers an opportunity like no other for Indian people to express themselves in traditional art forms of ceremony, dance, oral traditions and contemporary thought, without compromise. Within these (nontraditional) spaces … there is no limit to how and what is expressed.”—JAMES LUNA ASU Sponsors: American Indian Policy Institute | American Indian Studies Program | Department of English | Faculty of History in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies | Women and Gender Studies in the School of Social Transformation (all units in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences) | Indian Legal Program in the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law | Labriola National American Indian Data Center Community Partner: Heard Museum
