Inside the Exhibition, Natchiq | Onkeehq | Isuwiq – Indigenous Artists Honor the Seal

Join guest curators Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi (Alutiiq), Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich (Koyukon Dené and Iñupiaq), and Elizabeth James-Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag), along with María Fernanda Mancera, Assistant Curator, Indigenous Art at the RISD Museum for a virtual exhibition tour of Natchiq | Onkeehq | Isuwiq: Indigenous Artists Honor the Seal.
This exhibition highlights seals as a cultural connector for Native communities in Alaska and Inuit Nunangat, showcasing works from the early 1900s to the present. Hear about pieces from Kinngait and Labrador, Canada, along with contemporary textiles, photographs, and installations by Alaska Native and Canadian Inuit artists that highlight the seal as material, food, spirit, and muse.

Free. Registration required for this virtual program. A Zoom link will be included in the email confirmation.
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Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi (Alutiiq) is an art historian, museum consultant and author based in Kachemak Bay, Alaska. She focuses her work on Alaska Native arts revitalization and Indigenous aesthetics. Nadia is inspired by the concept of Museum Sovereignty, the concept of Indigenous peoples reclaiming their own cultures and narrating their own stories within museum spaces. She is a program director at The CIRI Foundation, an organization for Alaska Natives meant to assist with educational and self efficiency pursuits while also maintaining their rich cultural legacy. She holds a PhD. in art history from the University of Washington and is a recipient of the 2024 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant program. (bio from lots of website w/ additions) 

Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich (Koyukon Dené/Iñupiaq) is a carver, interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator living, working, and subsisting in South-Central Alaska. Honoring her arctic and subarctic ancestral homelands, Ivalu's work represents what has tied her and her ancestors to the North. Through carving and various mediums Ivalu creates representations of the revered wild relatives and homelands that have provided for her, her family, and her ancestors since time immemorial. Continuing the viewpoint of seeing these resources and places that are homelands as gifts given to the worthy who reciprocate respect and care for the land and wild relatives that share it. Connection to the realities of subsistence lifeways and arctic survival is vital to Ivalu’s work that mirrors what keeps us fed, warm and present in the north. With ancestral ties to the communities of Nulato, Nome and Utqiagvik; Ivalu currently resides in Denaʼina Homelands of Anchorage and Cohoe, Alaska.

Internationally known 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Heritage Fellow Elizabeth James-Perry is an enrolled Aquinnah Wampanoag whaling descendant who engages with Northeastern Woodlands cultural expressions primarily in sculptural wampum carving, naturally dyed textiles, and watercolor paintings including the Bear Map series. Her work explores the connections between the arts, sustainability, Native identity and sovereignty, maritime traditions and environmentally restorative Native gardening. Her garden project Raven Reshapes Boston was part of a year-long collaboration with artist Ekua Holmes to bring diversity to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. James-Perry has a Marine Science degree from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, attended Shoals Marine Lab, and Rhode Island School of Design CE, and holds a certificate in Digital Tribal Stewardship from Washington State University. She was an advisor for many years for the New England Foundation of the Arts Native program, and gave workshops in the Evergreen College Longhouse Program. For over a decade she was employed first with the Natural Resource Department and then the Aquinnah Tribal Historic Preservation Office, she was the Federal Tribal Co-lead of the Northeast Regional Ocean Planning Body and participated in the United South and Eastern Tribal Conferences as a member of the Heritage and Culture committee. See her current work on exhibit in Seals and Society, Interwoven Power, and Shifting Boundaries.