Maria Hupfield

After nine years in Brooklyn NYC, I circled back to my home territory in 2019 to live in Toronto, Canada. I identify as an off-rez Anishinaabe and belong to Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Canada. I am a current inargural Borderlands Fellow (2020-22) with the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics, The New School in New York, and the Center for the Imagination, Arizona State University, with my project Breaking Protocol which focuses on embodied processes and Indigenous Performance Art. My recent solo Nine Years Towards the Sun, Curator Erin Joyce, sought to centre the body within Art Museums by introducing a range of display strategies for performance art based work and related handmade creations, to open the 90th Anniversary of The Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona (2019-2020). This exhibit followed on the heels of my first major traveling institutional solo exhibition in Canada The One Who Keeps on Giving, a production of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, in partnership with Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal; Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, Halifax; and the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris. The show included a monograph with essays by Richard W. Hill, Crystal (Mikinaak) Migwans and a conversation with New York based Artist, Andrea Geyer. This show built on previous work with industrial felt, tin jingles, video, performance, and included wooden armatures that functioned as display structures. This work further explored display strategies developed for the It is Never Just About Sustenance or Pleasure, Wider Than a Line, SITELines Biennial SITE Santa Fe (2016).

Together with my husband artist Jason Lujan, we co-own Native Art Department International, originally based in China Town New York, a project focused on mutual support, collaboration and a shared commitment to showcasing Native American and Indigenous Peoples, alongside International artists.