Red Skin Dreams : Twenty Years of Curating Indigenous Art at the Venice Biennale

In Red Skin Dreams curator and scholar Nancy Marie Mithlo (Fort Sill Chiricahua Warm Springs Apache Tribe) recounts the challenges of exhibiting Indigenous art at the famed Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest and most-recognized international arts exhibition. Mithlo’s experience of organizing nine independently sponsored exhibitions in Italy from 1997 through 2017 reveals marginalization and breakthroughs in an ever-shifting global art market.

Mithlo’s curated exhibitions highlighted contemporary American Indian and Indigenous artists on a global scale while also calling into question the dichotomies of margin and center, insider and outsider. Her scholarship asserts that Indigenous peoples are active participants in the contemporary arts world, despite mainstream assumptions to the contrary.

This is a story about how Indigenous peoples—both collectively and individually—claim a place in a transnational world that often forgets their presence. It is a story not only about arrival but belonging.