SPIRIT OF THE LAND
Tuesday, November 29
United States: 10:00am PDT, 11:00am MDT, 12:00pm CDT, 1:00pm EDT
Europe: 18:00 GMT/WET
Kim Garrison Means
Honoring Avi Kwa Ame, with Tribal and Rural Communities
The East Mojave desert in Southern Nevada is home to a lush Joshua tree forest, Sonoran grasslands, and Spirit Mountain (Avi Kwa Ame in the Mojave language), the source of life and place of origin for the ten Yuman-speaking tribes, and sacred land to the Hopi and Chemehuevi Paiute people. 443,000 acres of this landscape is now proposed to become federally protected as Avi Kwa Ame National Monument.
A third-generation resident of the area, Kim Garrison Means, who is a recent ecoartspace member, has spent the last two years as a key land advocate, using her art and curatorial skills to collaborate with tribal and rural communities on creative initiatives, to help bring this proposal forward as a bill to Congress. Earlier this year, Garrison Means, along with artists Checko Salgado and Mikayla Whitmore, curated Spirit of the Land: Artists Honor Avi Kwa Ame, organized by the Barrick Museum of Art at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. This traveling exhibition features work by over 50 tribal, regional and national artists, writers, musicians and dancers, and highlights the history, culture, and natural wonders of this region, along with issues of concern about land use, stewardship, and protection for future generations.
Garrison Means will share works from Spirit of the Land that tell stories of land advocacy within the Avi Kwa Ame campaign, and discuss the exhibition as a model for engagement with Indigenous artists and rural communities. She will also address best practices for collaboration, storytelling, and building community trust into the creative and curatorial processes.
Kim Garrison Means is a visual artist, writer, musician and curator, with an MFA in sculpture and New Genres from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is an art instructor at Orange Coast College, and since 2001, has collaborated with artist Steve Radosevich as the conceptual art duo United Catalysts. Through sculptural installations, interactive performances, and storytelling, their work explores the connections between actions, environment, community and self. Starting in 2005, Kim and Steve, along with Kim’s husband, sculptor Leland Means, opened up her family home on 60 acres of patented mining claims near Searchlight, Nevada, as the collaborative project, Mystery Ranch, an art and science research station with an emphasis on local history and ecology. Their most recent project, along with co-curators Checko Salgado and Mikayla Whitmore, is Spirit of the Land, a traveling art exhibition series celebrating the public lands at the southern tip of Nevada. www.unitedcatalystsart.com
Members and one guest are free. General Public can attend for $10. Capacity is 100 participants. All participants MUST REGISTER.
