In the notes of God is Red, the prominent Standing Rock Sioux Native Studies scholar, lawyer, and activist, Vine Deloria Jr. states, “Most Americans, raised in a society in which history is all-encompassing, have very little idea of how radically their values would shift if they took the idea of places…seriously.” Given Time: Sensory Aesthetics of Reclamation seeks to challenge the dominance of historical narrative by centering Indigenous relationships to land and place through sensory, time-based media. This exhibition reflects on how film, a medium defined by its capacity to recompose temporal experience, can be used to create multi-sensorial engagement with place. Interweaving documentary narrative and abstract imagery, these works engage in visual storytelling that challenges colonial claims to land and history. The artists subvert chronological time to focus on representations of land, traversing personal and shared relations to reclaim Indigenous emplacement.

Given Time further highlights issues of Native sovereignty, environmental sustainability, and identity by foregrounding an Indigenous relationship to land and place through diverse works from the Center of Southwest Studies’ museum collections. Building on themes from the films, these works ground Indigenous visual culture and artistic practice in the landscape and homelands from which they come.

Given Time: Sensory Aesthetics of Reclamation is guest curated by Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies Dr. Megan Alvarado-Saggese, and is made possible with a grant from the City of Durango Arts & Culture Lodgers’ Tax Fund.