MFA Fine Arts presents curator Risa Puleo, who will discuss curating the exhibition "Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly," on view at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, through February 24, 2018.

"Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly" takes the migration path of the Monarch butterfly as a geographic range and a metaphor. The butterfly crosses the border of the United States at its junctions with Canada at the north and Mexico in the south, travelling through Midwestern states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois, crossing the Great Plains of Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma, and moving over the Texas Hill Country to their destination: the Oyamel Fir forests of Michoacán, Mexico. The path of the butterfly also connects the Standing Rock nation to the U.S.-Mexico border, but the butterfly itself is indifferent to these artificial divisions.

The exhibition "Monarchs" sees the defense of Standing Rock and the threat to build a border wall as continuous issues that pose challenges to people native to the Americas who have been separated into categories of indigenous, immigrant and assimilated Americans. Like the butterfly, which takes four generations to make the complete migratory path navigating its way through the center of the United States by drawing from inherited knowledge, these artists also pull from ancestral and cultural memory to reveal the deep conceptual legacies underpinning abstraction, reorient historical and art historical narratives, and explore centuries-old trade routes that moved people and aesthetics in addition to goods. "Monarchs" considers how objects, still and moving images, sound and performances made by artists living in the path of the butterfly think through questions of identities through form, process and materiality.

Talk

Curator Risa Puleo

Room 101C