Isabella Robbins

Robbins’ project puts critical pressure on the emergent category of global contemporary indigenous art to understand how indigeneity serves as a relational analytic in the work of artists from Australia, Canada, and the U.S. These artists, Emma Robbins (Diné, b. 1986), Reko Rennie (Kamilaroi, b. 1974), Maureen Gruben (Inuvíaluít, b. 1963), and Demond Melancon (African American, b. 1978), challenge definitions of contemporary, global, and indigenous through their communal- and self-reflexive practices. Using refusal, kincentricity, and kinship methods, Robbins argues that these artists interpret histories of place, displacement, diaspora, and mobility to illuminate new and ancestral relationalities beyond settler-Native binaries. From indigenous artists’ use of pan-Indian aesthetics to Mardi Gras Indian beadwork traditions to site specific land-based artworks in the Arctic and Australia, Robbins explores how “indigeneity,” as an aesthetic, concept, and political category, operates in contemporary art to destabilize settler colonialism and present alternative globalizations. Working at the intersection of Art History and Native American and Indigenous Studies, this project is informed by Robbins’ own consciousness as a Diné woman, as well as a desire to think with, through, and beyond limiting forms of sovereignty and political recognition.