Nanibah Chacon: Ni’ hoosdzaan: The Female Ground at LookOut! Gallery October 29 – November 21
November 19, 2018
- Paintings, drawings, and murals about the feminine and the environment by Dine Xicana artist Nanibah Chacon.
- “Women and girls, particularly women and girls of color, feel empowered and powerfully recognized when they come into contact with Chacon’s work.“
- “The mural — and the community conversations Nanibah held to prepare for it — allowed for new relationships to develop between MSU and the City of Lansing and between LookOut! and Latin and Indigenous community members.”
By Kara Dempsey '19
The newest exhibit at LookOut! Gallery is the embodiment of powerful femininity in one room. Artist Nanibah Chacon depicts Indigenous and Latin women in power in her work, which embodies the idea of the ongoing presence of these women in our society. Her work also brings the surviving culture of these women to society.
LookOut! Gallery Director Tessa Paneth-Pollak has helped curate the exhibit and worked directly with Chacon on the curation of pieces in the gallery.
When asked about her perspective on the message of Chacon’s work, Paneth-Pollak said that Chacon pulls the “contemporaneity and the beauty of Indigenous women, against the grain of a history of images that have attempted to relegate them to a primitive past and trap them in stereotype.”
The title of the exhibit is another powerful image that has a message to take from as well because the Navajo language presence, one that “affirms and empowers our Indigenous people that are still here. We have rights to be here. And one way we can be here is seeing images like this. Another way we can be here is speaking our language on the Land where we come from.”
Paneth-Pollak conitnued about her experience with Chacon and the exhibit curation saying, “What was exciting about Nanibah Chacon’s residency and about this exhibition is that it actually spans beyond the space of LookOut! Gallery: we consider the new mural Chacon painted in Old Town Lansing to be part of Ni’ hoosdzáán. The mural — and the community conversations Nanibah held to prepare for it — allowed for new relationships to develop between MSU and the City of Lansing and between LookOut! and Latin and Indigenous community members. The site of the mural is particularly significant for the City of Lansing. it is located on César E. Chávez Ave. in Old Town, which was renamed one year ago following a 20+ year struggle in the Latin community for acknowledgement.”
The exhibit serves as a bridge between the MSU community and the Indigenous and Latin people of the land as well.
Paneth-Pollak noted the presence of this bridge at MSU saying, “Chacon’s presence at MSU and the warm reception of her work here underlined important solidarities between local Indigenous and Latin communities—their presence in the MSU community as well as their importance as a deeply engaged, but underserved, art-viewing public. MSU faculty are increasingly taking steps—for instance, through the Land Acknowledgement drafted by our American and Indigenous Studies program, which we can append to our email signatures— to acknowledge that our campus occupies the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary Lands of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples and resides on Land ceded in the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw.”
The presence of Chacon’s work on campus and in the East Lansing community has an immense influence on those who are in it’s presence. The scale and color of her work is bold and powerful, portraying that message and character of the women she has painted in the images. Paneth-Pollak noted that those “women and girls, particularly women and girls of color, feel empowered and powerfully recognized when they come into contact with Chacon’s work."