Ada, Okla. — The Department of Art, Design, Media & Communication at East Central University invites the public to the annual Lockmiller Art History Lecture titled Contemporary Native American Performance Art by Dr. Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds, PhD, a scholar, writer, and citizen of the Diné (Navajo) Nation.

The lecture will take place Thursday, March 3 at 2 p.m. inside the Hallie Brown Ford Fine Arts Center, room 158. It is free and open to the public.

In this talk, Dr. Ketchum-Heap of Birds examines the work of Kent Monkman, Spiderwoman Theater Company, Rebecca Belmore, and James Luna to offer interpretations of how contemporary Indigenous artists confront and reinterpret the colonial past. Through images, artworks, and performance practices, these artists employ strategic and interventionist methods that function as acts of decolonization. The lecture highlights how their work challenges histories of Indigenous erasure and asserts Indigenous presence, resilience, and futurity.

Dr. Ketchum-Heap of Birds completed her PhD at Middlesex University, London, in 2022, where her research focused on contemporary Native American and Indigenous visual art, theater, and performance studies. Her recent writing has appeared in Artforum International, Wired Italia, and Art Review, as well as in the edited volume Beyond Failure: New Essays on the Cultural History of Failure in Theatre and Performance (Routledge).

An active lecturer and curator, Dr. Ketchum-Heap of Birds has presented at Artists Space (New York City), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and Nanyang University (Singapore), and has delivered virtual lectures for institutions including the University of Barcelona and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). In 2022, she curated Suffer, Dance, Stand: Native Survival in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She currently teaches at the University of Central Oklahoma and serves as Board President of Spiderwoman Theater Company, the longest-running Native American feminist theater group in the United States.

For more information about Dr. Ketchum-Heap of Birds and her work, visit https://dinehwriter.art.

-ECU-