Standing Rock: Art and Solidarity

In April 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota launched a large public campaign to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Over subsequent months, an unprecedented movement developed among allies from hundreds of other Indigenous nations as well as large numbers of non-Native activists, organized around the Dakota/Lakota principle “mni Wiconi,” translated as “Water is life.” Artists joined in this effort, producing works that connected this issue to broader questions of resource use, climate change, and tribal sovereignty.

Through the exhibit Standing Rock: Art and Solidarity, poster art, T-shirts, and photographs will demonstrate the immediacy of the protests and conflicts as they have unfolded, while a video art piece by the Native collaborators of the Winter Count Collective will explore the broader meanings of these events. In the context of the Autry’s broader galleries, this display echoes a long history of conflict between a settler society and Indigenous nations in the American West.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.