MARIA HUPFIELD : Nine Years Towards the Sun

This solo exhibition of Canadian / Anishinaabek artist Maria Hupfield will feature more than 40 works by the conceptual performance artist. 

The exhibition will take place over several exhibition spaces and range in content from performance, sculptural installation, video, and document. The works on view will be activated through movement, sound, memory, documentation, and collaboration – the exhibition will function as a living archive which continually replenishes itself with content throughout its five-month run. 

The exhibition plays with notions of not only a continuum of culture but also a continuum of thematic elements from major movements and artists within the 20th century art historical canon. Engaging materially, formally, and often conceptually with the practices of artists like Robert Morris, Jimmie Durham, Joseph Beuys, and Richard Serra, Hupfield disrupts to problematize and participate in an act of space-making within the post-war art landscape, and reimagines thematic elements of their work in our present day environment, and truncates functionality with material. 

Additionally, the exhibition engages with material investigating the impact and residue of colonial occupation of Indigenous lands in the United States and Canada. Hupfield also draws from work from artists who precede her and have made space and held space in the field of contemporary art; artists such as Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Faye Heavyshield, Simone Fonti, Rebecca Belmore, and the Brooklyn performance art community. MARIA HUPFIELD: Nine Years Towards the Sun will retool the museum space as a laboratory, as a performance venue, and as an archive that prioritizes and makes space for bodies. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a special edition issue of “RED INK: International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities” edited by 2018 MacArthur Fellow Natalie Diaz (Mojave) and will feature essays from leading Indigenous thinkers, scholars, and creatives.​

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website