Nativescape welcomes artists Gabriela Muñoz (Latinx) and Makaye Lewis (Tohono O’odham) who discuss the exhibition Indigenous Women: Border Matters at the Wheelwright Museum. The exhibition features Indigenous women artists who address issues on both sides of the U.S. border, and who’s practices are guided by current issues of identity, self-determination, feminism, human rights, and their impacts on the human experience.
Gabriela Muñoz's art practice is rooted in her experiences as a migrant living in Arizona, undocumented, for more than a decade. Living in the Southwest, her practice is concerned with movements of social justice and racial equality. Her installations, printed works, and collaborations function as a growing archive that documents the stories and histories of individuals from communities that are under-resourced and under-acknowledged. Her work champions women of color who build a place based counternarrative to mainstream culture that values power-sharing, peer-to-peer learning, and horizontal leadership models. Muñoz is a 2020-2021 NALAC Catalyst for Change Award recipient, a 2019-2020 Mellon-Fronteridades Creative Scholar at the University of Arizona’s Confluence Center and is a fellow of both the Intercultural Leadership Institute and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture’s Leadership Institute, San Antonio, TX. Her work has been exhibited at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the University of Arizona Art Museum, Tucson, AZ, The Juniata College Museum of Art, Huntingdon, PA, the Mexican Consulate in Douglas, AZ and at the U.S. - Mexico Border fence. Muñoz holds a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from Arizona State University.
Makaye Lewis (Tohono O’odham) is a multi-disciplinary artist, born in 1996. Lewis comes from the small, secluded village of Ventana on the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona. Her hometown has a current population of forty-nine and is located sixty miles from the Mexican border. Lewis says that she is informed by her Tohono O’odham heritage and people; her artwork is an extension of both environmental influences and cultural narratives. “My practice is a product of my exploration of creative processes and observational studies.” She received her Associate of Fine Arts at Tohono O’odham Community College in 2017 and went on to receive her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM in 2020. Lewis is a recipient of the Walt Disney Company Scholarship. Her work has been highlighted in the following Institute of American Indian Arts exhibitions: Visitors and Intruders, and Thirteen in 2019, Small Mediums At Large and Día de Los Muertos: More than Sugar Skulls in 2018, and Art Rush in 2017.