11/03/2021 with Nathan Young

Nativescape presents multi-disciplinary artist, Nathan Young (Delaware/Kiowa/Pawnee), who researched the Wheelwright Museum collection, and through exploration and selection created a site-specific installation utilizing his findings. The installation, Activation/Transformation (November 6, 2021- April 3, 2022.) Whether creating music scores, engaging with museums, developing social practice projects, or his contributions to Tribal politics, Young strives to create a strong connected vernacular. He was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in 1975 and is an artist, scholar, and composer working in an expanded practice that incorporates sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially engaged art, and experimental and improvised music. Young’s work often engages the spiritual and the political, re- imagining indigenous sacred imagery to complicate and subvert notions of the sublime. Young is a founding and former member of the artist collective Postcommodity. He holds an MFA in Music/Sound from Bard College’s Milton-Avery School of the Arts. Young is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the University of Oklahoma’s innovative Native American Art History doctoral program, where his scholarship is focused on Indigenous sonic agency. Young’s work has been supported by Creative Capital, The Tulsa Artist Fellowship, The George Kaiser Family Foundation, The Pew Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Tribeca Film Institute, and the Sundance Institute. Young is an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians and a direct descendent of the Pawnee Nation and Kiowa Tribe. He served as an elected Tribal council member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians from 2016 -2020.