Uploaded March 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
The Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Western Univeristy presents the 2025 Robert and Patricia Duncanson Lecture featuring Wanda Nanibush.
From protest to ceremony to performance art, Indigenous artists are breaking the Eurocentric boundaries between art/culture, tradition/contemporary, humor/ethics, fiction/history, and resistance/creation. In "Performing Sovereignty," Wanda Nanibush reveals how, in the process, new histories of protest and performance are sought, and both become the site of Indigenous sovereignty enacted. This shift is Indigenous and artist-led.
About the Speaker: Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation, Canada. Based in Toronto, Nanibush is the founding director of aabaakwad, an international yearly gathering of over 80 Indigenous curators, writers and artists for talks and performances that last took place at Venice Biennale and was in Toronto, December 5-7, 2024. She recently won the Toronto Book Award for her co-authored book Moving the Museum, which chronicles some of her groundbreaking work at the Art Gallery of Ontario as the Inaugural curator of Indigenous Art. She has curated survey, group, and retrospective exhibitions, including: Robert Houle Red is Beautiful (NMAI, Smithsonian, Washington); Rebecca Belmore, Facing the Monumental (2019), (Canada and the U.S) and Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971-1989 (AGO). She will be the Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at CUNY in the Graduate Department of Art History in 2025. She is also part of the curatorial team for Counterpublic 2026, St. Louis’ Triennial. In 2024, Nanibush was awarded The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence.
She received her M.A. in Visual Studies from University of Toronto where she has also taught graduate courses. She is Adjunct Faculty at York University. Nanibush has published widely on Indigenous art, politics, history, feminism and sexuality.
Filmed March 4, 2025 at Western University.
The Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Western Univeristy presents the 2025 Robert and Patricia Duncanson Lecture featuring Wanda Nanibush.
From protest to ceremony to performance art, Indigenous artists are breaking the Eurocentric boundaries between art/culture, tradition/contemporary, humor/ethics, fiction/history, and resistance/creation. In "Performing Sovereignty," Wanda Nanibush reveals how, in the process, new histories of protest and performance are sought, and both become the site of Indigenous sovereignty enacted. This shift is Indigenous and artist-led.
About the Speaker: Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe image and word warrior, curator and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation, Canada. Based in Toronto, Nanibush is the founding director of aabaakwad, an international yearly gathering of over 80 Indigenous curators, writers and artists for talks and performances that last took place at Venice Biennale and was in Toronto, December 5-7, 2024. She recently won the Toronto Book Award for her co-authored book Moving the Museum, which chronicles some of her groundbreaking work at the Art Gallery of Ontario as the Inaugural curator of Indigenous Art. She has curated survey, group, and retrospective exhibitions, including: Robert Houle Red is Beautiful (NMAI, Smithsonian, Washington); Rebecca Belmore, Facing the Monumental (2019), (Canada and the U.S) and Toronto: Tributes + Tributaries, 1971-1989 (AGO). She will be the Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at CUNY in the Graduate Department of Art History in 2025. She is also part of the curatorial team for Counterpublic 2026, St. Louis’ Triennial. In 2024, Nanibush was awarded The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence.
She received her M.A. in Visual Studies from University of Toronto where she has also taught graduate courses. She is Adjunct Faculty at York University. Nanibush has published widely on Indigenous art, politics, history, feminism and sexuality.
Filmed March 4, 2025 at Western University.
