Biography
Jolene Rickard is a visual historian, artist and curator interested in the intersection of indigenous knowledge and contemporary art, materiality and ecocriticism with an emphasis on Hodinöhsö:ni aesthetics. She is former Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Programme (2008-2020) and Associate Professor in the departments of History of Art and Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Rickard is on the editorial board of American Art, a founding board member of the Otsego Institute for Native American Art and an advisor to GRASAC: The Great Lakes Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Culture.
She has curated several exhibitions, including Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, Minneapolis Institute of Arts (2019–2021) and Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art (2018–2020). She co-curated two of the four inaugural exhibitions of the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington (2004–2014).
Her publications include Diversifying Sovereignty and the Reception of Indigenous Art (Art Journal 76, no. 2, 2017); Aesthetics, Violence and Indigeneity (Public 27, no. 54, Winter 2016); Arts of Dispossession in From Tierra del Fuego to the Artic: Landscape Painting in the Americas, Art Gallery of Ontario (2015); The Emergence of Global Indigenous Art, Sakahán, National Gallery of Canada (2013); and Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors (The South Atlantic Quarterly: Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law, 110:2, 2011).
Born in 1956 in Niagara Falls, New York, she lives and works in Ithaca, New York.
SAF participation: March Meeting 2022