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Highland Community College to Host Speaker on Indigenous American Art March 4

published February 19, 2019

Highland Community College will host speaker David Titterington as the next event in the Humanities Kansas sponsored STEAM series. Titterington will present, American Mashup: The Ongoing Indigenous American Art of Remixing the World, on Monday, March 4, 2019, at 1 pm in the Math Science Building on the campus of Highland Community College in Highland, Kansas. This event is free and open to the community.

 

David Titterington studied painting and East Asian cultures at the University of Kansas before moving to Japan, where for five years he studied Zen Buddhism, researched the Shikoku pilgrimage and painted sacred sites. It was there that he began to study Native American art history. He returned to Kansas to work with indigenous studies professor Norman Akers, of Osage ancestry. In 2013 he received an MFA from KU with an emphasis on the history of the body and North American landscapes. Since 2014 he has taught art and art history at Haskell Indian Nations University. His current work investigates the relationship between humans and the land, specifically American sites of tragedy and shame.

 

In American Mashup: The Ongoing Indigenous American Art of Remixing the World, Titterington will look to the work of over two dozen contemporary Native American artists in order to examine American identity and decolonial aesthetics.

 

Titterington states, “Indigenous artists are in a privileged position to reflect, interrogate, and subvert the dominant culture’s narratives. The presentation begins with a brief discussion of the reasons why non-natives appropriate native imagery, and why indigenous people are particularly vulnerable to cultural appropriation and stereotypes. This gives insight into why contemporary Native American artists focus on combatting these stereotypes and refuse to make art that fits into imposed categories and genres. At the same time, these artists are continuing a tradition of incorporating symbols and materials from their environment. While this practice of appropriating, recycling and repurposing has been used for cultural and economic survival today these ‘Native assemblages’ reflect an ongoing investigation into cultural hybridity, identity construction, and indigenous-led anticolonial activism.”

 

Highland Community College was awarded a grant from Humanities Kansas for a series of six interdisciplinary and cultural events focusing on science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) in the 2018/19 academic year. The series is titled, "Social Justice: Using STEAM to Revolutionize the World," and each event will feature discussions and presentations on how each of the STEAM fields influences areas of culture and social justice.

 

The event is being made possible due to funding from Humanities Kansas.

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