Demian DinéYazhi ́
Site: FOAM
Transdisciplinary artist Demian DinéYazhi ́ engages Cherokee Street and St. Louis’s complex histories with indigeneity and erasure through performance, poetry, and letterpress posters at FOAM. The project, falling is not falling but offering takes its title from a Wendy Rose poem and involves reprinting words and poems by Indigenous heroes as an act of honoring, remembering, and dedication through the radical history of the letterpress. The labor and process of the letterpress becomes a symbolic act of ritualistic ceremony of healing from erasure, murder, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy. Sited in the shadow of a contentious statue of a Cherokee chief that acts as an entrance to the neighborhood, DinéYazhi ́ offers an alternate inhabitation of the street’s and nation’s Indigenous ground.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Demian DinéYazhi ́ (born 1983) is an Indigenous Diné transdisciplinary artist born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Growing up in the colonized border town of Gallup, New Mexico, the evolution of DinéYazhi ́’s work has been influenced by their ancestral ties to traditional Diné culture and ceremony, matrilineal upbringing, the sacredness of land, and the importance of intergenerational knowledge. Through research, mining community archives, and social collaboration and activism, DinéYazhi ́ highlights the intersections of Radical Indigenous Queer Feminist identity and political ideology while challenging the white noise of the contemporary art movement. They have recently exhibited at Whitney Museum of American Art (2018), Henry Art Gallery (2018), Pioneer Works (2018), CANADA, NY (2017), and Cooley Gallery (2017). DinéYazhi ́ is the founder of the Indigenous artist/activist initiative, R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment. They are the recipient of the Henry Art Museum’s Brink Award (2017), Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts (2018), and Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellow (2019).
