The Forge Project, a regional Native-led organization focused on decolonial education and Indigenous art, recently announced the winners of its 2023 Forge Fellowship. WAMC's Capital Region Bureau Chief Dave Lucas spoke with two of six winners.
Brent Michael Davids is a member of the Stockbridge Munsee Community. He's a flutist, composer, and designer of musical instruments, who for five decades has written and performed different varieties of music of nearly every genre.
"Orchestral, concert band, theater, ballet, jazz, folk music, American Indian music, modern dance, films and film scoring. And TV and radio," said Davids.
Davids, who founded a recording studio on the Stockbridge-Munsee Reservation in Wisconsin, says he is happy to have connected with the Forge Project.
"One obvious connection for me is in the arts, you know, for music and working on music," Davids said. "The other is that the Forge is located in my tribal homelands, our territory."
The Forge Project started in 2021 in the Hudson Valley. The group’s executive director Candice Hopkins spoke with WAMC in October 2022, outlining its goals.
“We’re a Native women-led organization that focuses on fellowships for Native cultural workers in the United States and Canada, working on things like decolonial governance, or even experimental music, seed savings, for example. And we host six fellows a year, at the residences at Forge. We do programs in decolonial education and Indigenous-led education. And we have founded a journal as well called Forging. And so we're working in publication, too. Forge was created, not only because in this area, in the Mahicanituck Valley, another word for the Hudson Valley, there's a great absence of Native folks, because a lot of people were displaced, and they were displaced to even as far away as Wisconsin. The Stockbridge-Munsee Community, for example. And so with Forge what we're dedicated to is increasing Indigenous presence in this area,” said Hopkins.
Dr. Suzanne Kite is a visual artist andcomposer, one of the first American Indian artists to utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning in art practice.
"I moved to Ancram in January of this year," Kite said. "And I moved there, basically, to be closer to this booming indigenous art world that is kind of rooted in the work of the Forge Project. And so also I could teach at Bard College, and I think my work is very much indebted to the artists who have come before me and really pushed boundaries. So I'm able to make experimental sound work, video work and artificial intelligence work, because of all the amazing people that are in collections, like the Forge collection."
Kite sees her art as a reflection of the philosophy and spirit of the Lakota people. She praises Forge and hopes it will encourage other collections throughout New York state to attract contemporary indigenous work.
"Currently I'm making a lot of embroidery work," said Kite. "And so usually it's on large deer hides that are dyed black, and I use silver embroidery thread and beads. And I also work with conductive thread, and I embroider different designs in the Lakota visual language, because I'm Oglála Lakȟóta. And I try to make designs that I've had dreams about trying to combine like hand beadwork and machine learning experiments and digital embroidery."
Davids says the Forge Project giving direct support to artists is a move in the right direction.
“In this day, and age artists, you know, working artists who are, you know, working on commission are working project by project by project, we're constantly searching for money," said Davids. And we spend a lot of time jumping through hoops and writing big research papers and things when we should be working on our art and working on projects. So we live dual lives, we spend our times as administrators searching for funding, funding agents, looking for funds, and then at the same time trying to do our work as well. And we've kind of split our lives in half.”
Each Forge Project Fellow receives a $25,000 grant toward their practice. They also have full access to the Forge Project site, libraries, and collection of contemporary art by Indigenous artists during three-week rotating fellowships on-site at Forge. There's more about Forge and the six fellowshere.
