Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series: Demian DinéYazhi': Strategic Defense Mechanisms

Please join us for our next visiting artist lecture with Demian DinéYazhi'.

Through their transdisciplinary practice, Indigenous Diné Artist Demian DinéYazhi' scrutinizes the extractive and exploitive traditions of the arts industrial complex through letterpress posters to neon signs and performance readings to social media awareness. As an autonomous artist, Demian procures their courage and guidance from radical, DIY communities of empowered marginalized intelligentsia in defiance of colonial mechanisms threatening our collective futures.

Demian DinéYazhi ́ is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over-accumulative and supremacist nature of hetero-cisgender communities. DinéYazhi ́'s praxis interrogates normative spaces by refusing to settle or perform for exploitative galleries and publishers that act as gatekeepers to the lethargic, toxic legacy of Western paradigms. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center its politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land it occupies and refuses to give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail.

DinéYazhi´ has recently exhibited at the Hessel Museum of Art, Honolulu Biennial, Biennale of Sydney, Vielmetter Los Angeles, Wexner Center for the Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, Henry Art Gallery, Pioneer Works, and CANADA, NY. They are the author of Ancestral Memory, An Infected Sunset, and We Left Them Nothing. DinéYazhi´ will also be exhibiting new work in this year's Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing.