Native Visual Culture by Dr. Denise Cummings

The exhibition, In Conversation: Will Wilson, exemplifies the tension between present and past visual fields that makes Native visual culture unusually rich, uncommonly provocative, and extremely discussion worthy. The exhibition, as part of Diné photographer Will Wilson’s ongoing project, Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX), invites viewers into an essential comparative approach using early 20th-century photographer Edward S. Curtis’s images from his The North American Indian (1907-1930). The experience allows us to engage the politics of identity and self-representation, the problems of historical accuracy, and the complexity of images and reception.

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Dr. Cummings is Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies in the Department of Critical Media and Cultural Studies at Rollins. Her teaching and research interests in the fields of Cinema and Media Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) have led to scholarly publications that examine historical and contemporary Indigenous visual sovereignty and how visual cultures intersect with assertions of active Native presence, the pursuit of Native aesthetic pleasure, and the realities of ongoing colonial power.