Sky Hopinka

Co-presented with the Institute of American Indian Arts
Tuesday, July 19 | 5-7pm | $15 (ticket link forthcoming)

The Center for Contemporary Arts of Santa Fe (CCA) in partnership with the Institute of American Indian Arts’s (IAIA) Low Residency MFA presents a selection of short films by artist Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), followed by a moderated discussion with Sky Hopinka and Mario A. Caro, PhD (Colombian Mestizo), Director of IAIA’s Low Residency in Studio Arts Program.

Hopinka’s work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and nonfiction forms of media. The films selected include Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021), Jaaji (2015), Lore (2019), Fainting Spells (2018), Dislocation Blues (2018), In Dreams and Autumn (2021), and Kicking the Clouds (2021).

Still - Sky Hopinka
Sky Hopinka, Kicking the Clouds (2021), still image
Sky Hopinka, Fainting Spells (2018), still image

Sky Hopinka

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial and Prospect.5.  He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He has had a solo exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2020 and at LUMA Arles in Arles, France in 2022. He was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018- 2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, an Art Matters Fellow in 2019, a recipient of a 2020 Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and was a 2021 Forge Project Fellow.

Dr. Mario A. Caro

Dr. Mario A. Caro is a researcher, curator, and critic who has published widely on the history, theory, and criticism of contemporary Indigenous arts. He has taught graduate courses at Indiana University, New York University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is currently the Director of the MFA in Studio Arts program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.