This month, we kicked off IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts‘ (MoCNA) first virtual Social Engagement Artist Residency (SEAR). Two artists, Luzene Hill (Eastern Band Cherokee) and Mercedes Dorame (Tongva Ancestry), will be participating in a one-month virtual residency in which they will share their social engagement work with our community and museum audience through an online platform. Each artist has proposed a community engagement project that they will work on remotely and share through a series of public programs and virtual studios that can be found on our newly developed Social Engagement Residency website. Please follow these two artists in their creative journey by visiting their virtual studios.

Luzene Hill

Luzene Hill is a multimedia artist, best known for socially engaged conceptual installations, which incorporate performance/action. Her work reflects interdisciplinary scholarship in visual art, women’s studies, and Native American culture—topics that are integral to her background and personal journey. Through work informed by pre-contact culture of the Americas, Hill advocates for Indigenous sovereignty—linguistic, cultural, and personal sovereignty. These concepts form the basis of her installations, performances, drawings, and artist’s books. Her drawings address vulnerability and resilience viewed through both a personal and cultural lens. Recent work, employing indigenous goddess motifs, asserts female agency and challenges phallocentric hierarchies. An enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Hill lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Canada, Russia, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Her awards include the 2019 Ucross Fellowship, the 2016 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship in Visual Arts, the 2015 Eiteljorg Museum Fellowship, and the 2015 First Peoples Fund Fellowship. Hill’s work is featured in Susan C. Power’s book, Art of the Cherokee: Prehistory to the Present, in Josh MacPhee’s and Rebecca Solnit’s book, Celebrate People’s History: The Poster Book of Resistance and Revolution, and the PBS documentary, Native Art Now!.

Mercedes Dorame

Mercedes Dorame, born in Los Angeles, California, received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her undergraduate degree from UCLA. She calls on her Tongva ancestry to engage the problematics of visibility and ideas of cultural construction. Dorame’s work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Triton Museum, The Allen Memorial Art Museum, The de Saisset Museum, The Montblanc Foundation Collection, and The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from: Creative Capital, the Montblanc Art Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Loop Artist Residency, the James Phelan Award for California born visual artists, En Foco’s New Works Photography Fellowship Awards program, Galería de la Raza, for her solo exhibition there, the Harpo Foundation for a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and from the Photography Department at the San Francisco Art Institute for her MFA Studies. She is currently visiting faculty at CalArts, and was recently honored by UCLA as part of the centennial initiative UCLA: Our Stories, Our Impact, and was part of the Hammer Museum’s 2018 Made in L.A. exhibition. She has shown her work internationally. Her writing has been featured in News From Native California, and 580 Split, and her artwork has been highlighted by PBS NewsHour, Artforum, KCET’s Artbound, the New York Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, KQED, Artsy, ARTnews, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, among others.