The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) announces its Spring 2021 Social Engagement Arts Residents Anna Tsouhlarakis (Diné/Creek/Greek) and Eric-Paul Riege (Diné). Both artists will be taking part in our virtual Social Engagement Artist Residency for the month of March. The virtual artist residency will occur remotely, with both artists building their projects and engaging with the public through “virtual studios,” workshops, artist talks, and Instagram takeovers.

Please visit the artist residents’ virtual studios by visiting our Social Engagement Artist Residency website. The artists will be sharing more about their work, process, upcoming projects, inspiration, ideas, and more. For more information, please contact Senior Manager of Museum Education Winoka Yepa (Navajo) at (505) 428-5907 or winoka.yepa@iaia.edu.

Anna Tsouhlarakis

Anna Tsouhlarakis (Diné/Greek/Creek)

Anna Tsouhlarakis (b. 1977, Lawrence, Kansas, USA) lives and works in Colorado. She is Greek, Creek, and an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation. Tsouhlarakis works across many disciplines including sculpture, installation, video, and performance. Using Indigenous epistemologies and pedagogies as starting points, her work reframes the discourse around the construction of Native American identity.

Tsouhlarakis received her Bachelor of Arts from Dartmouth College with degrees in Native American Studies and Studio Art. She went on to receive her Master of Fine Arts from Yale University with a focus in Sculpture. Tsouhlarakis has participated in various art residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, and was the Andrew W. Mellon Artist-in-Residence at Colorado College for the 2019–2020 academic year. Her work has been part of national and international exhibitions at venues such as Rush Arts in New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Crystal Bridges Museum, the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, the Heard Museum, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. She has upcoming exhibitions at Colorado College, White Frame in Basel, Switzerland, the NEON Foundation in Athens, Greece, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. In December of 2020, she received a Creative Capital Award. Other recent awards include fellowships from the Harpo Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Tsouhlarakis’s work appears in several anthologies of Native American art including the recently published Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices from 1950 to Now.

Eric Paul Riege

Eric-Paul Riege (Diné)

Eric-Paul Riege (b. 1994, Na’nízhoozhí, Gallup, New Mexico) is a weaver and artist celebrating presence in his mind, body, and beliefs through collage, durational performance, installation, woven sculpture, and wearable art. For Riege, his work pays homage and links him to generations of weavers and the processes of weaving. His work is a being of Hózhó-Diné philosophy that encompasses beauty, balance, goodness, and harmony in all things physical, mental, and spiritual and its bearing on everyday experience. His work, which he describes as being “encompassed in the threads of weaving and life,” creates an immersive and charged space influenced by his own homes, ceremonies, and rituals, from his past, future, and present selves.

Riege uses myth and storytelling to propose homes—spaces of acceptance and sharing. His work exists as living things that aid him in generating sanctuary spaces of welcome and memory. In the Diné language, the word hólǫ́ means “to exist.” To exist amongst his family, friends, strangers, ancestors, more than human beings, Holy Peoples, ghosts, angels, demons. He states “the cosmologies of my work have enlightened me towards a path of goodness told by my hands and therefore the hands of my loved ones, and therefore the hands of our ancestors, and therefore the hands of my Holy People—all reaching out welcoming you into our blessed space.”

Riege exhibited at the SITElines 2018 Biennial at SITE Santa Fe, in Santa Fe, NM, the Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, NM and the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, AZ. In 2019 he had a solo museum exhibition at ICA Miami in Miami, Fl, and was a recipient of the Art Matters Foundation Grant, NYC, NY. In 2020, he was one of “12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now” at Southwest Contemporary in Santa Fe, NM, and was honored with the Artsy Vanguard 2020 distinguish, an annual list of the most promising artists shaping the future of contemporary art. Riege was apart of the group exhibition “Larger Than Memory” at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, and is currently apart of the ongoing project STTLMNT: An Indigenous Digital World Wide Occupation. In the next year Riege will be apart of Prospect New Orleans’ fifth edition biennial, “Yesterday we said tomorrow,” and the second edition of the Toronto Biennial in Canada.