Acclaimed Artist Sky Hopinka Curates Native Film Series at the BMA

Don’t wait for me, just tell me where you’re going foregrounds Native voices in experimental filmmaking

BALTIMORE, MD (April 8, 2024)— On May 12, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) opens Don’t wait for me, just tell me where you’re going, a series of short experimental films by Native artists selected by guest curator Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation and descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians). Hopinka is a widely acclaimed artist and a founding member of COUSIN, a collective supporting Indigenous artists expanding the form of film. The five films are presented in a continuous loop in the BMA’s Black Box gallery through December 1, 2024.

Of the series, Hopinka said, “In the questions they ask and in the wandering they do, the short films in this gallery uncover and explore generational memory. They give thanks to those who are gone, those who are yet to be born, and those who are here living right now. They acknowledge that blood is a gift and the land is a gift and our past is a gift. They drift through time, movement, memorial, and landscape towards some unknown and never-known place and serve as a much-needed reminder that we’ll all get there together, just not at the same time.”

Descriptions of each film follow:

✧Ⓑ ☻Ⓛ♡Ⓞ✇☟Ⓞ ☽Ⓓ✰ⓜⓐⓣⓔⓡⓘⓐⓛⓢ✦ (pronounced Blood Materials)

(2021) by Fox Maxy (Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians and Payómkawichum) (born San Diego 1992) consists of meticulously edited moving images gathered from the artist’s personal archive set to a soundscape of remixed ambient noises and songs ranging from hip hop to country. The film traverses fragmented landscapes and events in the present to pose questions about the fluidity and warping of identity, land, nature, and time.

seeing her (2020) by Lindsay McIntyre (Inuk) (born Treaty Six territory, Edmonton, Canada 1977) This 3:30 minute single-channel silent video invites a witnessing of the labor, skill, and familial record held within beadwork passed down from mother to daughter through generations. Shot on hand-processed Super 16 film, the beaded textures featured in this film are attached to the front panel of McIntyre’s great-grandmother’s amauti, or parka.

We Only Answer Our Landline (2019) by Olivia Camfield (Muscogee Creek Nation) (born Fredericksburg, TX 1997) and Woodrow Hunt (Cherokee, Klamath, and Modoc Tribes descendent) (born Portland, OR 1997) is a 5:50-minute single-channel video performed by Kayla Banks (Mississippi Choctaw Descendent, African American, Eastern European), Raven Bright (Navajo Nation), Celeste Camfield (Muscogee Creek Nation), Hotvlkuce Harjo (Muscogee Creek Nation), Victoria Perez (mixed Indígena, Mexican, Czech), and Anne Pesata (Jicarilla Apache), with music by Black Belt Eagle Scout, “Indians Never Die.” We Only Answer Our Landline searches through snapshots from family albums, archival images and registries, and contemporary and vintage footage to explore notions of the alien.

Cerro Saturno (2022) by Miguel Hilari (Aymara/German) (born Hamburg, Germany 1985) is a 13:18-minute single-channel video that reveals traces of human presence—such as a lone dirt road or transmission tower—within the moonlit landscapes of the Bolivian mountains. Cerro Saturno follows these clues of existence to the populous city La Paz, where the artist is based, and its sonic buzz of activity, where faces are captured with the same attention and poetry as the environment in which they live.

all-around junior male (2012) by Lindsay McIntyre (Inuk) (born Treaty Six territory, Edmonton, Canada 1977) is a 7:30-minute single-channel video that shows a young Nunamiut athlete, Sean Uquqtuq, performing a challenging traditional Inuit game known as the one-foot high kick. Shot on hand-processed 16mm film, this textured, abstracted portrait shows reverence and respect to a challenging athletic display in an equally demanding subarctic tundra landscape.

The exhibition is part of the BMA’s Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum initiative that significantly increases the presence of Native voices, experiences, and works across the museum. Unfolding over the course of 10 months, Preoccupied includes nine solo and thematic exhibitions, interpretative interventions across the museum’s collection galleries, the development of a publication guided by Native methodologies, and public programs. It represents an exceptionally expansive museum presentation of Native artists and thinkers, with nearly 100 individuals contributing to and represented across the initiative.

About Sky Hopinka

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people) (born Ferndale, Washington 1984) was raised in Ferndale and Palm Springs, California. His video, photo, and text work centers personal expressions of Indigenous homeland and landscape and explores language as a container for and manifestation of culture. Hopinka was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and his work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies (2020); LUMA in Arles, France (2022); and Kunsthalle Friart in Switzerland (2024). His films have also been screened at Sundance, the Toronto International, and New York film festivals. His works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, and Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. Hopinka is a 2022 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, who has also received a 2020 Herb Alpert Award, a 2022 International Center of Photography Infinity Award, and 2023 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel. He currently lives in Brooklyn and is an assistant professor in the department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.