Diary of a Native Femme(nist)

Kimberly Robertson (Mvskoke)

Opening Reception

Saturday, May 4th, 2024

5:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Exhibition runs May 4 - June 30, 2024

The Chapter House is pleased to present Diary of a Native Femme(nist), a solo exhibition of new and recent works by Kimberly Robertson. The works on view draw from her embodied experiences as a Mvskoke woman born, raised, living, and working on unceded California Indian lands and are heavily informed by Native feminist theories and practices. Robertson utilizes high-femme aesthetics to address the myriad forms of violence Native femmes experience under settler colonialism and cisheteropatriarchy while also encouraging viewers to consider the radical practice of making joy and laughter in service of collective healing and liberation. 

Kimberly Robertson is a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, an Associate Professor of American Indian Studies at California State University, Long Beach, and an artist. Her scholarship and creative practices center Native feminisms, the sexual and gendered violence of settler colonialism, ceremony, storytelling, decolonization, and Indigenous futurities.  She has published in journals such as Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society and Wicazo Sa Review, as well as peer-reviewed anthologies such as Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness and Keetsahnak: Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters. Her creative practices currently include screen printing, collage, beadwork, installation art, and zine-making.  Her artworks have been exhibited in numerous community, university, public, and private galleries as well as peer-reviewed monographs and anthologies. She is also an active member of the Los Angeles Indian community and facilitates beading circles and art-making workshops both locally and nationally.

Water is Life. A rallying cry of Indigenous Peoples, and a true, plain and simple fact. But what exactly does it mean to come from water? In her poem Atlas, where this exhibition draws its title from, Terisa Siagatonu ponders the realities of being from Sāmoa, an island in the South Pacific, very often overlooked on maps, and that is victim to colonization, tourism, and American military imperialism. For Siagatonu, water is the place she is from, in part because it threatens to overtake what little land makes up Sāmoa, but also because the ocean’s vastness is easier to see than the island. As water surrounds her homelands, how might water shape other places we are from? From the Navajo Nation to sub-Saharan Africa to California, water scarcity, the lack of running water, and drought make everyday tasks and health a challenge. On the other hand, abundance of water, like post-Hurricane Katrina or the Kiribati Islands threaten to swallow the very existence of a physical space. In both instances of too little or too much water, water structures our homes, physical and mental health, and lives.

In The Chapter House’s online exhibition, but when you come from water, we invite artists to contribute works that consider water as a material, medium, inspiration, and something to fight for. This exhibition is specifically inspired by the work of Emma Robbins, The Chapter House’s Founder and Executive Director of the Navajo Water Project. In conjunction with World Water Day, but when you come from water, explores interpretations of water in artistic form from artists from across the world.

Opens March 22 on World Water Day.