The exhibition will be on view at Hopkins Hall Gallery, click here to register for your in-person visit.
In the exhibition Whisper into a Hole, Indigo Gonzales, Rebecca Copper, Anna Freeman and Minus Plato come together to celebrate a series of Indigenous collaborative projects across a series of ‘posts’ spread out in the exhibition space.
The first ‘post’ comprises three pivotal documents placed on three pedestals that highlight the significant contributions by several BIPOC artists, writers and poets. A copy of the Cassandra Press Reader on Blackness Indigeneity and Erasure edited by Kandis Williams and Aline Baiana (commissioned by the Ohio State collaboration K’acha Willaykuna), an issue of Art in America magazine focused on Indigenous art, including a portfolio and text by the interdisciplinary Indigenous and mestizo art collective Postcommodity about the year 2043, and the exhibition guide Temporary Spaces of Joy and Freedom, curated by La Tanya S. Autry for MOCA Cleveland, inspired by a discussion between Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) and Dionne Brand. Each pedestal’s printed matter foregrounds the importance of collective authorship and critical dialogue that aims to unsettle conventional practices to make way for Indigenous and Black futurities. Scattered across the floor are printed copies of Minus Plato blogposts and projects, as well as other reproduced materials that engage with and expand from the central documents on the pedestals.
The second ‘post’, and the central component of this exhibition, is Potu faitautusi: Faiāʻoga o gagana e, ia uluulumamau!, a reading room organized by Minus Plato and guest librarian Dr Léuli Eshrāghi (Sāmoan) in 2020-2022 at the Columbus Printed Arts Center (CPAC) and relocated to Hopkins Hall for the exhibition. This project celebrates and shares critical texts about Indigenous experience, art, fiction, and poetry. Students and community members can access a range of selected texts chosen by artists Sebastián Calfuqueo Aliste (Mapuche), Sarah Biscarra Dilley (yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini), Ke´y Rusú Katupyry & Verá Poty Resakã (Guarani-Nhandewá), and Indigo Gonzales (Southern Ute, Afro-Indigenous). Since the Fall of 2021, Indigo Gonzales, Printmaker and Curator of Relational Learning and Community Engagement at Columbus Printed Arts Center (CPAC), continues to hold space for community members to engage with the reading room.
The third ‘post’ is a listening station where visitors can listen to the Minus Plato radio show dear fellow settler colonizer, created for Columbus-based community radio station Verge.Fm and which includes conversations with and music by local and global Indigenous artists, including the ‘whisper into a hole sessions’, four episodes that focus on the planning of the exhibition.
The final ‘post’ is a room of reflection, with a slow-moving slideshow of images from Minus Plato blogposts, which acts as a space where visitors can gather their thoughts and leave a whispered message for future generations.
The Whisper into a Hole Score welcomes and guides visitors through these ‘posts’ for the celebration of collaborative Indigenous projects, created to generate a relational experience, from how to respectfully engage with the books in the reading room to the use of the photocopier to reproduce and take away materials from the pedestals and scattered over the floor.
As an exhibition without any ‘original’ art objects present, Whisper into a Hole asks its visitors to consider their own relation to Indigenous artistic practices by their very participation in the exhibition as an experience.
Listen to the recordings of the artists' planning sessions:
Indigo Gonzales (she, they) is a Two-Spirit (Southern Ute, Non-Enrolled) Afro-Indigenous artist, educator, and medicine practitioner based in Columbus, OH. After graduating from The Ohio State University with a BA in East Asian Art History in 2017, Indigo has been committed to her totemic medicine and art practices through freelance artwork commissions, holding ceremonies, as well as community speaking engagements. While holding various spaces of learning via artist talks, guest speaking in university classrooms, and as a panel participant, she remains rooted in the development of her pedagogical practice through indigenous ways of knowing while holding space for all peoples. In doing so, she maintains her Two-Spirit duty as a sacred witness for all relations and as a Good Ancestor for the next seven generations to come.
Rebecca Copper is an artist and MFA candidate at Portland State University, through the Art + Social Practice Program where she recently worked as a research assistant for Portland State University's Art + Social Practice Archive. Before working towards her MFA, she worked an upward of 6 years at the educational publishing company, McGraw-Hill Education, as a media designer. She is in awe of ontology; how being and our perceptions of reality exist against one another. And, how reality is mediated, dictated back to us in varying forms. She is deeply invested in a vast inversion of imperial/masculine archetypes, power dynamics, and ideologies. And, the reduction of hyper categorical, industrialized, research.
Anna Freeman is a Ph.D. student in the Arts Administration, Education, and Policy program, specializing in Museum Education. Her research interests focus on examining the relationship between land grant universities and local Native nations, and Indigenous contemporary art. Anna received her B.A. in history and a minor in arts management from the College of Charleston (2013) and earned her M.A. in Art History (2018), specializing in Museum and Cultural Heritage Studies, from Florida State University. Anna is currently a graduate teaching assistant and has been involved in several programs with the K’acha Willaykuna: Andean and Amazonia Indigenous and Humanities Collaboration.
Minus Plato started life as a blog created by OSU Classics professor Richard Fletcher in May 2012 to explore how contemporary artists engage with ancient Mediterranean culture, history, mythology, literature, philosophy, and art. The blog slowly developed into a key site for imagining an alternative approach to the discipline of Classics, one that emphasized contemporary creative receptions of antiquity at its core, while challenging forms of canon-building and exclusion within the discipline’s working areas of focus and methodologies. With the election of Donald Trump in November 2016 and a transforming experience at the 2017 documenta 14 exhibition in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany, Minus Plato pivoted towards a more expansive platform and persona that engaged with contemporary artists to better unlearn entrenched supremacies (white, Western, patriarchal, colonial). By 2021, following the 2020 publication of the book No Philosopher King: An Everyday Guide to Art and Life under Trump (AC Books), Minus Plato had expanded beyond the blog, into a platform and persona that not only actively examined resonances of the documenta 14 exhibition from a distance, but in doing so centered global Indigenous artists from within the conflicted and fraught territory of settler colonialism. Now, ten years later, and a far cry from its classical origins, Minus Plato has emerged as a dynamic self-critical space of radical unlearning to challenge the political, intellectual, and educational foundations upon which historical and ongoing colonial violence and erasure are taking place, especially within institutions of the university and the museum. Minus Plato will come to an end in May 2022.