Slick and Smick: Ten Years of Collaboration

This page highlights four collaborative projects created with my longtime friend and mentor, Duane Slick, an accomplished contemporary artist, curator, and Professor of Painting at RISD. Duane is a member of both the Meskwaki Nation of Iowa and the Ho-Chunk Nation of Nebraska. Over the years, Duane’s mentorship has guided our partnership, creating space for conversations about the weight of the history of colonization in America, viewed through our divergent and historically conflicted lenses—Native American and Anglo-American.

Our first two projects, Finding Metacom (2016) and My Teacher is a Lizard: Decolonizing Curatorial Practice (2018), were rooted in our work within the anthropological archives of the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA, and The Haffenreffer Museum at Brown University in RI. By studying these collections, we confronted the complex and often obscured histories behind anthropological practices, questioning their legacy. Together, we reimagined these collections, reconsidering their meaning and impact on contemporary understandings of American identity. In doing so, we aimed to bring greater awareness to the violent history of land and cultural theft that has shaped many of our cultural institutions.

Our two more recent collaborations, What the Night Tells Us (2023, Drake University) and Pictures of the Great Shared Earth (2024, Providence, RI), extend the conversation beyond anthropological collections, engaging with broader themes of nature and our collective relationship to land and place. These projects allow for a more expansive dialogue, inviting our distinct perspectives to coexist within a shared framework.

The evolution of our creative partnership is a gift, one that continues to deepen my understanding of what it means to be an artist and an American. I hope our work will inspire further dialogue and contribute to the ongoing expansion of our collective vision.