Trapper Grrrlz spotlights the work of artists connected through kinship, gender and political action to amplify femme-forward Indigenous creativity and expression that speak back to the failings of our contemporary moment. Trapper Grrrlz explores the way in which, from one generation to the next, these artists define, refine and redefine “the feminine” as a source of agentic power to be harnessed.
At once playground and battlefield, in this context, NDN1 girlhood refuses to be trapped or reduced to a fixed state but becomes a site for experimentation, desire, grit, self-determination, and auntie stewardship.
In the artists’ works, femininity is not conceived of as fixed or solitary but relational, experienced, enacted, inherited, contested, and perpetually reconstructed – an embodied and ontological process through which spirit, memory, desire and ancestral presence may enter.
Curated by
Dani Printup
Artists in the exhibition
Lori Blondeau, Jobena Petonoquot, Laura Grier, Arielle Twist, Joi Arcand, Taqralik Partridge, Akinasi Silaapik Partridge and Laakkuluk Williamson
- Billy-Ray Belcourt, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (House of Anansi Press, 2019), 9. The Cree writer and academic Billy-Ray Belcourt explains that “NDN is internet shorthand used by Indigenous peoples in North America to refer to ourselves. It is also sometimes an acronym meaning ‘Not Dead Native.’” ↩︎