Resist Enbridge Pipeline | Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and 2-Spirits
As an Indigenous artist in the face of growing intolerance, widening inequalities, and erasure, Valaria Tatera focuses her work on environmental justice, the commodifying of resources, sovereignty, colonialism, and the effects of historical trauma. Her intention is for the work to hold visual and personal space for data that often erases the individual. The intersections of ethnicity, gender, commerce, and environment continue to influence her art.
"When you commodify resources it leads to the commodification of people."
Valaria Tateria
Valaria Tatera
Valaria Tatera (she/her/hers) is a Wisconsin based installation artist, activist, and lecturer whose work investigates the intersection of ethnicity, gender, commerce, and the environment. An enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Valaria explores self identity and contemporary Indigenous issues such as the impact of colonization on Indigenous Erasure, Visibility, and Resilience. Her intention is “for the work to hold visual and personal space for statistics that often erase the individual.”
Valaria earned an MFA in 3-D from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and M.A. and B.F.A. in Ceramics from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She recently was a finalist for the Mary Nohl Fellowship and the United States Artist Fellowship and is a co-curator for No More Stolen Sisters about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and 2 Spirits. In spring, her public artwork on COVID will be featured at Kilbourne Park in Milwaukee, and future exhibitions are scheduled for James Watrous Gallery (spring-summer), Saint Kate (summer), the Wriston Gallery (fall), and the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts (winter). View her work here.
Thank you for sharing this evocative work. I enjoyed hearing you talk about it in the lecture as well. The use of ribbons is so interesting and achieves such a range of effects in the different scenes.