On June 13th, Paul High Horse, John Paul, and Barbara Robins sat down with Annika Johnson for a conversation about methods and materials Native and Indigenous artists and culture bearers use to interrogate past erasures, reclaim the present, and vivify Indigenous futures.

On April 11th, Noni Williams, G. Anthony Galdamez, Ken Heinze, and Carlie Waganer sat down for a conversation about how we define and assess what constitutes failure in creative processes that hinge on investigation, discovery, and uncertainty.

On Friday, March 14th, we sat down with artists and organizers Lydia Cheshewalla, Patrick Costello, and Alajia McKizia to talk about compost as a mechanism for transformation, renewal, and exchange, and explored affinities in their work that bind compost to history, inheritance, and carrying certain types of knowledge forward.

“On the evening of September 29, 2022, a protest took place at Dewey Park to oppose the removal of the Harney Street bike lane. Stretching a mile and a half, this was Omaha’s first protected bike lane, connecting Midtown to the Old Market.” 

“Refuse the narrow definitions of value and use that are assigned to objects by capitalism.

Refuse what relies on waste for profit.

Refuse what is rejected as trash, what is seen as useless and de-nied the chance to be useful.”

On  December 11th, artists and organizers Amanada Huckins, Alex Jochim, Joseph Orzal, Bilgesu Sisman, Marcey Yates, and Rachel Ziegler discussed navigating alternative models of economic organization and building resilience in the face of precarity and the uncertain future of arts funding.

On  October 18th, Mi’oux Stabler and Lydia Cheshewalla sat down with Casey Welsch for a conversation about food sovereignty’s role in confronting generations of colonial dispossession and revitalizing community health and cultural autonomy.

“The struggles of artists and cultural workers for fair compensation and financial stability/sustainability cannot and should not exist independent of struggles for housing, healthcare, education, and protections led by people from all walks of life.”

“The composition layers keyboard played by Mary Elizabeth Jo Dixen Pelenaise Kapi’olani Lawson, her vocals (chanting, reading, humming), sounds inside a kitchen, and the voice of Paul Stephen Benjamin singing ‘Black Is the Color.’”

“Indigenous people of this continent have ancestral responsibilities and rights that others do not. Each of us is born with the opportunity to serve our community in a way that fulfills a need. My energy goes towards forging relationships with the plants from this region that remain.”

“Taking the project from its inception to completion helped us deepen our respective creative practices and our relationships with each other and our collaborators. It’s also a process that we invite others to copy freely and use as a blueprint for making similar work in different social and geographic contexts.”

“East, West, North, South, each occupy equal weight on the compass, and all regions enjoy autonomy and self-determination to their fullest possible expressions. Poverty is a memory and prosperity is promised to all. We have achieved Utopia. Now, where do you want to eat?”

“I remember stepping off the plane and thinking, I've made it. This is the promised land. A utopia. A place where dreams come true. Unfortunately over the last decade, I've watched this vision of what America claims to be, fall apart right in front of my very eyes. This utopia is a dystopia in disguise.”