Events

Returning Home is a small scale contemporary photography exhibition and the first exhibition of its kind to take place at the Montgomery Place Mansion at Bard College. This exhibition will introduce and educate its audience about the United States’ settler colonial past, as well as its ongoing presence that insidiously targets Indigenous peoples' children. Through alternative narratives of Indigenous families, particularly women and children, this exhibition aims to disrupt negative historical and contemporary notions about Native families and interrupt the comfortability of settlers living on stolen land. Through portraiture and poetry, or what Jolene Rickard calls "visual sovereignty", audience members will get to experience the works of Kali Spitzer (Kaska Dena/Jewish), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Dana Claxton (Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations), Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke), and Bonney Hartley (Stockbridge-Munsee) as an intervention in a historic home whose land, labor, and original proprietor's wealth is intertwined with the forced removal and land dispossession of Native peoples in early colonial New York State (NYS) and the enslavement of African peoples. In addition to the artworks, the exhibition includes important archival materials and books documenting the forced removal of Native peoples children into federally mandated off reservation boarding schools and the loss of Native homelands in NYS.