Anna Tsouhlarakis
Colorado
June 2-30, 2021
Time for You Residency
Sponsored by the Sustainable Arts Foundation and collectors David Horvitz and Francie Bishop Good
BIO
Anna Tsouhlarakis (b. 1977, Lawrence, Kansas, USA) lives and works in Colorado. She is Greek, Creek, and an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation. Tsouhlarakis works across many disciplines including sculpture, installation, video, and performance. Using Indigenous epistemologies and pedagogies as starting points, her work reframes the discourse around the construction of Native American identity.
Tsouhlarakis received her Bachelor of Arts from Dartmouth College with degrees in Native American Studies and Studio Art. She went on to receive her Master of Fine Arts from Yale University with a focus in Sculpture. Tsouhlarakis has participated in various art residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, and was the Andrew W. Mellon Artist-in-Residence at Colorado College for the 2019-2020 academic year. Her work has been part of national and international exhibitions at venues such as Rush Arts in New York, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Crystal Bridges Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, the Heard Museum, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. She has upcoming exhibitions at Colorado College, White Frame in Basel, Switzerland, the NEON Foundation in Athens, Greece, and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. In December of 2020, she received a Creative Capital Award. Other recent awards include fellowships from the Harpo Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Art has always been a presence in my life and over time I found myself asking questions about what Native artists were making and why. There are certain perceptions and expectations that confine Native American Art. I question why these limitations transfer to the gallery setting and why they have maintained their presence for so long.
I am interested in challenging and stretching the boundaries of aesthetic and conceptual expectations. The focus of my work is to raise questions between artist and audience. Through sculpture, installation, video, photography and performance, my work makes the viewer conscience of their relationship to the imagery and ideas before them. I use not only my voice to ask these questions but those of other Natives. It is my goal to make work that speaks to and from Natives and creates dialogue that utilizes unexpected vehicles to help grow the trajectory of Native American art.
ARTIST LINKS
Website: naveeks.com
Instagram:@annatskis
https://creative-capital.org/projects/indigenous-absurdities/
https://fac.coloradocollege.edu/exhibits/anna-tsouhlarakis-to-bind-or-to-burn/
https://www.camilleobering.com/#/anna-tsouhlarakis-incomplete-drawings-of-decolonization/