Hartwick College Welcomes Melanie Printup Hope for Inaugural Phil Young Residency for Indigenous Art

During the residency, Hope will install “My Ancestors in the Sky World,” a mixed-media piece, and speak with Hartwick students and museum visitors about her work. She will also lead a free beading workshop on Saturday, Oct. 10. Advance registration is required. To register, visit the Phil Young Residency for Indigenous Art webpage.

A public reception for Hope and her installation will be held from 5-7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 15, at the Yager Museum.

Hope is a graphic artist and designer of Tuscarora and European descent. Born and raised on the Tuscarora Nation Reservation in western New York, she earned a bachelor of fine arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology and a master of fine arts in electronic arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Working across genres and media, Hope examines colonization, environmental degradation, Haudenosaunee cultural reclamation, and Indigenous identity. Her work challenges distinctions between craft and art, modern and traditional, and European and Indigenous practices.

Hope has exhibited across North America and Europe, including at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Native Americas International Film Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has received the Rockefeller Foundation Intercultural Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts and the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund.

She has lectured at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada, and is professor emerita at The Sage Colleges in Albany and Troy. She also served as associate dean and associate professor in the Faculty of Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.

The Phil Young Residency for Indigenous Art brings Indigenous artists to Hartwick to create and exhibit work, engage with students and share their creative practice with the public. Based at the Yager Museum, the residency includes an artist talk, workshop, open studio or other public program. The participating artist also selects one work to enter the museum’s collection of Native American art.

The residency honors Phil Young, an artist and Hartwick professor emeritus of art who taught at the College for 35 years before retiring in 2013. A native of Oklahoma of Cherokee and Scots-Irish descent, with Creek and Seminole relatives, Young explored identity, colonialism and the politics of history through his work. During his Hartwick career, he developed relationships with Indigenous artists, thinkers and activists and brought their work and perspectives to campus.

For more information, contact Quentin Lewis, curator of the Yager Museum of Art & Culture and lecturer in museum studies, at 607-431-4481.