Phil Young Residency for Indigenous Art

Through this residency, Indigenous artists come to campus biannually to create and showcase an exhibition of significant and incisive works in the Yager Museum of Art & Culture. They engage in educating students and utilize Hartwick’s campus and resources to express their identity and advocate for their culture and community.

It is through the generosity of donors that we intend to establish an endowment to fund this opportunity. The residency would pay for housing, supplies, and an honorarium for the artist for up to two weeks on Hartwick’s campus. The residency would be based out of the Yager Museum of Art & Culture, whose mission has always been to showcase and explore Native American culture and achievement. The artist would create works in the museum or elsewhere on campus, with some part of that creation being publicly shared through an artist’s talk, workshop, open studio, or another format. At the conclusion, the museum would host a reception showcasing the artist and the works created. One piece of the artist’s choosing would then be donated to the Yager Museum to continue to build the museum’s collection of Native American Art.

Melanie Printup Hope is a graphic artist and designer of Tuscarora and European descent. Born and raised on the Tuscarora Nation Reservation in western New York, Hope earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and an MFA in Electronic Arts at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her work cuts across established genres and mediums, and explodes seemingly separated categories like “craft” and “art”, “modern” and “traditional”, “European” and “Indigenous”, while maintaining a strongly political focus on issues of colonization, environmental degradation, Haudenosaunee cultural reclamation, and Indigenous Identity.

She has exhibited across North America and in Europe, at the National Museum of the American Indian, the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Native Americas International Film Festival in Sante Fe, and numerous other venues. Recognized with many prestigious awards, she has been received the Rockefeller Foundation Intercultural Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship, as well as grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council of the Arts, and the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund. Highly sought after as a teacher of art, she has lectured at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada, and is professor Emeritus at the Sage Colleges at Albany and Troy, New York, as well as former Associate Dean and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, Canada.

For more information about the Phil Young Residency for Indigenous Art, contact Quentin Lewis, Curator of the Yager Museum of Art & Culture, and Lecturer in Museum Studies at [email protected] or 607-431-4481.

The Yager Museum of Art & Culture