Dylan A. T. Miner

Indigenous Aesthetics critically investigates the intersection of contemporary native art and anti-colonial politics. In the wake of the near universal adoption of the United Nations' Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a text of this nature is crucial as contemporary indigenous artists, activists, and curators continue to change the landscape of indigeneity and the political possibilities of self-determination (both political and artistic). No other single-authored book has explored the relationship between contemporary artistic practice and indigenous activism. With a focus on 'non-traditional' indigenous practices, Miner explores the discourses and the artistic and aesthetic sites in which contemporary Native artists are participating. In this way, an engaged analysis of contemporary art – including popular and street art, indigenous theory, and curatorial work – appropriately positions news ways of seeing indigenous North American art. Written from an indigenist perspective, one which incorporates Western theories, yet couched in contemporary indigenous ontologies, Indigenous Aesthetics is the first book of its kind to discuss contemporary Native art in relationship to radical politics and/or aesthetics.

Indigenous Aesthetics critically investigates the intersection of contemporary native art and anti-colonial politics. In the wake of the near universal adoption of the United Nations' Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a text of this nature is crucial as contemporary indigenous artists, activists, and curators continue to change the landscape of indigeneity and the political possibilities of self-determination (both political and artistic). No other single-authored book has explored the relationship between contemporary artistic practice and indigenous activism. With a focus on 'non-traditional' indigenous practices, Miner explores the discourses and the artistic and aesthetic sites in which contemporary Native artists are participating. In this way, an engaged analysis of contemporary art – including popular and street art, indigenous theory, and curatorial work – appropriately positions news ways of seeing indigenous North American art. Written from an indigenist perspective, one which incorporates Western theories, yet couched in contemporary indigenous ontologies, Indigenous Aesthetics is the first book of its kind to discuss contemporary Native art in relationship to radical politics and/or aesthetics.

In lowriding culture, the ride is many things—both physical and intellectual. Embraced by both Xicano and other Indigenous youth, lowriding takes something very ordinary—a car or bike—and transforms it and claims it.Using the idea that lowriding is an Indigenous way of being in the world, artist and historian Dylan A. T. Miner discusses the multiple roles that Aztlán has played at various moments in time, from the pre-Cuauhtemoc codices through both Spanish and American colonial regimes, past the Chicano Movement and into the present day. Across this “migration story,” Miner challenges notions of mestizaje and asserts Aztlán, as visualized by Xicano artists, as a form of Indigenous sovereignty.Throughout this book, Miner employs Indigenous and Native American methodologies to show that Chicano art needs to be understood in the context of Indigenous history, anticolonial struggle, and Native American studies. Miner pays particular attention to art outside the U.S. Southwest and includes discussions of work by Nora Chapa Mendoza, Gilbert “Magú” Luján, Santa Barraza, Malaquías Montoya, Carlos Cortéz Koyokuikatl, Favianna Rodríguez, and Dignidad Rebelde, which includes Melanie Cervantes and Jesús Barraza.With sixteen pages of color images, this book will be crucial to those interested in art history, anthropology, philosophy, and Chicano and Native American studies.Creating Aztlán interrogates the historic and important role that Aztlán plays in Chicano and Indigenous art and culture.

This essay collection gathers together writings on the works of Maria Campbell, feminist, activist, visionary, artist, mother, grandmother, and Métis elder. The book talks truthfully of Maria's journey as a writer, how her writing was infected with her experiences with marginalization and discrimination. And how she emerged on the other side having affirmed her identity.