Visitors and friends are invited to join a conversation with Residency artists Noelle Garcia and Joseph Lefthand moderated by Mariela Acuna, HPAC Exhibitions and Residency Manager. The conversation will reflect themes of race, identity, relationship building, and trust between artists (particularly Native artists) and institutions. The conversation will highlight how these themes are reflected upon through the artists’ practices of expressing gratitude, both through their work and in relationship to themselves, and others. 

To Ponder is an Artist to Artist Conversation series featuring exhibition artists and HPAC Jackman Goldwasser Creative Wing resident artists. To Ponder, named after their program space, colloquially called “the pond,” is also a space for artists to think through something they are currently in practice with or bring a question or theme to the table “to ponder.”

Joseph Lefthand is an artist, administrator, and cultural advocate based in Chicago. Descended from the Cheyenne-Arapaho, Taos, and Zuni tribes, Lefthand works at the intersection of art and social practice, exploring the role of embodiment, “performance-as-theory”, and communal inquiry as sustainable modes of discourse when confronting institutional and historic systems of violence. His current research imagines contemporary, traditional, and hybrid forms of performance and dance as catalytic to shared resilience and cultural resistance.

Based in the Chicago metropolitan area, Noelle Garcia is an artist who focuses on themes of identity, family history and recovered narratives in her work. She is an North American indigenous artist from the Klamath, Modoc and Paiute tribes from Oregon and Nevada. Her multidisciplinary practice utilizes various research methods in order to inform her methodology in both art making and education. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and institutions across the United States. Garcia has earned awards and fellowships at various institutions such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the American Indian Graduate Center, the Nevada Arts Council, and the  Illinois Arts Council Agency. Noelle has held residencies at multiple organizations such as ACRE, Ox-Bow, and Ucross Foundation. Additionally, Noelle has published multiple articles and illustrations in publications such as the American Quarterly, Arts Everywhere Musagetes, and various graphic novels.