Recently, we caught up with modern dance and gender studies student, Terra Killpack-Knutsen, on her work as co-curator of the upcoming exhibit “Half a Century in Motion: Honoring Chicanx Dance, Art, and Activism.” This exhibition was created to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1975 Chicano Awareness Week event held at the University of Utah. The exhibit will run from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15 in the lobby of the Marriott Center for Dance.

The School of Dance is also hosting a series of Latinx Heritage Celebration concerts. Find dates, times and tickets here.

What’s your background? How/why did you become involved in the project?

I am currently in my fourth year at the University of Utah, double-majoring in modern dance and gender studies with a minor in ethnic studies. Dance and activism have been two constant pillars in my life. I have been dancing since I was three years old and attending protests since I was in my mama’s womb. Within the last five or six years, I have become especially interested in exploring the ways in which dance and activism intersect, and have found a lot of this crossover through the mediums of research and public scholarship. I feel passionately that art can be activism and activism can be art. Art has the power to kindle collective consciousness; it’s capable of bringing awareness to various sociopolitical issues and injustices in really powerful ways. It can also act as a vehicle for cultivating and maintaining embodied knowledge and engaged citizenship (Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda 2018). This project offered a wonderful opportunity to dive into the ways in which dance and dance pedagogy have been sites of resistance as well as sites of colonial and appropriative exploitation.

I became involved with this curatorial collective when my then dance histories professor, Kiri Avelar, approached me with the idea towards the end of last semester. In Professor Avelar’s dance histories course, she prompted us to critically question positionality within historical knowledge productions, to examine the gaps and silences within archival materials, and to continuously interrogate the dominant narratives of what we are told modern dance is. The concepts we explored in this class inspired me as both a dancer and as an activist, and in wanting to further my own research I was incredibly honored to join the curatorial collective for this exhibit. I am so grateful to Professor Avelar for trusting me with this project. It has been an amazing experience to work alongside her and the other thoughtful dance-scholars on this exhibition. Scholarly work like this is needed now more than ever.

What are the themes of the exhibition?

The idea behind the exhibition was to create a space for academic research to be in conversation with the School of Dance’s fall concert, Latinx Heritage Celebration. This concert, featuring works by Michelle Manzanales, Stephanie García, and the curatorial collective’s very own Roxanne Gray, coincides with National Hispanic Heritage Month, and also falls on the 50th anniversary of the “Chicano Awareness Week” that happened on the University of Utah campus in March of 1975. There are so many themes that we came into this process with, and many more that came out of the research that was submitted. Across the board, we have a big focus on exploring hxstories, activism, art making, and teaching through a borderlands perspective; decolonial, Queer and Chicana feminist pedagogical frameworks; and art creations that challenge what has been silenced and ignored within artistic and academic spaces.

In response to social efforts, such as the Chicano Movement, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law Hispanic Heritage Week in 1968, which was later expanded to a full month of celebrations (September 15 – October 15) in 1988. This exhibition and the correlating performance, Latinx Heritage Celebration (September 25-October 4), are our way to continue the legacy of student, faculty, staff, and community activism.

Thinking/creating/curating through the arts allows us to explore these local histories of the Chicano Movement and imagine new futures. This process asks us to pay attention to geography and think about the civil rights in this state and the activism on this campus. National movements are sustained by local activity.

In what ways did you connect to the themes?

I think this never-ending work of (re)mapping, of (re)considering, of interrogating what Western education has told us to be true, is a part of being decolonially vigilant. And doing this work through the lens of the Chicanx political consciousness is a powerful way to engage with decolonial scholarship inside and outside of art-making.

What’s your favorite piece in the exhibition? Why?

I can’t say I have a favorite because each piece is so distinctly unique and important. As a queer artist and gender studies major, I am particularly drawn to Soph Cardinal and Sean Sullivan’s emphasis on Queer and Trans embodied resistance and pedagogy. I love the powerful images from Sumedha Bhattacharyya and Hediyeh Azma’s collaborative exploration of cultural restrictions and censorship. We have so many works that traverse multiple disciplines: photo essays, collages, an incredible musical segment of a future Spanglish opera. Everyone was so creative in the ways they chose to showcase their research, which has made putting this exhibition together all that more exciting.

What was it like working with a curatorial collective?

Working as a curatorial collective has been an amazing experience. Our fabulous collective is made up of Kiri Avelar (Assistant Professor in the School of Dance), Alexia Maikidou Poutrino (MFA candidate), Roxanne Gray (alumna), Katherine Boyce (undergraduate, modern dance with honors major, global health minor), and myself. What has been incredible to witness is how quickly we pulled this together with very limited face-to-face planning. We only had a few Zoom meetings between the months of May and August, within which we completed the bulk of this project. At the same time as we were collectively creating our call for submissions, deciding what we wanted this exhibition to showcase, reviewing submissions,  providing feedback, and organizing all of the logistical details that are the byproduct of putting together an event like this, we were all also developing our own research to contribute to the exhibition! There have been a lot of moving parts to navigate, and with as little time as we have had, I think we have done a good job at supporting and encouraging one another through each and every step. In our last meeting, Professor Avelar said something along the lines of, “We all rally and do what we can with what we have,” which is very much in line with the Rasquachismo Chicano sensibility—one of the themes we explored within this exhibition (Tomás Ybarra-Frausto 1989). This is a resourceful strategy, making do with what we have, making something out of nothing—an underdog stance.

Working as a collective was a necessary way of honoring the Chicano Movement the exhibit is based on. A social movement is most often defined as a sustained and collectively organized effort to achieve a particular goal. We, as a collective, while small, have worked together to create an exhibition with the goal of highlighting erased and ignored hxstories and their decolonial implication in the world of art and academia. We hope that the exhibition’s work sparks awareness and encourages future engagement with the research presented (and beyond). Co-creating knowledge is an important part of decolonial praxis. By working as a collective, we were able to hold each other accountable, and present work that tells the stories of multiple perspectives and lived realities.

We have dedicated this exhibit to all the students, faculty, staff, and community members/organizations who were responsible for the “Chicano Awareness Week” held on this campus fifty years ago.

Sources: 

Sepúlveda, Gabriela Aceves. “‘¡Estamos Hartas!’: FEMINIST PERFORMANCES, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND THE MEANINGS OF POLITICAL SOLIDARITY IN 1970S MEXICO.” In The Art of Solidarity: Visual and Performative Politics in Cold War Latin America, edited by Jessica Stites Mor and Maria del Carmen Suescun Pozas, 149–92. University of Texas Press, 2018. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7560/316399.8.

Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás. 2019. “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility.” In Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Jennifer A. González, C. Ondine Chavoya, Chon Noriega, and Terezita Romo, 85–90. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.