Artist Talk with Bebonkwe Brown: Walking the City, Wahkohtowin-Style

Bebonkwe Brown's Urban Skins & Ancient Kin exhibit has been on display at the Brooklyn Heights Library since December 2023. The artist will return to the Library to discuss her work, which will be on display through July 22. Please join us in the Reading Circle on the main level! 

Brooklyn-based Nehiyow/Anishnawble/Metis artist Bebonkwe Brown (from Amiskwaciwâskahikan), will talk about ’walking the city’, the term she coined many years ago for the culturally informed urban gathering practices that are a foundation of her work while living in the city (like the majority of Native people today). She will share insights about how ‘wahkoktowin’, the Nehiyow (Plains Cree) term for deep relationship with land and animal relatives, is centered in her Urban Skins & Ancient Kin exhibition artworks and her overall arts practice, as well as in broader First Nations arts practices. Bebonkwe’s talk will also include an intro to the re/Indigenization of Western arts genres, advocating for how the long-standing fem-centric abstraction practices of Native Nations, particularly amongst plains tribes and territories, predate Western abstraction by thousands of years, while heavily informing it. The artist will share aspects and examples of of pre-contact and reservation era Indigenous abstract mark-making more recently associated with color-field and all-over painting, abstract expressionism, the support/structure movement and geometric abstraction, and how they relate to Native culture, history and world-view.

Bebonkwe / Jude Norris is a multi-media Nehiyow/Anishnawbe/Metis artist from Alberta, Canada, based in Brooklyn, NY. Bebonkwe's work embodies First Nations creative traditions in contemporary ways, reflecting the challenge & paradox of navigating deep cultural polarities and damage within colonized Indigenous territories, while transmuting the seemingly insurmountable into cultural continuance, celebration, lyricism and good medicine.      IG @bebonkwe

The Heritage Ambassador program is Brooklyn Public Library’s Folk Arts program that aims to foster cultural ecosystems at BPL branch libraries by bringing together folk and traditional artists, library staff, and communities to create connections via storytelling, relationship-building and community knowledge-sharing.