Anna Tsouhlarakis: To Bind or to Burn

To Bind or To Burn presents recent works by multi-media and performance artist Anna Tsouhlarakis (Navajo, Creek, and Greek). Tsouhlarakis was the 2019-20 Andrew W. Mellon artist in residence at the FAC. During this time in the studio, she explored projects that questioned how to indigenize contemporary art practice. This exhibition combines art works from these explorations with earlier works to show her continued engagement with the connections between Native American Art and Minimalism. Tsouhlarakis identified artist Sol Lewitt’s project of studies of incomplete cubes as a starting point for her investigation. She was intrigued by Robert Rosenblum’s statement, “Lewitt’s search for the building blocks of form, for the basic alphabet, vocabulary, and grammar of all structures, is one that has a deeply ingrained tradition in the history of modern art…” And she wanted to understand how she could interrupt this “vocabulary” and insert Native art into the conversation. The result was a se