Maria Hupfield, Lisa Le Feuvre, and Mikinaak Migwans

Nancy Holt (1938–2014) was a member of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. An innovator of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades she asked questions about how we might understand our place in the world, investigating perception, systems, and place. Holt’s rich artistic output spans concrete poetry, audio works, film and video, photography, ephemeral gestures, drawings, room-sized installations, earthworks, artists’ books, and public sculpture commissions. Holt described herself as a “perception artist”; throughout her oeuvre she repeatedly challenges us to look beyond what we think we know. 

Maria Hupfield merges performance art, design, and sculpture, drawing from Indigenous storytelling traditions through art, scholarship, collaboration, and social justice.
 
Hupfield was the inaugural ArtworxTO Legacy Artist in Residence with the City of Toronto and a recipient of the Hnatyshyn Mid-Career Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Prize, among others. Her work has been exhibited, performed, and collected across North America. She is co-owner of Native Art Department International with her husband, artist Jason Lujan.
 
Hupfield is Martin clan and an off-reservation member of the Anishinaabe Nation belonging to Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario. Since 2019, she has served as a Canada research chair in transdisciplinary Indigenous art and an assistant professor of Indigenous digital arts and performance in the Department of Visual Studies and the Department of English & Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, and editor. She is the inaugural executive director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, the artist-endowed foundation dedicated to the creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Between 2010 and 2017 Le Feuvre was head of sculpture studies at the Henry Moore Institute, directing the research component of the largest artist-endowed foundation in Europe, leading programs of education, research, collections, publications, and exhibitions focused on sculptural thinking. She has curated more than 70 exhibitions as an institutional and independent curator, played a pivotal role in shaping academic and arts organizations, edited over 30 books and journals, spoken at museums and universities across the world, and has published more than 100 essays and interviews with artists.

Mikinaak Migwans is a member of Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory and an assistant professor in the Department of Art History and curator of Indigenous art in the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the politics of placemaking from the land to the museum, with special emphasis on textile arts in Anishinaabe territory. Migwans has worked with the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts & Culture at Carleton University, the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation in M’Chigeeng First Nation, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.