Anna Tsouhlarakis: The Native Guide Project: Columbus 

A multilayered commission, The Native Guide Project: Columbus builds on Tsouhlarakis’s The Native Guide Project (2019–present), which deploys boldface phrases such as “I LIKE HOW YOU SEE NATIVE AMERICANS AS YOUR INTELLECTUAL EQUAL.” The Native Guide Project: Columbus is installed on the building’s exterior grid scaffolding through December 30, 2023, and in the interior lobby through October 15, 2023. Work by Tsouhlarakis was also featured on monitors around Columbus thanks to a partnership with Orange Barrel Media.

Framed as responses to a potential interlocutor, Tsouhlarakis’s texts encourage viewers to question their complicity in the ongoing erasure and displacement of Indigenous tribes. The work references the more than 10,000 earthworks across Ohio built by Native people long before the arrival of settler-colonists.

The Native Guide Project: Columbus continues the artist’s earlier text-based works such as Edges of the Ephemeral (2012) and In Other Words: A Native Primer (2013)—in which she worked closely with members of Native American communities about their beliefs and experiences.

In January and February 2023, the center’s dedicated video gallery The Box presented Tsouhlarakis’s short Breath of Wind.