Unsettling the Archive

Unsettling the Archive: Exploring Tufts’ Relationships with Land uses materials from the Tufts University Permanent Art Collection and Tufts Digital Collections & Archives to explore the university’s relationship to the land it occupies, with a focus on making visible and unsettling the prevailing narratives of the campus ecosystem. To this end, the exhibition also seeks to present counternarratives to this archive, and will include contemporary work sourced from local artists and community members that consider questions of land and place.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Erin Genia’s commissioned mural, Wakpa, is drawn from the Dakota word for river. Depicting the Mystic River, which is the watershed that Tufts University Art Gallery resides within, Genia utilizes the imagery of Anpa O Wicahnpi – the Morningstar – as a way to honor Indigenous perspective and develop new relationships to place.