Alan Michelson’s Wolf Nation (2018) opens with a lone wolf gradually joined by its pack. Panoramic in format, the video echoes the elongated configuration as well as the purple and white palette of a Haudenosaunee wampum belt.  Instruments of diplomacy and ceremony, wampum belts communicated and authorised agreements and relationships, first among Indigenous nations, and later between them and colonial bodies.  Originally crafted from the shells of the Atlantic quahog and whelk, wampum has seen adaptations including glass and plastic beads and, here, pixels—a transformation Métis scholar Sherry Farrell Racette has termed “deep continuity.”*

Internationally acclaimed for his richly poetic, multi-layered, site-specific work, Michelson transposes webcam footage of a pack of red wolves into a glowing electronic wampum belt warning of their threatening extinction. Conceived for an exhibition at Storm King Art Center in 2018, Wolf Nation connects the eradication of the wolves from their original habitat to that of the Wolf Clan Munsee from their Hudson Valley homelands. Although in the original footage the pack is confined in a  wolf conservation centre in the area, through the artist’s alterations the pack is shown unperturbed in a small forest clearing, interrupted only by the occasional falling leaf. The all-wolf soundtrack by White Mountain Apache composer and musician Laura Ortman, does not stem from the footage, but is rather a haunting addition conveying a sense of ancestral time. 

In this work, Michelson affirms the deep kinship between Indigenous peoples and their non-human Indigenous relations, and deplores their shared fates under colonialism. Using pixels as beads, he has woven a belt for our urgent times.

Alan Michelson (b.1953) is an internationally recognized New York-based artist, curator, writer, lecturer and Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River. For over twenty-five years, he has been a leading practitioner of a socially engaged, critically aware, site-specific art grounded in local context and informed by the retrieval of repressed histories.

Select exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Tate Modern (London), the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian (Washington), the 14th Gwangju Biennial (Korea), the 18th Sydney Biennial (Australia), the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville), the Woodland Cultural Centre (Brantford) and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa) amongst numerous other international presentations. He is the recipient of several awards, including an NEA Visual Artists Fellowship, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship, and the GSA Design Award, Citation in Art. His works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Peabody Essex Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.

Michelson is co-founder and co-curator, with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, of the Indigenous New York series.

*Sherry Farrell Racette, "Encoded Knowledge: Memory and Objects in Contemporary Native American Art," In Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism, ed. Nancy Mithlo (Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 2011).