Nicholas Galanin Tlingit/Unangax̂, born 1979 in Sitka, Alaska 2015 Taxidermied polar bear, polar bear rug 80 x 120 x 42 inches Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York An artist of rigorous training, versatility, and wit, Nicholas Galanin’s work treats “adaptation, resilience, survival, memory, cultural resurgence, [and] connection to and disconnection from the land.” Through this poignant reclamation and redirection of a hunter’s trophy, Galanin calls out injustices done to living beings, land, and water. Having been forced to protect his native artmaking methods from assimilation into Eurocentric studio practice, Galanin understands the importance of expressing place and origin in his work, and decries contemporary society’s disconnect from them. As such, his work often examines the commercialization of Indigenous culture, and condemns the market-driven quest for “authentic” Native American art. Examples of this artistic resistance include works that reduce tourist-trade masks to wood chips, or coax a Tlingit Raven mask profile from the carved pages of a Christian Bible. In this same way, We Dreamt Deaf contests commodification and calls for accountability. As Galanin observed in a 2019 interview with the Honolulu Museum of Art: "The taxidermy polar bear—shot in the 1970s by a white sport hunter in Shishmaref, a village now falling back into the ocean due to climate change—melts into trophy form. We Dreamt Deaf is half-animal, half-rug, fixed in the struggle to survive an unsustainable condition. With this title, we are all implicated in participating in the anthropocentric industrial dream that renders us deaf to our impact on all of our relatives (human and nonhuman). Speaking to colonizers and colonized, to generations past and future, to humans as an animal forgetful of our place in the world, the work speaks of losing sight and sound of what is done to us and by us; of how we are living, what is being lost through our taking." AW Image: Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York