Join Dr. Meranda Roberts (Northern Paiute) and Leah Mata Fragua (artist, educator, and member of the yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini [Northern Chumash] tribe) for a conversation about “place-based” art, defined by Mata Fragua as “art that evolves from one’s connection to place as an Indigenous Person.”
Roberts and Mata Fragua will discuss the adaptations tribal members have used to sustain traditional art practices and how non-Native institutions can support them moving forward, especially considering the legal and environmental challenges that restrict California Native American communities’ access to cultural resources.
Photo: Cara Romero
Leah Mata Fragua is an artist, educator, and member of the yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini (Northern Chumash) tribe located on the Central California Coast. As a place-based artist, Leah’s kincentric approach seamlessly blends shared iconography with personal imagery, highlighting the impact each has on the other. She uses a diverse range of materials, from synthetic to organic, placed based to modern, to explore the interconnectedness and dependence between land, kinships, and self. She understands that her art is a reflection of the way she prioritizes the protection of traditional materials and the continuation of art forms that are important to her community, which intersect with her individual practice.
Leah is an adjunct professor in the Indigenous Liberal Studies department at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She travels between New Mexico and California, maintaining close ties to her tribal community and ancestral homelands. Her award-winning work is included in many public and private collections internationally. She was also honored with a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in 2011. She was selected as a Master Artist recipient for the Alliance of California Traditional Arts (ACTA) in 2013 and, most recently, the 2020 Barbra Dobkin Fellowship at the School of Advanced Research. Her education includes a B.A. in Anthropology and an M.A. in Cultural Sustainability from Goucher College, and she is currently completing her MFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Dr. Meranda Roberts is a citizen of the Yerington Paiute Tribe and Chicana. She has a Ph.D. in Native American History and an M.A. in Public History from the University of California, Riverside. Meranda has worked as a co-curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, where she developed brand new content for the museum’s Native American exhibition hall, "Native Truths: Our Stories. Our Voices." She curated the 2023 Native American Invitational Exhibition at Idyllwild Arts titled "Still We Smile: Humor as Correction and Joy" and is currently guest curating the exhibition "Continuity: Cahuilla Basket Weavers and their Legacies," which will open at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in Winter 2024. Meranda is also a visiting professor at Pomona College in the art history department.Meranda’s passion lies in holding colonial institutions, like museums, accountable for the harmful narratives they have created about Indigenous people. She is dedicated to reconnecting Indigenous collection items with their descendants and telling these items’ stories in a way that adequately expresses their meaning to the communities they come from. Using Indigenous methodologies and anti-colonial pedagogy, Meranda’s work exemplifies ways in which we can work toward a more equitable future.