Anna Tsouhlarakis

Jan 15

Curator: New Red Order

Anna Tsouhlarakis (Navajo/Creek) works in sculpture, installation, video, and performance. For Counterpublic 2023, The Native Guide Project: STL is a multi-media artwork consisting of a billboard and public digital displays throughout St. Louis. Using text as a vehicle to question place, land, identity, and narrative, The Native Guide Project: STL aims to occupy and recondition the mindset of viewers. Following the first The Native Guide Project (2019-present) and The Native Guide Project: Columbus (2023), Tsouhlarakis focuses on the Indigenous presence of the area which precedes the city of St. Louis illustrated in the monumental architectural constructions we refer to as “mounds” of the tribes residing alongside the currently named Mississippi River. Though Native people were forcibly removed from this area, The Native Guide Project: STL demonstrates their ancestors, their stories, and their knowledge remain a part of this land forever.

About the artist

Anna Tsouhlarakis works in sculpture, installation, video, and performance to challenge and stretch the aesthetic and conceptual boundaries of Native art. Using Indigenous epistemologies as starting points, her work reframes the discourse around the construction of Native identity. She received her BA from Dartmouth College and her MFA from Yale University. Tsouhlarakis has participated in various art residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, and was the Andrew W. Mellon Artist-in-Residence at Colorado College for the 2019-2020 academic year. Tsouhlarakis’s work has been part of national and international exhibitions at venues such as NEON Foundation in Athens, Greece; White Frame in Basel, Switzerland; Rush Arts in New York; the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; the National Museum of the American Indian; and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. She recently received a Creative Capital Award and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Tsouhlarakis is an Assistant Professor in the Art and Art History Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is Greek, Creek, and an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation.