honorable mention
Matika Wilbur united states
title
Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America
Project 562 is the solution to historical inaccuracies, stereotypical representations and silenced Native American voices in massive-media. Matika’s work aims to humanize, the otherwise “vanishing race”, and share the stories that Native Americans would like told.
In this respectful way, Matika has been welcomed into hundreds of tribal communities, and she has found that people support the project, because they would like to see things change. Conversations about tribal sovereignty, self-determination, wellness, recovery from historical trauma, decolonization of the mind and revitalization of culture accompany the photos in captions, video, and audio recordings.
The time of sharing, building cultural bridges, abolishing racism and honoring the legacy that this country is built on is among us.
Project 562 is that platform.
Wilbur began her extraordinary portrait work after a dream in which her grandmother Laura Wilbur, a prominent Swinomish tribal leader, urged her to return home from a South American assignment and begin photographing her own people. She first focused on portraits of Coast Salish elders in We Are One People, she probed the breadth and complexity of contemporary Native American identity with We Emerge and a 2011 one-person exhibition, Save the Indian, Kill the Man at The Seattle Art Museum.
Her most recent endeavor, Project 562, is a multi-year national photography project dedicated to photographing over 562 federally-recognized tribes in The United States in an effort to create an unprecedented repository of imagery and oral histories that accurately portrays contemporary Native Americans. This creative, consciousness-shifting work will be widely distributed through updated national curricula, artistic publications, exhibitions and online portals.
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entry description
Project 562 is a multi-year national photography project dedicated to photographing over 562 federally-recognized tribes in The United States in an effort to create an unprecedented repository of imagery and oral histories that accurately portrays contemporary Native Americans. This creative, consciousness-shifting work will be widely distributed through updated national curricula, artistic publications, exhibitions and online portals.Project 562 is the solution to historical inaccuracies, stereotypical representations and silenced Native American voices in massive-media. Matika’s work aims to humanize, the otherwise “vanishing race”, and share the stories that Native Americans would like told.
In this respectful way, Matika has been welcomed into hundreds of tribal communities, and she has found that people support the project, because they would like to see things change. Conversations about tribal sovereignty, self-determination, wellness, recovery from historical trauma, decolonization of the mind and revitalization of culture accompany the photos in captions, video, and audio recordings.
The time of sharing, building cultural bridges, abolishing racism and honoring the legacy that this country is built on is among us.
Project 562 is that platform.
about the photographer
Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) graduated from the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California and also trained at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography.Wilbur began her extraordinary portrait work after a dream in which her grandmother Laura Wilbur, a prominent Swinomish tribal leader, urged her to return home from a South American assignment and begin photographing her own people. She first focused on portraits of Coast Salish elders in We Are One People, she probed the breadth and complexity of contemporary Native American identity with We Emerge and a 2011 one-person exhibition, Save the Indian, Kill the Man at The Seattle Art Museum.
Her most recent endeavor, Project 562, is a multi-year national photography project dedicated to photographing over 562 federally-recognized tribes in The United States in an effort to create an unprecedented repository of imagery and oral histories that accurately portrays contemporary Native Americans. This creative, consciousness-shifting work will be widely distributed through updated national curricula, artistic publications, exhibitions and online portals.
back to gallery
