inVISIBILITY: Indigenous in the city - Indigenous artists, Indigenous youth and the project of survivance

The inVISIBILITY exhibition featured urban Indigenous artists whose work addresses issues of urban Indigeneity and education. Through their work, the artists simultaneously clarify and complicate stories of schooling told by Indigenous students, resulting in an exhibition that called on stakeholders in education and the public to think and respond. In this paper we consider visual art in the exhibition alongside stories told by Indigenous students. Both the artists and the students describe the ways in which they “don’t (didn’t) fit in school and schools don’t (didn’t) fit them.” It is their Indigeneity that, in different ways, creates the rupture. Working with a particular conception of presence articulated by Gerald Vizenor (1994), who explains that survival plus resistance equals survivance, we investigate and describe the rupture. Drawing on the work of scholars in the field of Indigenous art including Jolene Rickard (20013, 1992), Greg Hill (2013, 2011), Gerald Vizenor (2008, 2013,), Gerald McMaster (2013) and Heather Igloliorte (2013), we position our analysis within an emerging body of literature addressing the continuous presence of Indigenous peoples in spaces of cultural significance for knowledge-making - including museums, galleries and schools.