Artist and Emily Carr University assistant professor Gina Adams recently spoke to Art & Object magazine about how art can confront issues of erasure and colonialism in popular culture — namely, in the globally popular sport of basketball.

In the article, Gina notes how becoming a basketball player in the NBA has a way of automatically assimilating an individual in the eyes of the public, regardless of their place of origin.

“They are seen as All American,” she says in the article. “This is extremely important [because] though there are many native and mixed Indigenous players, the actual count of Indigeneity …has never been counted by the NCAA or NBA.”

Gina’s own body of work, Honoring Modern Unidentified, takes this concern as its starting point.

The series of ceramic encaustic-coated molds of NBA regulation balls were created immediately following an intense period of research around photographs of unidentified Indigenous people, taken during the years the treaties between the U.S government and Native American tribes were first being drawn up.

Full article by Perrin Grauer: https://www.ecuad.ca/news/2020/gina-adams-talks-colonial-erasure-in-sports-in-art-object