Grey Art Museum and CIRCL present talk by Indigenous artist Jeremy Dennis

NYU’s Grey Art Museum, in collaboration with Center CIRCL at NYU, will present a public talk at 6 p.m. on February 24 by artist and curator Jeremy Dennis, whose work explores Indigenous relationships to land, time, and cultural continuity. The event situates Dennis’s practice within broader Indigenous frameworks that challenge colonial narratives and affirm Native presence as ongoing rather than historical.

A member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, Dennis foregrounds land as a living archive in his photographic and curatorial work. His practice resists colonial models that frame Indigenous histories as fixed in the past, instead emphasizing persistence, survivance, and cyclical understandings of time. In conversation with the visual expressions of ancestral continuity found in Papunya Tula paintings, Dennis will examine how contemporary Indigenous artists sustain relationships to place despite centuries of dispossession and imposed erasure.

The talk explores how Indigenous artists articulate temporal frameworks that defy linear, occupation-based histories, offering alternative ways of understanding memory, land, and cultural endurance. Through this lens, Dennis connects global Indigenous practices while remaining grounded in the specific histories of Shinnecock territory on Long Island.

Jeremy Dennis is a contemporary fine art photographer and enrolled Tribal Member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, New York. He is the founder and lead artist of Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc., a nonprofit art space and residency program on the Shinnecock Reservation dedicated to supporting Indigenous and BIPOC artists.

Dennis’s work centers Indigenous identity, Native oral traditions, and the legacies of colonial assimilation. Using photography, he creates cinematic, otherworldly scenes rooted in ancestral stories, historical memory, and contemporary Indigenous life. His major ongoing projects include “On This Site — Native Long Island,” an interactive photographic map documenting culturally significant Native sites; “Rise and Nothing Happened Here,” which confront colonial violence and erasure; and “Stories — Indigenous Oral Stories, Dreams, and Myths,” which reimagines Native cosmologies through staged photography.

Dennis has received numerous honors, including a 2025 New York State Council on the Arts Grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Residency Fellowship, an Andy Warhol Visual Arts Residency (2023), a Getty Creative Bursary Award, and Running Strong for American Indian Youth Dreamstarter Grants. Most recently, he was awarded the Artist to Artist Fellowship from the Art Matters Foundation.

He has participated in residencies at institutions such as Yaddo, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Watermill Center, and the Vermont Studio Center. Dennis currently serves on several advisory boards supporting arts, education, and community initiatives across Long Island.

Jeremy Dennis lives and works in Southampton, New York, on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation.

For more information on the talk, click the event link here.