Indigenous Arts Festival features hip-hop, Native dances, films, artistic workshops

Amy Geiszler-Jones
·4 min read

Growing up on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, Frank Waln was first introduced to hip hop music as a kid when he found a scratched-up CD of Detroit rapper Eminem, who’s been acknowledged as breaking the racial lines of the genre.

For the past several years, Waln has broken barriers too as a Native American rapper, sharing some of his life experiences through music. His unique hip-hop presence has earned him interviews with Playboy, Vibe, NPR and other media outlets, and tours in other countries.

Waln will perform in Wichita on Tuesday, kicking off the two-day Contemporary Indigenous Arts Festival being organized by the Ulrich Museum of Art on the Wichita State University campus. The free concert starts at 7 p.m. in WSU’s Duerkson Amphitheater.

The concert will include an opening performance by Mvskoke Creek/Seneca hoop dancers Lumhe and Samoche Sampson, who perform Native hoop dances to hip-hop. Known as the Sampson Brothers, they’ll join Waln later in the concert too.

Waln, whose Sicangu Lakota tribal name is Oyate Teca Obmani, has released two solo albums, “Born Ready” and “The Bridge,” and has received three Native American Music Awards. Besides performing solo, he also sings and records with his band, Nake Nula Waun, according to a news release about the festival.

“He’s a unique and dynamic performer,” said Teri Mott, the Ulrich’s interim creative communications manager. A former pre-med student, Waln has talked about music being “good medicine.”

A Gates Millennium scholarship recipient who earned a degree in audio arts and acoustics, Waln is also presenting an indigenous songwriting master class workshop Thursday morning.

The festival will include other live performances, artist talks, a film program and hands-on workshops led by indigenous artists, including the Wichita-based WarClan Collective, that all happen on Wednesday in various locations on the WSU campus.

The popular award-winning Wichita War Dancer Greg Victors, whose Ponca name is Tohono O’Odham, will perform and give a presentation in the atrium of McKnight Art Center from 12:15 to 2:15 p.m.

The film programming is part of the 2022 Sundance Indigenous Short Film Tour. It’s a 90-minute showing of narratives and documentary shorts curated from the Sundance Dance Festival shorts program and alumni of the Sundance Institute’s indigenous program.

All of the events are free to attend, but preregistration is required for the workshops and film showings. Register at IndigenousArtsFestival.eventbrite.com.

The programming ties in with the Ulrich Museum’s fall exhibition, “Myths of the West: Narrating stories of the Land and People through Wichita Art Collections.” Approximately 80 pieces comprise the exhibit, which opened in late August and closes Dec. 3.

The artists included range from early Native American artists Blackbear Bosin and Woody Crumbo, who both had Wichita connections and renowned reputations, to contemporary artist Edgar Heap of Birds from Oklahoma, according to curator Ksenya Gurshtein.

Gurshtein put together the exhibition to bring attention to Native American artists and recognize that “the city of Wichita occupies the traditional homelands and hunting and camping territories of several Native American nations, including the Kiowa, Kaw, Osage, Wichita, the people of the Seven Council Fires, and many other Indigenous caretakers of this land and water,” she wrote in the exhibition catalog.

“Two Places,” by artist Norman Akers, a part of the Art of Emprise collection, is among the works being exhibited in the Ulrich Museum’s fall exhibition, “Myths of the West: Narrating stories of the Land and People through Wichita Art Collections.”
“Two Places,” by artist Norman Akers, a part of the Art of Emprise collection, is among the works being exhibited in the Ulrich Museum’s fall exhibition, “Myths of the West: Narrating stories of the Land and People through Wichita Art Collections.”

There are 30 works from the Wichita Art Museum in the show, including all 12 of Crumbo’s Ritual Dances series, while other works were culled from Art Bridges in Arkansas, the Lowell Holmes Museum of Anthropology at WSU and the Art of Emprise collection. The latter is a collection held by Wichita-based Emprise Bank. Works from two private collections are also part of the show.

With a jam-packed schedule of festival events on Wednesday, several programs will run concurrently, but some will also be repeated. Many of the workshops will include an artist talk before participants do the hands-on activities, including tattoos led by Hell Bomb Tattoo artist Megan Shelton (Ponca/Seminole/Creek), beading by artist Tylana Looking Glass (Comanche/Apache) and sun printing led by Taiomah Rutledge (Ojibwe/Meskwaki/Dakota), co-founder of WarClan Collective.

For a complete schedule of the two-day festival activities, visit ulrich.wichita.edu.