AIRIE Fellow
M. Carmen Lane
2022 June
Visual Art
Cleveland, OH
M. Carmen Lane is a two:spirit African-American and Haudenosaunee (Mohawk/Tuscarora) artist, writer and facilitator living in Cleveland, Ohio. Lane is founder and director of ATNSC: Center for Healing & Creative Leadership, an urban retreat center and social practice experiment in holistic health, leadership development, Indigenous arts and culture and the Akhsótha Gallery located in the historic Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood. Lane’s work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including the Yellow Medicine Review, Red Ink Magazine, Anomaly, and the Lambda Literary Award-nominated Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two Spirit Literatures. Lane’s first collection of poetry is Calling Out After Slaughter (2015). Lane has exhibited work during the FRONT 2018 Triennial, EFA Project Space and Praxis Fiber Workshop Gallery. In 2020, Lane was awarded a Joyce Award with ATNSC: Center for Healing and Creative Leadership.
Lane is the recipient of AIRIE’s 2022 Indigenous Artist Fellowship
BIO
About the work When You Visit Other Camps, 2022, from Passages at the Nest
“The title of the work comes from a teaching of Maggie Osceola (Seminole), "When you visit other camps you must show good behavior." I took these words in while being hosted by Samuel Tommie at the Seminole Museum. As a guest and distant relative to the Seminole and Miccosukee people "visiting" the Everglades, the experience of hospitality and care emerged as a significant energy and catalyst for investigation. In a settler colonial context, how do we construct meaning in relationship to the environments we find ourselves in? In holding the Everglades as a whole, there is no binary between the city and the "park." It's ALL the Everglades. This work explores kinship, racialization, power, and the teachings embedded within the land while acknowledging the limiting belief systems and fragmentation of colonial narratives regarding place and lineages.”