Independent Curators International, the New York–based nonprofit that looks to support the work of curators around the world, will give its 2022 Leo Award to Candice Hopkins, one of today’s most closely watched and influential curators. Hopkins will share the award with the nonprofit American Indian Community House.

Hopkins, a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation, is the inaugural director and chief curator of Forge Project, “a Native-led initiative centered on Indigenous art, decolonial education, and supporting leaders in culture, food security, and land justice based in the Mahicannituck valley on the unceded homelands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok, the Peoples of the Waters That are Never Still, who now reside in Wisconsin and are known as the Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohicans,” according to a release.

Founded in 1969, the American Indian Community House provides community support, including elder care and raising awareness around HIV/AIDS within Native communities, to the 35,000 Native Americans, from more than 70 Indigenous tribal affiliations, in New York City. The organization also maintains an exhibition space, AICH gallery that has shown work by artists like Greg Hill and Mario Martinez.

In addition to her work at Forge Project, Hopkins has been known for her curatorial work around the world that has charted new paths for the ways in which the work of Indigenous artists is supported, presented, and written about. Most recently, she served as the senior curator for the first two editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art. She also was a member of the curatorial team of Documenta 14 in 2017, and helped organize several editions of the SITElines biennial at SITE Santa Fe in New York. She also worked on the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

Additionally, Hopkins has also been a co-curator on numerous groundbreaking group exhibitions focused on Indigenous artists, including “Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years” a multi-venue exhibition in Winnipeg in 2009, “Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art” at the National Gallery of Canada in 2013, “Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now,” at Crystal Bridges in Arkansas in 2018, and “Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts,” which debuted in 2019 and has since traveled to seven venues through ICI.

When renowned art collector Peggy Guggenheim commissioned a young Jackson Pollock to paint a mural for her New York townhome in 1943, she was confident that she had discovered the next great American artist. The product of that commission, Mural, has been recognized as one of the most significant American artworks of the 20th century and launched Pollock to international stardom.

Similarly, when Guggenheim donated Mural to the University of Iowa in 1951, it signified a kind of arrival for the public university’s already prestigious art department. Mural and the University of Iowa have since become interchangeable symbols of artistic excellence; yet for the past 14 years, Pollock’s magnum opus has been only tenuously tethered to its Midwestern homestead since a devastating flood struck the university’s art museum in 2008 and displaced its collection. While all the works were recovered, they were left without a permanent home, and many of the university’s linchpin holdings—including Mural—were forced to take up temporary residence in galleries and storage units around the world.

But on July 14, 2022, after years of restoration work and tours throughout the United States and Europe, Mural returned to the University of Iowa, kicking off a celebration a decade and a half in the making.

The University of Iowa’s reputation as a world-class enclave for fine art dates back more than a century. The university began offering formal curricula in fine arts in the late 19th century, but planted its stake as a pioneering institution for arts education in the 1920s with the introduction of the “Iowa Idea,” the then-novel concept that artists and art scholars ought to practice alongside one another within an academic context, allowing each to study and be challenged by the other’s work. The university’s School of Art and Art History was founded in 1938 with the Iowa Idea as its guiding principle, and defined a graduate-level art theory and practice program that became the blueprint for the modern master of fine arts degree.

The Australian government has launched an industry review on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula, a major gas export hub, after concerns were raised by indigenous women about damage to ancient rock art.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek agreed to appoint an investigator to assess the full impact on ancient rock art from industry on the Burrup Peninsula, in response to an application by two Indigenous women representing a group called Save Our Songlines.

“The consultant will take as much time as necessary to prepare the report. There is no legal deadline,” a Plibersek spokesman said in emailed comments.

Once the review is done, the investigator must make a recommendation to the minister on whether to order new native heritage protection on the Burrup Peninsula, home to more than a million ancient rock carvings which have been nominated for a World Heritage List. UNESCO.

The sites lie near an industrial zone where there are two liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants run by Woodside Energy Group and fertilizer and explosives plants run by Norway’s Yara International.

“This is an unprecedented opportunity to consider all impacts of any Burrup industry on our sacred rock art sites and provide permanent protection under federal laws,” said Indigenous woman Raelene Cooper, who applied for review under Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. Law on Heritage Protection.

Plibersek last month rejected a request from the same group seeking to block the construction of a A$4.5 billion ($3.0 billion) fertilizer plant after consulting with the local representative group for traditional owners, the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, about the impact of its potential in ancient rock art.