On View in the Culture Lab: Elisa Harkins’s Teach Me a Song
By Elizabeth Snell
Elisa Harkins’s Teach Me A Song will be on view at M-AAA’s Culture Lab beginning January 13 and continuing through April 7, 2025.
Teach Me A Song is a single channel video with sound, playing from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. each day.
Location:
Mid-America Arts Alliance
Culture Lab – Viewable from outside windows
2018 Baltimore Ave
Kansas City, Missouri 64108
This video compilation is drawn from Elisa Harkins’s ongoing project, Teach Me a Song, which builds on the artist’s interests in language preservation, translation, and Indigenous musicology. The multifaceted project is structured on a series of exchanges, wherein she invites collaborators to teach her a song. With the recordings of these songs—which may be ceremonial, religious, rock & roll, electronic, etc.—Harkins’s practice of nation-to-nation sharing and trading music is presented as a means of decolonizing traditions of Indigenous musicology.
In addition to recording the song, she also transcribes the song into sheet music, makes a photo of the participants(s) and creates a shawl that’s a portrait of that person or represents the song.
Elisa Harkins is a Native American (Cherokee/Muscogee) artist and composer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Harkins received a BA from Columbia College, Chicago, and a MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She has since continued her education at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited at the Halsey Institute, Crystal Bridges, documenta 14, the Hammer Museum, the Heard Museum, and Vancouver Art Gallery, among others.
In addition to creating her own music and artworks, she hosts the nation’s only all-Indigenous radio show, Mvhayv Radio. Harkins resides on the Muscogee Reservation and is an enrolled member of the Muscogee Nation.
Elisa Harkins’s Teach Me a Song project was supported in part through M-AAA’s Interchange program, which is designed to strengthen individual artists in the M-AAA region (Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas) who have a history of impactful work with a socially-engaged creative practice. The program provides practice-based grant funding, professional development experiences, peer network access, and one-on-one mentoring. The Interchange program is made possible through the support of the Mellon Foundation.
To learn more about the artist, please visit www.elisaharkins.org.
Learn more about Elisa’s work in our blog post, Oklahoma Artist Elisa Harkins Shares Her Indigenous Song Exchange Project .