Rebecca Dobkins

Rebecca J. Dobkins is Professor of Anthropology and American Ethnic Studies, and Curator of Art at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. She has written about and organized exhibitions of work by many Indigenous artists in a variety of media, including Rick Bartow, Joe Feddersen, and Marie Watt, and curated Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts at 25, a major exhibition and book project about the printmaking studio on the Umatilla Reservation in eastern Oregon. Since her arrival at Willamette in 1996, she has been engaged in collaborative endeavors with regional tribal communities, traditional and contemporary Pacific Northwest indigenous artists, Maori artists, and the Chemawa Indian School, a federal Indian boarding school located in Salem that was founded in 1880. Dobkins has experience with repatriation under NAGPRA, with archival records and research related to federal Indian boarding schools, and with ethnographic field research with American Indian basketweavers who are exercising sovereign rights to tend and gather traditional plant materials on public lands. She regularly teaches museum studies, Native American studies, and a course entitled Indigenous Peoples, Human Rights and the Environment. Since 2004, she has attended several Pacific Rim indigenous arts exchanges as a curator, most recently at The Evergreen State College’s 2017 Tears of Duk’Wibahl: Gathering of Artists of the Pacific Rim. Dobkins has served on the boards of the Council for Museum Anthropology, the Native American Arts Studies Association, and the Oregon Historical Society.

Residency/Fellowship

Truth & Reconciliation 2018/2019

Location

Portland, OR USA