UNL's Great Plains Art Museum to host Native artist (2024)

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Great Plains Art Museum will host a Native artist as a part of its Elizabeth Rubendall Artist in Residence program.

Angela Two Stars, a multidisciplinary visual artist, public artist and curator, was named to the residency, which aims to create opportunities for museum visitors and school groups to witness an artist in action. The Elizabeth Rubendall Foundation has funded the program since its inception in 2006.

Two Stars will use her time in residency to create an artwork that will become part of the museum’s permanent collection, according to a news release. She also will lead educational programs and tours. Visitors can see her in action at the lower-level Elizabeth Rubendall Artist-in-Residence Studio and Education Lab during the museum’s public hours. Her residency will run Tuesday through Saturday and June 11-15.

During her residency, titled “Okizipi (To Heal),” Two Stars invites the community to share in conversations that focus on healing. Two Stars connects with the Dakota language and her ancestral homelands to address historical, intergenerational and personal healing with her artwork. Two Stars also explores the healing process in her exhibition “(Re)Connected,” open in the lower-level gallery through July 20.

Two Stars, an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyatetribe, is the director of All My Relations Arts, a contemporary Native art gallery and arts program that is a project of the Native American Community Development Institute in Minneapolis. Her public art can be seen at Bde Maka Ska, the largest lake in Minnesota, and honors the Dakota people of Mni Sota.

The museum, located at 1155 Q St., will kick off Two Stars’ residency with a special screening of “Bring Her Home” on Thursday at 5:30 p.m. The film features Two Stars and follows three Native women as they work to vindicate and honor their relatives who are a part of the missing and murdered Indigenous women crisis. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Two Stars.