Territorial Practices: A Conversation About Art, Sound, Land, and Fire

Territorial Practices is part of a larger, two-part event titled Nawa / 🫱🏼‍🫲🏾/ Aha; or, The Handshake, which will also include Confluencing: A Sonic Burnout at The Church Arthouse from 7–10 PM. Featuring sound performances by Kole Galbraith, Doom Flower (solo), Complex Crown, Warren Realrider & Sholeh Asgary, and Juan William Chávez, this concert will be an immersive, sensory counterpart to the afternoon’s discussion.

Admission is free. Visitors may attend one or both parts. RSVP to Territorial Practices at Bemis Center here.

Nawa / 🫱🏾‍🫲🏼/ Aha; or, The Handshake is organized by Tulsa Artist Fellowship Awardees Gavin Kroeber and Warren Realrider and artist Lydia Cheshewalla, on the occasion of Realrider’s residency at Bemis Center. It will bring together a diverse group of visiting artists who are making land-based work and, in various ways, engaging territory: moving back and forth across vast ecoregions, tracing the migration paths of other species, restoring Native fire landscapes, and deranging settler-colonial spatial regimes. Participants include sound artists, prescribed and cultural fire practitioners, former Nebraska residents, and Pawnee and Otoe-Missouria descendants visiting their ancestral homelands. In addition to the public talk and concert, it will also feature several days of private exchanges, site visits, and artistic fieldwork at sites across Southeast Nebraska, bringing visiting and local artists together to build relationships with one another and with the land. It is part of a series of related gatherings Kroeber is organizing this year, with others planned in California, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

Event Information

Nawa / 🫱🏾‍🫲🏼/ Aha; or, The Handshake
Saturday, August 1
Omaha, NE

Part 1
Territorial Practices: A Conversation About Art, Sound, Land, and Fire
with Max Brotman, Juan William Chávez, Lydia Cheshewalla, Alex DeRoin, Kole Galbraith, Gavin Kroeber, Jess Price, and Warren Realrider

2–4 PM at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
724 S 12th St, Omaha, NE

Part 2
Confluencing: A Sonic Burnout
with performances by Kole Galbraith, Doom Flower (solo), Complex Crown, Warren Realrider & Sholeh Asgary, and Juan William Chávez

7–10 PM at The Church Arthouse
3101 S 20th St, Omaha, NE

Participating Artists

Max Brotman lives and works in Yurok territory, located in far northwestern California on the lower Klamath River. In this place Max works with the Cultural Fire Management Council, using intentional fire to tend land for cultural resources and ecology. Max and his partner live on remote mountain land which they are stewarding through recovery from timber and cannabis exploitation with process based restoration and land return to the Yurok Tribe. Max creates music in a handmade off grid studio under the name Complex Crown, a term for the canopy structure of old growth trees, and brings the process based land tending mindset into their electronic improvisations.

Juan William Chávez, a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and beekeeper of Indigenous Latinx and Irish descent. Working across social practice, public art, installation, and ecology, he creates long-term, community-based projects that connect land stewardship, food sovereignty, and decolonial practice. Drawing on Andean philosophy, Chávez explores ecology as a living system shaped by creativity, ritual, labor, and reciprocal relationships with the land. He was the lead artist for Art Pollination, Bloomberg Philanthropies' 2024–26 Public Art Challenge, and founded the art-and-ecology nonprofit Northside Workshop. Chávez is currently the Wallace Herndon Smith Distinguished Visiting Artist at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Lydia Cheshewalla is an Osage ephemeral artist from Oklahoma, living and working in motion throughout the Great Plains ecoregion. Through the creation of site-specific land art and ephemeral installations grounded in Indigenous land stewardship practices and kinship pedagogies, Lydia engages in multivocal conversations about place and relationship. Her work has been shown at Generator Space, the Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), Comfort Station, Harold Washington Library, the Center for Native Futures, Elmhurst Art Museum, and Brushwood Center (Chicago, IL) among others. She is currently filling the bucket with water to see if it leaks and is often found standing in fields.

Alex DeRoin (They/Them) is a Two Spirit Neo-Dadaist artist, poet, storyteller, and awarded water protector. Alex comes from the Osage, Otoe, Pawnee, Blackfeet, and Ioway tribes. They are an active member of the 𐓒𐓂͘𐓒𐓂𐒿𐒻 district and headright holder for the Osage Minerals Estate. Their work explores intersections of marginalized communities, notably through their work with Tulsa Two Spirit, Kinship Model, and Words of the People. They are the pioneer of LAN𐓈𐒰͘𐓈𐒰ISM (Landadaism), an art movement that utilizes a unique cross-pollination of indigiqueer ecology and the art of Dadaists' collage principles as metaphor. To become a “visual rebellion” that questions, recontextualizes, or operates outside of heteronormative and conventional standards. To merge their art-making with their interpersonal resistance and reclamation of two-spirit joy in all their affairs.

Kole Galbraith (Sinixt/Peoria) is a multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on sound, audio-visual, and found object installation. Based in Seattle, Washington, Kole Galbraith has been active in the underground experimental music community for the past decade performing throughout the West Coast of the United States and Europe. Sonically his sonic studio compositions are informed by musique-concrète, metal, jazz and contemporary composition. Thematically, the compositions are influenced by interior Salish folklore, and contemporary indigenous experience. Galbraith mixes using materials found in nature with electronic techniques to uncover both hidden sonic capabilities and their latent histories. Galbraith has worked with musicians including Lori Goldston, Greg Kelley, Jessika Kenney, Steve Moore, Raven Chacon (Diné), alyené vinokurova (Sakha), Warren Realrider (Pawnee/Crow), Nathan Young (Delaware), Catherine Guesde, Sean Waple, Jason Lazer, Patrick Wurzwallner, Maja Osojnik, morher and Noel Kennon.

Gavin Kroeber creates gatherings, excursions, and collaborative projects that explore the relationships between art, landscape, and cultural power. Working across visual art, curatorial practice, and performance, he brings interdisciplinary communities together to examine place through decolonial, ecological, and speculative frameworks. A 2025–2027 Tulsa Artist Fellowship Awardee, Kroeber is also a Creative Capital Awardee and an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellow.

Jess Price (Tiny Amazing Camera; Doom Flower) splits time between Chicago, Tulsa, and Omaha—documenting season cycles, perspectives, and shared experiences in the midwest region. She works with the light-loving Digital Harinezumi (tiny amazing camera) and audio recording tools to filter common information into a composite memory. Recordings are fed into a sampler and arranged into soundtrack-like sequences, often laced with pieces of song and live elements. We invite you to enjoy a snapshot of these facets of home.

Warren Realrider is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on sound, site, and material to convey the intersecting time and ecological cycles moving through contemporary plains existence and Pâriru’. He is a Pawnee descendent and is a member of the Crow Nation of Montana. Warren received a bachelor’s degree in painting from the University of Oklahoma in 2000. He is currently in the 2024-2026 cohort of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and Bemis's Summer 2026 Sound Art + Experimental Music Artist-in-Residence.