This presentation begins with an act of vandalism: the cutting off of the foot of a bronze statue of conquistador and first Governor of New Spain, Don Juan de Oñate, in 1997. The foot was cut by a group of anonymous activists in retaliation for Oñate's own brutal and murderous treatment of Pueblo and Hopi peoples during the non-Native settlement and conquest of the Southwest. Travelling back in time to the moment when the Spanish first started coming north from Mexico City to modern-day New Mexico in search of riches--especially gold, the talk asks: What histories spill forth when monuments are defaced? How are historical figures are memorialized--and challenged--in the present day?

Candice Hopkins is a curator and writer who has held curatorial positions at the National Gallery of Canada, the Western Front, and the Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre. Hopkins holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College where she was awarded the Ramapo Curatorial Prize for the exhibition Every Stone Tells a Story: The Performance Work of David Hammons and Jimmie Durham. Her writings on history, art, and vernacular architecture have been published by MIT Press, BlackDog Publishing, Revolver Press, New York University, The Fillip Review and, the National Museum of the American Indian, among others. Candice has lectured widely including at the Witte de With, Tate Modern, Dakar Biennale, Tate Britain, and the University of British Columbia. In 2012 Hopkins was invited to present a keynote lecture on the topic of the “sovereign imagination” for dOCUMENTA (13). Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, co-curated with Greg Hill and Christine Lalonde, was the National Gallery of Canada’s largest survey of recent Indigenous art.  Hopkins was co-curator with Janet Dees, Irene Hofmann and Lucía Sanromán of the 2014 SITE Santa Fe biennial exhibition, Unsettled Landscapes. In 2014 she received the Joan Lowndes award from the Canada Council for the Arts for excellence in critical and curatorial writing. In 2015 she was appointed the Chief Curator at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Sante Fe. She currently is a Curatorial Advisor for documenta 14 opening in 2017. 

The Proseminar talks in 2016 focus on the issues of Sovereignty and Colonization organized by Charles Stankievech: https://www.daniels.utoronto.ca/events/mvs-proseminar-series