Sky Hopinka

New York

The filmmaker Sky Hopinka makes work that investigates the meanings of homeland and landscape in relationship to language and culture. Born in Ferndale, Washington, Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of the Midwest and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians from southern California. He began making films more than a decade ago, using a combination of language (sung, spoken and written), circular narrative structures and hallucinatory special effects to explore the possibility of an Indigenous cinema made in resistance to a reductive Western gaze. Recent years have brought solo exhibitions at the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo (2023), the San Jose Museum of Art (2022) and LUMA, Arles (2022). In 2022, he received the Infinity Award in art from the International Center of Photography and this year he was awarded the Baloise Art Prize for his four-channel film, Just a Soul Responding (2023), about the repatriation of bodies to Indigenous burial mounds.

See more 40 Under 40 USA Artists