NAWA / 🫱🏾🫲🏼 / AHA; OR, THE HANDSHAKE
Saturday, August 1, 2026
Omaha, Nebraska
2:00–4:00 PM | Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
7:00–10:00 PM | The Church Arthouse
Tulsa Artist Fellowship is proud to partner with Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and The Church Arthouse to present Nawa / 🫱🏾🫲🏼 / Aha; or, The Handshake, a two-part gathering organized by Tulsa Artist Fellowship Awardees Gavin Kroeber and Warren Realrider, and artist Lydia Cheshewalla, on the occasion of Realrider's Summer 2026 Bemis Sound Artist Residency.
Bringing together artists, cultural practitioners, and community members, the project explores land-based approaches to art and artistic approaches to territory. Through public conversation, experimental sound, and collaborative fieldwork across Southeast Nebraska, participants engage movement across ecoregions, Indigenous homelands, cultural fire practices, migration, and the evolving relationships between people and place.
Beyond its public programs, Nawa / 🫱🏾🫲🏼 / Aha; or, The Handshake includes private exchanges, site visits, and collaborative fieldwork that cultivate lasting relationships among artists, communities, and the land. The gathering is part of an ongoing series of artist-led convenings that Kroeber is organizing throughout 2026.
TERRITORIAL PRACTICES:
A CONVERSATION ABOUT ART, SOUND, LAND, AND FIRE
2:00–4:00 PM
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
724 S. 12th Street
Omaha, NE
Featuring Max Brotman, Juan William Chávez, Lydia Cheshewalla, Alex DeRoin, Kole Galbraith, Gavin Kroeber, Jess Price, and Warren Realrider.
Artist presentations and community dialogue exploring land, sound, ecology, Indigenous knowledge, stewardship, and artistic approaches to territory.
CONFLUENCING: A SONIC BURNOUT
7:00–10:00 PM
The Church Arthouse
3101 S. 20th Street
Omaha, NE
Performances by Kole Galbraith, Doom Flower (solo), Complex Crown, Warren Realrider & Sholeh Asgary, and Juan William Chávez.
An immersive evening of experimental sound extending the day's conversations through improvisation, collective listening, and sonic exploration.
ORGANIZERS
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.
Warren Realrider (Pawnee & Crow) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the intersections of sound, materials, and site. Through performance, installation, and collaboration, he creates immersive works that draw from Pawnee cosmology, contemporary Plains experience, and experimental sound. A 2024–2026 Tulsa Artist Fellowship Awardee and Summer 2026 Bemis Sound Artist-in-Residence, Realrider has presented work throughout the United States.
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.
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.
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.
Other Credits + Special Thanks: Sarah Rowe (concert poster), Veronica Pipestem (MO art research affiliate), Aaron Owens (background photo).
VISITOR EXPERIENCE
Tulsa Artist Fellowship is committed to creating a welcoming, inclusive, and accessible experience for every visitor. All exhibitions and programs are free, open to the public, and thoughtfully documented and archived for continued community access.
For accessibility questions or accommodation requests, please email info@tulsaartistfellowship.org or call (539) 302-4855.