as part of the Paul Brach Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Santiago X, M.Arch, MFA is an Indigenous futurist and multidisciplinary artist specializing in land, architectural, and new media installation. He is an enrolled citizen of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana (Koasati) and Indigenous Chamoru from the Island of Guam USA (Hacha'Maori).
Santiago X has exhibited and designed internationally, including The Museum of Contemporary Native Art, in Santa Fe, New Mexico; The Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy; and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. He is a 2019 3Arts Award Winner, a 2020 New City Top 50 Artist, a member of the inaugural City of Chicago Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee, and the first Native American contributor to the Chicago Architecture Biennial. In 2020, X was commissioned by the US State Department to be the lead artist of The American Arts Incubator Brazil, where he traveled and conducted workshops culminating in a virtual reality exhibition, entitled PORTAL.
Currently, Santiago X is reinvigorating the ancestral mound building practice of his Koasati people, via two large-scale augmented public earthwork installations along the Chicago and Des Plaines River in Chicago. This is notably the first time effigy earthworks have been constructed by Indigenous peoples in North America since the founding of the United States. POKTO ČINTO (Serpent Twin Mound) publicly opened on Indigenous Peoples Day, Oct. 14, 2019.
Santiago X received a Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University of Colorado, a Master of Architecture from the University of Southern California, and a Master of Fine Arts Studio in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
All lectures are free, open to the public, and presented online. RSVP required. To register, please email artvals@alum.calarts.edu with the subject RSVP PBVALS.