the course of liberty
Join us on Saturday, November 14th for the opening of The Course of Liberty with Shinnecock artist Jeremy Dennis.
The Course of Liberty brings together photographs from Jeremy Dennis’s ongoing series Rise to examine the contradictions between America’s promises of freedom and the historical and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples. A member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, Dennis draws upon the legacy of the Pequot Massacre of 1637 and King Philip’s War (1675–1676), two defining conflicts in New England’s colonial history marked by massacres, enslavement, displacement, and the violent suppression of Indigenous resistance. These histories are frequently presented as chapters in the disappearance or defeat of Native peoples, overlooking the Indigenous nations and communities that survived and remain connected to their ancestral homelands. Through staged, cinematic photography, Dennis revisits these histories from the present, using suspense, horror, and humor to challenge the idea that Indigenous people belong only to the past.
In Salem, Massachusetts, Dennis extends this inquiry to the colonial fears surrounding the witch trials and the broader ways Puritan settlers interpreted Indigenous spiritual traditions through accusations of witchcraft and devil worship. Such beliefs contributed to the portrayal of Native people and the woods as dangerous or threatening, reinforcing colonial justifications for conversion, exclusion, and violence. Working with local participants and artist Isabella Fernanda, Dennis brings these histories into a collaborative process of research, performance, and image-making. The supernatural becomes a way to examine how fear shapes collective memory, from colonial descriptions of Indigenous resistance to contemporary myths of disappearance and return.
Special thanks to Mass Cultural Council for their Creative Experiences grant and for additional funding from the Foundation for Contemporary Art to realize this exhibition.
Saturday, 11.14 Exhibition Opening and Performance
Wednesday, 12.02 Artist Talk with Jeremy
Jeremy Dennis (b. 1990) is a contemporary fine art photographer, an enrolled Tribal Member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, New York, and the founder and lead artist of Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc., an artist-led nonprofit art space and residency on the Shinnecock Reservation.
His practice brings together staged photography, landscape, archival research, installation, public history, and community-based projects. Through this work, Dennis examines Indigenous identity, memory, land, and the continuing presence of Native histories on Long Island. His photographs often move between cinematic storytelling and place-based research, creating images that challenge colonial erasure while connecting contemporary Shinnecock life with ancestral stories, oral histories, and cultural sovereignty.
Isabella Fernanda (b. 1999) is a visual and live performance artist based in New York. Her work examines the exploration of identity through the societal norms and peculiarities that emerge within our contemporary world.
Fernanda’s work has appeared in exhibitions, film festivals, and virtual shows. Most recently she exhibited at Shockboxx and at Ma's House & BIPOC Art Studio in 2023. She has performed live on the New York City Streets and Subways and has been digitally projected onto Long Island's Village of Patchogue MoCA L.I.ghts’s site-specific installation in 2022. Her short film, CLOSER, first premiered at Pace University's Student Film festival in 2020. She has collaborated with Performance Artist Rebecca Pristoop’s, “The Moving Company”, articulating an original live art performance at the Pace University Art Gallery in 2019.