Exhibits: Nayana LaFond- Portraits in RED

Nayana LaFond is a local artist, and has spent the past 20 years creating, collaborating and curating in the arts world of New England. Working primarily in acrylics on canvas, Nayana's work also incorporates ink, cloth, thread and other materials. She also sculpts, working primarily with epoxy, metal, glass, concrete, as well as found objects and old medical supplies. She sits on the board of Artist Organized Art and her work can be found in galleries, museums and private collections worldwide.

"Portraits in RED" honors the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People; in both Canada and the United States, Indigenous women and girls are eleven times more likely than white women to be victims of violence. Indigenous men are four times more likely. Murder is the third leading cause of death in Indigenous people on Turtle Island (North America), after cancer and heart disease. As a point of comparison, murder does not factor into the top twelve causes of death for non-Indigenous people.

In both Canada and the United States, local and state/provincial police forces, to say nothing of the RCMP and FBI, continually failed to investigate, let alone protect, Indigenous women and men. For example, by 2016, in the United States alone, there were nearly 6,000 instances of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Only 116 of those cases were logged in the US Department of Justice's database. In Canada, families of the missing and murdered, along with their allies, tend to need to publicize cases to embarrass the police and politicians into action. Between 2006 and 2009, prosecutors in the United States failed to bring a case in 67% of sexual abuse crimes in Indigenous communities. The majority of these crimes are committed by white men against Indigenous people. Upwards of 96% of Indigenous women in the United States are survivors of sexual violence.

As LaFond says, "This crisis does not only affect enrolled indigenous people or those living on reservations and in remote areas. The families coming to me are from all over Turtle Island and encompass all different Indigenous backgrounds and locations. This is a result of a lot of complicated issues which affect us all, from inter-generational trauma, male dominated extractive industries, human trafficking, domestic violence and more. There is not one easy answer or solution for this. It is a complex issue that has its roots in the legal language set forth by the US and Canadian Governments and is echoed in policies which are continued to this day."

This programming is made possible by a grant from Mass Humanities, with funding from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.