ABSTRACT
Contemporary visual arts in the Americas are powerful conduits that reveal how the intersections of culture, religion, and history provide imaginative models for a poetics of resistance. It is especially among contemporary Indigenous and Afro-Atlantic artistic expressions that colonial histories and extractivist encounters with the land become visible. This chapter examines how artists from the Americas, namely, Cecilia Vicuña (Chile), Nicholas Galanin (Alaska), and Joelington Rios (Brazil), have developed a visual poetics that is aligned with their traditional ways of knowing while denouncing the colonial impact their communities have endured. In weaving visual cross-threads that run deep through historical, pictorial, geophysical, and cosmological structures, these artists evidence the fundamental role the visual arts play in developing an effective decolonial praxis for living and thriving otherwise.
