In this talk, Emma Robbins will discuss her visual art as well as her activist work with The Navajo Water Project and The Chapter House, describing the intersections of art and activism in her practice. Robbins navigates many different worlds in her interdisciplinary work, always with a commitment to Indigenous rights and her Diné community. Her efforts in these spheres are braided together by the issues many Native women face, both on and off the reservation – and, crucially, by their potential solutions. In her work, Robbins strives to raise awareness about concerns ranging from the lack of clean water on Native Nations, to health hazards caused by abandoned uranium mines in the American Southwest, to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis and broad issues regarding the representations and misrepresentations of Native Peoples in American culture.

Emma Robbins is a Diné artist, activist, and community organizer with a passion for empowering Indigenous women. As Director of the Navajo Water Project, part of the human rights organization DigDeep, she is working to create infrastructure that brings clean running water to the one in three Navajo families without access to this basic right. In addition to her water work, she is also the founder of The Chapter House, an Indigenous arts space. Robbins completed her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied Modern Latin American Art History in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is a 2020 Aspen Institute Healthy Communities Fellow.