Sky Hopinka's "Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer"

Sky Hopinka:
Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer (2019)
This experimental two-channel video installation, Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer, is set at Castillo de San Marcos, also called Fort Marion, in St. Augustine, Florida. Hopinka visited the fort for the first time during an artist residency at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum at Flagler College.

The film grew out of Hopinka’s research at and around Fort Marion, including in the St. Augustine Historical Society’s collection of ledger drawings, or drawings on pages of old
account books, by Native Americans imprisoned at the fort.  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Fort Marion staff sold the drawings to tourists in order to fund government-run boarding schools across the United States that sought to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people into whiteness.

In the artist’s words: “Each section of the video tells a small part of this history, from Seminole Chieftain Coacoochee’s account of his escape from the fort, to ledger drawings
made by the prisoners from the Plains given pen and paper and told to draw what they see and what they remember. Each section traces the persistence of presence and memory experienced through confinement and incarceration, through small samplings of space and hope.”

Sky Hopinka. Native American; member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, born 1984.  Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer.  2019.  HD Video, stereo, 2-channel, color.  Ed 2 of 3 + 2AP.  Running time 13:15 minutes.  Purchased with funds from the Contemporary Associates.  SC 2020.3.1