The curators of the expansive exhibition Extraction: On the Edge of the Abyss have set the ambitious goal of manifesting a worldwide “ruckus” around confronting climate change, in particular extractive and exploitative processes. One aspect of this undertaking entails bringing their artistic movement to the state of Colorado via the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art in Fort Collins. The movement was founded by writer Edwin Dobb and artists Sam Pelts and Peter Rutledge Koch, whose own personal history in Montana surrounded by the dominance of the Anaconda Copper Company provided the initial inspiration for the project as a whole.

As part of this movement, curators Erika Osborne and Lynn Boland are presenting six artists in an exhibit entitled Reclamation: Recovering Our Relationship with Place at the Allicar Museum alongside dozens of other curators, artists, writers, poets, and activists across the globe. The full extent of the collaboration is documented in the catalog and exhibition guide for Extraction featured on their website—

Excavationart.org—and printed on recycled newsprint.

In 2021, the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder is now tackling the difficult issue of colonial settler violence and abuse, specifically against Native women, with Sing Our Rivers Red—an exhibition about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, #MMIW. At the History Colorado Center in Denver, Gregg Deal, a contemporary artist and member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe, picks up on this theme in his exhibit Merciless Indian Savages. In the wall text for this provocative exhibition, Deal poses the question, “What does it mean to communicate an Indigenous message when to do so effectively means speaking through filters of capitalism, nationalism, and mainstream American culture?”