Her practice is collaborative with an ongoing focus on the hemispheric entanglement of art, ecology, and migration in the Americas. Co-investigators and colleagues, Dr. Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Dr. Ella Diaz, and artist, Sandy Rodrigues continue with the ongoing project, “From Invasive Others Toward, Embracing, Each Other: Migration, Dispossession, and Place-Based Knowledge in the Arts of the Americas,” funded by Global Cornell and the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative. She was a Fulbright Scholar at McMaster University, (CA), 2020.
Recent curatorial interventions include Deskaheh in Geneva, 1923-2023 : Defending Haudenosaunee Sovereignty (Geneva, Switzerland, 2023) where she considers the visibility of Indigenous governance within the context of the United Nations. Her current role as a consultant to the Niagara Falls State Park (NYS) interpretive museum and the Royal Ontario Museum (CA) contributes to updating Indigenous perspectives in public spaces. She also co-curated two of the four inaugural exhibitions of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (2004-2014).
Jolene’s current book project, Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' Stone Carving and Shaping Time, sets in dialogue the work of master soapstone (steatite) carver Joseph Jacobs (Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' / Cayuga Nation) with Haudenosaunee cosmological perspectives as an illustration of relationships to more than human beings. This research seeks to recognize an Indigenous temporal relationship to time and place requiring a significant shift in what modernity means from a Western philosophic perspective.
Highlights of Jolene’s recent art exhibitions include Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography, Amon Carter Museum of American Art (2022), Minneapolis Institute of Arts national exhibition, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, (2019-2021), and Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950’s to Now (2018-2020).
Jolene has been instrumental in supporting the infrastructure to raise the visibility of Indigenous Art. She is on the editorial board of American Art, a founding boardmember for the Otsego Institute for Native American Art and an advisor to GRASAC - The Great Lakes Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Culture and is part of the Inaugural Forge Project’s Indigenous Steering Council.
She is from the Skarù·ręʔ / Tuscarora Nation, Hodinöhsö:ni Confederacy.
