Portraits of Place

Early in Sky Hopinka’s new three-channel video installation Here you are before the trees (2020), the artist-filmmaker holds a small freshwater shell up to the camera, just gathered from the shore of Lake Michigan. His grandmother, Dolli Big John, tells him that her own grandfather had said a Ho-Chunk isn’t a Ho-Chunk without a shell from Red Banks, Wisconsin, a site central to the Nation’s creation story. It’s a quiet moment, easy to miss among dramatic shots of stormy s