TOTEM: As Monument & Archive

TOTEM: As Monument & Archive

A book talk by Erin Turner

Saturday, November 14, 2026 | 11 AM - 12 PM | Free | RSVP

TOTEM: As Monument & Archive examines the shifting perceptions of aesthetics, Native representation, and transhistoric remembering through the lens of Ed Galloway’s Totem Pole Park, an artist-built environment in Foyil, Oklahoma. The book brings together research and projects from artists, curators, activists, historians, politicians, and journalists, who consider site through the lenses of the monument and the archive focused primarily on Oklahoma, although representative as the discourse of a nation. Erin Turner will discuss the public project that brought this book into life and the contemporary collaborations that come into conversation with a not-so-distant past. 

Erin Turner is a site-specific installation artist whose itinerant, research-based practice spans sculpture, photomontage, painting, tapestry, walking, writing, and participatory archives. Drawing especially from newspapers, local archives, and sustained engagement with particular places, Turner layers personal and collective narratives onto the landscape. Her work addresses questions of sovereignty, preservation, biodiversity, and environmental struggle while giving form to histories and relationships that are often overlooked or rendered invisible.

Erin Turner is a participant in The Luminary’s 2026 Open Call Residency (Climate Futures cohort).