Ahní Rocheleau, American, Canadian, and descendant of the Huron Wendat Nation, works in site-specific installation art of all scales, ritualist performance art, public art, sculpture, mixed media drawing and painting, and exhibition curating, all at the
intersection of human/ecosystem INTERrelationships and collective imaginative responses to the mainstream narrative. Rocheleau’s artwork and curatorial projects derive from an interest in how cultural memory directs society, often suppressing our human connection to earth.

She earned her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and a BA in Ceramics from California State University, Sacramento, where she also studied advanced painting with Oliver Lee Jackson. With years of teaching studio arts at both the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), including the course Public Space Design and Public Art; and Santa Fe Community College (SFCC), she considers teaching a form of artistic practice.

Rocheleau was selected for the Southwest Contemporary award “12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now; a Santa Fe Art Institute “Equal Justice” Artist Residency; an Andy Warhol Fulcrum Grant on behalf of Confluence Collective, which she founded; four International Convergence Festival commissions for public artworks, one for the 1995 International Sculpture Conference; two Rhode Island State Council on the Arts grants; a City of Bogota, Colombia Site-Specific Public Commission; a DeWitt-Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation Fellowship Award; a Walter Hopps (Director, Menil Collection) Recognition of Merit Award; and artist fellowship residencies at the UCross Foundation and the Edna St. Vincent Millay artist colony. Ahní has exhibited nationally and internationally in Boston, California, Maine, New York City, Santa Fe, Barcelona, Canada, Colombia, the Canary Islands, and Germany.

Intertwining her climate-based art production and cultural intervention, Rocheleau served as the NM Coordinator for the 2014 Great March for Climate Action, working in partnership with twelve Indigenous tribal administrations, the Bureau of Land Management, and the US Forest Service to establish 29 impromptu camps for the marchers; and later helped the Chaco Coalition protect Greater Chaco from encroaching hydraulic fracturing and fossil fuel pipeline construction.

As founder of Spaces For Peace, a public space design nonprofit, she also established the Spaces For Peace Design Lab for Met School students in Providence, Rhode Island. Through the University of Rhode island, she is certified in Level I & II Kingian Nonviolence with the American Civil Rights leader known as the architect of the Voting Rights Act, Dr. Bernard LaFayette, Jr.

Ahní Rocheleau, American, Canadian, and descendent of the Huron Wendat Nation, works in site-specific public art at all scales, installation art, ritualist performance art, object sculpture, mixed-media painting and drawing, and exhibition curation at the intersection of human/ecosystem relationships, climate change, community transformation, and racism. Rocheleau’s artwork and curatorial projects derive from an interest in how cultural memory directs society, while suppressing our human connection to earth and imaginative responses to the mainstream narrative.

She earned her Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and a BA in Art at California State University, Sacramento. With years of teaching studio arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico at both the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), including the course Public Space Design and Public Art; Santa Fe Community College (SFCC), she also taught metal and wood sculpture at the University of Connecticut, drawing at RISD, about collections with the Education Department of the RISD Museum for many years, 3-D Design at Providence College, Political Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; engineering at Sacramento City College; and was union certified in bridge welding.

A distant relative, Kateri Annenontak, Huron-Wendat First Nation and her mother Otri-Hô- Andet are too remote in time for Rocheleau to claim any form of indigeneity. Yet, this great-grandmother of eight generations ago feels present as an inner knowing over decades of life and of artistic production with wild rice grasses, seeds, river projects, the construction of a fishnet, ecosystem and climate awareness permeating the work, and the ever-present need to be with the land.

Rocheleau was selected for the Southwest Contemporary award “12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now; a Santa Fe Art Institute “Equal Justice” Artist Residency; an Andy Warhol Fulcrum Grant on behalf of Confluence Collective, which she founded; four International
Convergence Festival commissions, one for the 1995 International Sculpture Conference; two Rhode Island State Council on the Arts grants; a City of Bogota, Colombia Site- Specific Public Commission; a DeWitt-Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation Fellowship
Award; a Walter Hopps (Director, Menil Collection) Recognition of Merit Award; and artist fellowship residencies at the UCross Foundation in Wyoming, and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony for the Arts in New York. She has exhibited her work from Boston, New York City, Santa Fe, and California; to Canada, Germany, Barcelona, and the Canary Islands.

She initiated and conducted an environmental justice collaborative project “El Río Desde Adentro/una colaboración binacional” (The River Within; a binational collaboration) in Medellin and Providence; and “Retorno/Return” in partnership with the Paul Bardwell Gallery and artists she drew into collaboration from Medellin, Colombia.

She occasionally appears as “One-of-Many,” in an experimental walking art performance roaming along rivers and streets, spirit-like in a frosty white cloud of bobbling tumbleweeds -that omen of drought from the Dust Bowl Era, and now extreme climate drought. She is inviting the world to do the same, donning branches and grasses to elevate climate emergency consciousness.

Trained in Al Gore’s “Climate Reality” program, she also served as the NM State Coordinator for the 2014 Great March for Climate Action. She was responsible for the well-being of marchers as they traversed New Mexico on their way from Los Angeles to Washington DC. She evaluated hundreds of miles New Mexico roads from Zuni to Colorado in search of safe-to-walk byways; established 29-camps (on tribal lands, in fields, lots, churches and schools); worked with twelve Native American pueblo tribal administrations, the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service; four city councils; organized speaker rallies on climate in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos, and organized cultural interactive performances. Extending climate work into Northern New Mexico, Rocheleau for many years worked with the Chaco Coalition alongside Diné (Navajo) and Pueblo activists to protect Greater Chaco Canyon from encroaching hydraulic fracturing.

Rocheleau organized and curated two biennial Art Against Racism exhibitions, a multi- site exhibition in Providence, Rhode Island featuring the work of dozens of local artists and faculty. Rocheleau’s highly publicized, public art installation “A True History of Rhode Island”, exhibited and revealed anew to the Rhode Island public the leading role of Rhode Island’s seafaring industry as the largest transporter of enslaved peoples from the West Coast of Africa to the United States in the ‘Triangle Trade.’ Funds from the slave trade, often termed “Ivory Coast loot” went to the founding of Brown University. As a result of Rocheleau’s Art Against Racism multi-sited exhibitions, she was invited by the Committee’s chair to attend Brown University’s public hearings for the “Brown University Report of the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice,” which addressed the University’s historical relationship to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. The Steering Committee’s hearings were attended by interested parties from around the world, including from South Africa’s poet/writer Mongane Wally Serote.

Ahní studied at the Pilchuck Glass School and Haystack Mountain School of Art and served as French interpreter for glass casting courses at the Musée de Verre (Glass Museum) in Sars-Poteries, France.

Ahní served as assistant director of the Langston Hughes Center for the Arts; as the founding director of the Rhode Island Foundation Art Gallery where she curated dozens of exhibitions reflecting social justice themes relevant to the Foundation’s mission. She founded Spaces For Peace, a public space design nonprofit centered on bringing peace methodologies to the public in conjunction with visual art. In conjunction with Spaces For Peace, she established an internship program the “Spaces For Peace Design Lab” for Met High School students in Providence. Through the University of Rhode island, she is certified in Level I & II Kingian Nonviolence with the American Civil Rights leader known as the architect of the Voting Rights Act, Dr. Bernard LaFayette, Jr., and for many years she served on the Board of Directors of the New Mexico SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference, —historically founded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as the vehicle for his American civil rights campaigns)