Territorial Practices:
A Conversation About Art, Sound, Land, and Water
With Gavin Kroeber, Kole Galbraith and Warren Realrider, as well as local practitioners
Monday, October 5, 5-7 PM (light meal served afterwards)
Can you make art, not just for, but literally with the birds? Can such work be “brought back” to the gallery? What is territorial art, and what is the role of representation – particularly video and photography – within such practices?
Join visiting artists Kole Galbraith (Sinixt, Peoria), Warren Realrider (Pawnee, Crow) and artist-curator Gavin Kroeber (St Louis) for presentations of their recent work, as part of their travels through Illini Confederacy sites along the Illinois River. This exceptional conversation also serves as an opening or prequel to Four Days in the Illinois Country, a program of events and activities at Counterpublic in St Louis. Here in Chicago we hope to unfold the potentials of our own engagements with the Illinois River Valley and to imagine new or reactualized relationships with the local territory, with inputs from Ryan Griffis who just organized When the Landscape Recognizable Today was Shaped at Watershed Art & Ecology. This discussion will be held in the library, with the exhibition Watershed Cairns, by Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan, on view in the gallery.
Guests
Kole Galbraith (Sinixt/Peoria) is a multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on sound, audio-visual, and found object installation. Based in Seattle, Washington, Kole Galbraith has been active in the underground experimental music community for the past decade performing throughout the West Coast of the United States and Europe. Sonically his sonic studio compositions are informed by musique-concrète, metal, jazz and contemporary composition. Thematically, the compositions are influenced by interior Salish folklore, and contemporary indigenous experience. Galbraith mixes using materials found in nature with electronic techniques to uncover both hidden sonic capabilities and their latent histories. Galbraith has worked with musicians including Lori Goldston, Greg Kelley, Jessika Kenney, Steve Moore, Raven Chacon, alyené vinokurova, Warren Realrider, Nathan Young, Catherine Guesde, Sean Waple, Jason Lazer, Patrick Wurzwallner, Maja Osojnik, morher and Noel Kennon.
Gavin Kroeber creates gatherings, excursions, and collaborative projects that explore the relationships between art, landscape, and cultural power. Working across visual art, curatorial practice, and performance, he brings interdisciplinary communities together to examine place through decolonial, ecological, and speculative frameworks. A 2025–2027 Tulsa Artist Fellowship Awardee, Kroeber is also a Creative Capital Awardee and an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellow.
Warren Realrider is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on sound, site, and material to convey the intersecting time and ecological cycles moving through contemporary plains existence and Pâriru’. He is a Pawnee descendent and is a member of the Crow Nation of Montana. Warren received a bachelor’s degree in painting from the University of Oklahoma in 2000. He is currently in the 2024-2026 cohort of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art’s Summer 2026 Sound Art + Experimental Music Artist-in-Residence.