About
Winona is the independent curatorial practice of Katherine Jemima Hamilton. Katherine Jemima is a curator and writer born and raised on unceded Ligwilda'xw territory. She is one-third of the Off Hours collective, and works as an Exhibitions Manager at the Seattle Art Museum.
My third-person bio
Katherine Jemima Hamilton moved to Toronto in 2014 to pursue a degree in art history at the University of Toronto. In 2019, she relocated to the Bay Area for an MA in Curatorial Practice and Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. Her research interests include feminism and technology; craft and ritual in contemporary frameworks; unsettling practices for Western colonial institutions; and the exploration of sound as a framework for working and living together.
She has curated exhibitions for the CCA Wattis Institute, Root Division, Hashimoto Contemporary, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Italy), and continues to curate nomadically across the Bay Area as a founding member of the curatorial collective Off Hours, and in an 8 x 6 foot shed in Seattle, WA. She also collaborates as a curator for Dive Barn, a curatorial experiment on a 2000-acre ranch in Mendocino County, CA. Her writing has been published by Variable West, CLOT Magazine, Collecteurs, Juxtapoz, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the CCA Wattis Institute. She has taught art history at the Oakland Public Library.
My land biography
From August 2019 - April 2025, I lived between Oakland and San Francisco, California. I am very grateful to be able to work and live in the Bay Area, an ecologically and ethnically diverse area that is the traditional lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone on the peninsula side, and the Lisjan Ohlone people in the East Bay, who include Chochenyo (Ohlone), Karkin (Ohlone), Bay Miwok, Plains Miwok, Delta Yokut and Napian (Patwin). I want to acknowledge that the cultural institutions I am a part of now could never have flourished without the cultural production of Black and Latinx activists, artists, and community members, who are large arteries in the metaphorical artistic heart of the Bay Area.
This land where I work and live was first colonized by Spanish soldiers and missionaries who attempted to convert Indigenous people into Catholic subjects of Spain. The Missions were plantations, built by slave labor and sustained through brutal physical violence and extractive land practices. This colonization is what makes my cultural work possible today. What would cultural work without this colonization process look like?
All groups of the Lisjan people, the first peoples of the land on which I live and work, are not officially “recognized” by the US federal government as a tribe. This means that the Confederated Villages of Lisjan have no reservations or protected land bases and receive none of the rights, benefits, compensations, or protections afforded to Indian tribes under US laws. This means that the institutions and people who work at them in Oakland, CA, do not pay the consequences for the atrocities that made our work possible.