Zoe Weldon-Yochim presenting “Fighter Jets and Fallout: Attending to Militarized Western Shoshone Lands and Diverse Multi-Being Assemblages in Jack Malotte’s The End,” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s McEvoy Auditorium. Photo: Amelia Goerlitz.
Zoe Weldon-Yochim served as the 2022-23 Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her time at SAAM enabled her to conduct research at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, the National Museum of American History, and the Archives of American Art. The fellowship culminated in presenting part of chapter three of her dissertation, “Atomic Afterlives: Visualizing Nuclear Toxicity in Art of the United States, 1979-2011,” during the public annual fellows lectures held at the museum. Her talk, “Fighter Jets and Fallout: Attending to Militarized Western Shoshone Lands and Diverse Multi-Being Assemblages in Jack Malotte’s The End,” explores Malotte’s visual and political work which calls for the demilitarization and return of Shoshone lands, and the Department of Energy’s undeclared nuclear war against inhabitants across and beyond Newe Segobia, the customary name for the unceded Western Shoshone homeland in what is currently called Nevada.