A Native ‘Takeover’ At Baltimore Museum Of Art

“A Native Takeover.”

That's how Dare Turner (Yurok Tribe), Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum and former Assistant Curator of Indigenous Art of the Americas at the Baltimore Museum of Art, describes the museum's “Concerned: Indigenizing the Museum” initiative of Baltimore launched on April 21, 2024.

“Preoccupied” includes nine solo and themed exhibitions, a film series, a publication guided by Native methodologies, museum-wide staff education related to Native American history and colonization, and a wide range of public programs to in February 2025.

“It also includes audio tour stops where members of the Indigenous community have gone to the galleries and selected any artwork that interests them, which most of the time is not artwork made by an Indigenous person, and they talk about it from their perspective,” Turner told Forbes.com. “We also rewrote (wall) labels that privileged white artists when depicting Native subjects. We flipped the script so that Native subjects were privileged.”

Almost 100 people have contributed to or are represented in the initiative, transforming not only who tells stories in museums like the BMA, but also which stories are told and how.

“We wanted to make a big statement with Indigenous art in the museum, but we wanted to go much further than just presenting an exhibition and congratulating ourselves on a job well done,” said Leila Grothe, associate curator of contemporary art at the Museum of 'Art of Baltimore. a contributor to the project told Forbes.com. “We thought together about how we could go through the perspectives, the stories, the truths and the stories in the museum in as many ways as possible, how we can emerge those voices in as many places as possible to go beyond and make something that feels . as a meaningful statement and a meaningful presence.”

“Preoccupied” debuted with “Dyani White Hawk: Bodies of Water,” a showcase of new and recent work from the artist's “Carry” series. White Hawk (b. 1976; Sičáŋǧu Lakota) adorns large copper buckets and ladles with glass beads and long fringes that suggest tree root structures. These works cross the long-standing boundaries between fine art and craft traditions in museum practice and focus native perspectives on the importance of both functionality and art in material culture.

Looking In The Mirror

America's museums are not responsible for the nation's genocide against its indigenous inhabitants. Museums did not write the Indian Removal Act or start the Navajo Long Walk. They are not to blame for broken treaties, boarding schools, the near extinction of the buffalo, or the Sand Creek Massacre. However, they have been complicit in conveying white supremacy and flattening and erasing Native American peoples, culture, and artwork through their historical and, in some cases, ongoing practices of collecting and display related to native articles.

“There are many cases historically where institutions have come into (indigenous) communities and taken or coerced objects. Sometimes they've paid for them, sometimes they haven't, but even in cases where they've paid for those belongings , sometimes things that didn't belong to an individual have been taken to give away,” Grothe cites as an example of how museums have harmed Native. americans “They call it cultural heritage where it actually belonged to the community and not to an individual, but there was a kind of colonial misunderstanding – and that might be being generous – whether that individual owned it or not and could sell it to the person . There is an exploitation right in the kind of economic status potentially of whoever is making these sales, and the trades are sometimes theft, sometimes robbery, all these things have happened.

Placing contemporary indigenous art in the past

American museums have traditionally relegated indigenous items to their “ethnographic” sections or placed native artworks in natural history museums rather than art museums, sending a subconscious, but not at all subtle, message. , to its mostly white visitors.

“Museums have talked about Native communities, Native artists in the past, not positioning Native communities as vibrant and alive and thriving today,” Turner explained.

Placing Native American material on display next to woolly mammoth bones signals to museum guests that Native Americans are a thing of the past. That Native stories and histories and truths and futures are not to be considered in modern society.

“Many Native artists are frustrated that one of their contemporary pieces is placed in a historic Native art gallery, contextualized in a narrow way, without being brought into conversation with larger stories of contemporary art,” he said. Turner.

From a non-native perspective, this museological practice has been so subtle and pervasive that guests do not even recognize how they have been duped.

“(A visitor) recently stopped me to say that they hadn't realized that the fact that we installed this exhibit in the contemporary wing completely reversed a lens in which they were used to seeing these works,” Grothe said . “They were so used to seeing (Native American) work in specific settings with specific gallery lighting and colors; it seemed radical to see (Native artwork in the contemporary wing). They said they even saw the works of historical art that they knew for the first time (in a new way), simply appreciating (their) beauty. That's exactly what we're trying to do. There are subtle changes that an institution can make to change the way people see these things.”

And by changing the way visitors see the objects, museums will change the way visitors see the people who made them.

“By incorporating contemporary artists, contemporary voices, and mixing historical art with contemporary art, we are showing the continuity of narratives of artistic practices in a way that embraces Native realities,” added Turner.

Also, reminding museum visitors that Native art, people, and culture are contemporary, dynamic, and constant.

Fine Arts > Crafts

Museums must also recognize how their hierarchies have dismissed and marginalized indigenous artistic talent.

“Dyani White Hawk, one of her great statements as an artist is to talk about the way Indigenous artworks have often been relegated as less than fine art and labeled as craft in institutions of col· lectionism,” explains Grothe.

Crafts (material objects (ceramics, fabrics, beads)) have always been considered “less than” fine arts (paintings, sculpture, photography) from the historical perspective of museums that act as the ultimate arbiters and guardians of taste and culture in America. An opinion founded on patriarchy, white supremacy and Western exceptionalism.

The breadth of “Preoccupied” and its takeover of the museum simultaneously helps visitors recognize how these museum practices are harmful to Native people, taking place in thousands of institutions across the country since the 19th.^th century, have combined to contribute to disempowering, oppressing, and excluding Native Americans from mainstream American culture.

Baltimore is the native land

In addition to the scale and scope of “Preoccupied,” its location is significant. If this took place in a museum in New Mexico or Oklahoma or Arizona or Montana, where Native artwork and people are more visible, it would still matter, but in Baltimore, Maryland, it is seen differently.

“We find that on the East Coast in particular, that's true everywhere, but here, because colonialism is so much older, it was hundreds of years before it happened to my (Yurock) people (in California ), there's a different understanding in non-native communities about the history of the (native) people in the region,” Turner said. “They think that the natives were genocided and that was the end, they welcomed the pilgrims and then they left. There's a lot of education that needs to be done and museums are in a unique position to reach many different audiences.”

Ten months of a native “acquisition” at the Baltimore Museum of Art, or any museum, can't make up for 100 years of institutional neglect, but it's a significant start.

Individual and thematic exhibitions of concern organized by opening date:

“Dyani White Hawk: Bodies of Water” (April 21 to December 1, 2024)

“Finding a home” (May 12 to December 1, 2024)

“Enduring Buffalo” (May 12 to December 1, 2024)

“Illustration Agency” (May 12 to December 1, 2024)

“Don't Wait for Me, Just Say Where You're Going” (May 12 to December 1, 2024)

“Caroline Monnet: River Flows Through Bent Trees” (May 12 to December 1, 2024)

“Nicholas Galanin: Exist in the Width of a Knife's Edge” (July 14, 2024 – February 16, 2025)

“Laura Ortman: Wood that Sings” (July 17, 2024 – January 5, 2025)

“Dana Claxton: Spark” (August 4, 2024 – January 5, 2025)

General admission to the Baltimore Museum of Art is free.