The project comes as the Met has taken some steps<\/a> toward fostering a sense of belonging for Native art and artists in the American wing. In 2020 the museum hired Patricia Marroquin Norby as its first associate curator of Native American art. In 2021 it debuted a new display of the Charles and Valerie Diker collection of 139 works from more than 50 tribes, though the works have been displayed in a segregated corner of the American wing. Earlier this year, the museum opened a survey devoted to the Ojibwe Abstract Expressionist painter George Morrison<\/a> (until 31 May 2026), curated by Norby. But it was installed in a room adjoining the Diker collection works, cloistered from Morrison\u2019s 20th-century New York contemporaries like Helen Frankenthaler, William T. Williams and Jackson Pollock.<\/p>\n Flechas, LANDBACK (2025), digitally overlaid on Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Courtesy the artist and Amplifier<\/p>\n \u201cInstitutions have a responsibility to care for the community that they represent, or have taken culture from,\u201d Nicholas Galanin, a Tlingit and Unangax\u0302 artist who contributed multiple works to ENCODED, tells The Art Newspaper.<\/p>\n Galanin\u2019s enduring dubiousness about institutional collecting practices informed one of his previous works, Anax Yaa Nad\u00e9in (it is flowing through it)<\/a> (2022), a series of masks and baskets with balaclava-style eye and mouth openings. The piece points to the double standard in how the theft of Native cultural objects sanctioned by and for the West is perceived, compared to the criminalisation of Natives who might reclaim those same objects by similar means. Galanin\u2019s critique is backed by data: research by ProPublica<\/a>shows that only 15% of the 139 Indigenous works in the Diker collection have solid or complete provenance. The the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was updated in 2023<\/a> to require deference to tribes\u2019 Indigenous knowledge and authority in the return of human remains, funerary items, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony.<\/p>\n \u201cMuseums are nimble when they really want to be\u2014this is how they get their things done,\u201d Galanin adds.<\/p>\n Priscilla Dobler Dzul’s Future Cosmologies: The Regeneration of Maya Mythologies (2023) digitally overlaid on Thomas Crawford’s Mexican Girl Dying (1846, carved 1848) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Courtesy the artist and Amplifier<\/p>\n Not all the participants in ENCODED see the Met as an adversary. The Seneca-Cayuga artist Amelia Winger-Bearskin, who uses artificial intelligence (AI) as a creative medium, describes a more nuanced relationship to the institution.<\/p>\n \u201cI have a beautiful relationship with the Met growing up in New York\u2014my son took classes there. I had a friend who led an art and tech incubator inside the Met when they had a grant to look at emerging technologies,\u201d Winger-Bearskin says. \u201cThe Met has always taught me how to interact with it. I think it\u2019s set up for these types of interactions\u2014building this AR layer on top of it to expand these conversations.\u201d<\/p>\n The interventions themselves are both playful and pointed. Visitors can use a link for a self-guided tour on their phones, activating these virtual transformations as they traverse the American wing and the Met\u2019s exterior by holding up their phones before selected works. For his contribution, the Shinnecock photographer Jeremy Dennis transposed the White House on top of a painting of the Parthenon, showing the same disregard for Western sacred sites that has been shown to Native ones\u2013\u2013such as the defacing of the Black Hills to create Mount Rushmore. Priscilla Dobler Dzul digitally enrobed Thomas Crawford\u2019s sculpture Mexican Dying Girl (1846-48) in a florally embellished funerary big cat skin, head and all.<\/p>\n Jeremy Dennis’s The White House (2025) digitally overlaid on Frederic Edwin Church’s The Parthenon (1871) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Courtesy the artist and Amplifier<\/p>\n Some artists\u2019 jocose transformations work through wordplay, like Mer Young transposing a famous photograph of We’wha\u2014a Zuni two-spirit artist and spiritual leader who travelled to Washington, DC in 1886\u2014over Childe Hassam\u2019s Avenue of the Allies, Great Britain (1918). The original painting depicts a patriotic display of flags from European and Latin American nations along Fifth Avenue in support of US involvement in the First World War. These nations were no allies to queer Indigenous people, and Young\u2019s intervention offers a pointed play on the contemporary LGBTQIA2S+ language of allyship.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to make sure the artists could represent themselves as they wanted,\u201d Rector says. \u201cA through line was cosmology: not only responding to American masters, but opportunities to show ways of resistance and not just reframing but creating new narratives.\u201d<\/p>\n In reference to the project\u2019s unsanctioned natured, Record adds: \u201cAbout 5 years ago the Met worked with a number of placards that offered a Native perspective on pieces of art. Those are no longer up. I\u2019d love institutions, especially the Met, to bring back that counter-balance. As we know history is often told by the winners, or those in power.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Indigenous Peoples\u2019 Day (13 October), 17 Native artists staged an unsanctioned intervention inside the Metropolitan Museum of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":301085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,4304,1033,171,2678,44048,50558,10158,87940,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-301084","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-augmented-reality","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-exhibitions","14":"tag-indigenous-art","15":"tag-metropolitan-museum-of-art","16":"tag-museums-heritage","17":"tag-native-american-art","18":"tag-technology","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-unitedstates","21":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115369342969646489","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/9e3bf7a6b6d885ebc16ebc4a0f8e5a8e56cf669b-2000x1500.jpg\"\/)
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