Finding Home

This presentation speaks to Native people’s dynamic and powerful relationship with land, home, and sanctuary. While they have beliefs and practices as wide and vast as this continent, Native communities share a recognition that humans exist as part of a larger ecosystem that must stay in balance. As the pressures of colonization and contemporary life have assaulted traditional lifeways, the works in this exhibition demonstrate the resilience and versatility with which Native artists maintain their cultures, community connections, and sense of home.

Featured artists whose names are known to us include:

• Tom Haukaas (Lakota and Puerto Rican, b. 1950, San Juan, PR)
• Marie Watt (Seneca Nation and German-Scot ancestry, b. 1967, Seattle, WA)
• Shan Goshorn (Eastern Band Cherokee, b. 1957 Baltimore, MD; d. 2018 Tulsa, OK)
• Duane Linklater (Omaskêko Ininiwak from Moose Cree First Nation, b. 1976, Moose Factory, ON, Canada)
• Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy, b. 1978, Passamaquoddy Indian Township Reservation, ME)
• Meryl McMaster (nêhiyaw from Red Pheasant Cree Nation, a member of the Siksika Nation, British and Dutch, b. 1988, Ottawa, ON, Canada)
• Mark Tayac (Chief of the Piscataway Indian Nation, b. 1959, MD)

Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum is a wide-reaching project that proposes Indigenizing interventions to address and refuse the oppressive hierarchies of coloniality that pervade the realm of culture and serve as the underpinning of museums. The project encompasses community engagement, a series of nine monographic and thematic exhibitions, institutional interventions, public programs, and an untraditional catalog.