Indigenous artists transform works at Metropolitan Museum in unsanctioned AR project

"On Indigenous Peoples' Day (13 October), 17 Native artists staged an unsanctioned intervention inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American wing. Using augmented reality (AR), the artists intervened in the gallery's 19th-century paintings-generic and imagined landscapes, portraits of affluent settlers and grandiose historical scenes-digitally superimposing cosmological figures, pow-wow dancers and suffocating layers of ivy. The unsanctioned digital intervention, ENCODED: Change the Story, Change the Future(until 31 December),"

"was co-curated by the film-maker and curator Tracy Renée Rector and an anonymous Indigenous co-curator (who also sponsored the project), in collaboration with the non-profit media and design lab Amplifier. It launches as the American Wing celebrates its centenary, asking: what stories does American art tell? Who decides what's worthy of display? And what happens when the museum will not make room, so artists take it?"

"The project comes as the Met has taken some steps 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,"

Seventeen Native artists executed an unsanctioned augmented-reality intervention inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Wing on Indigenous Peoples' Day, digitally overlaying 19th-century paintings with cosmological figures, pow-wow dancers and layers of ivy. The project ENCODED: Change the Story, Change the Future was co-curated by Tracy Renée Rector and an anonymous Indigenous co-curator with Amplifier and launched during the wing's centenary to question narratives and display authority. The Met has taken steps toward Native representation, hiring Patricia Marroquin Norby and exhibiting the Diker collection and a George Morrison survey, though Native works remain segregated within the wing.

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