Powerful Narratives: Contemporary Native American Art at the Field Museum

Abstract

Collaboration with contemporary Native American artists is a powerful strategy that natural history museums can use to disrupt colonizer narratives and begin to remedy the harm of historical curatorial practices. This article discusses the use of contemporary Native American art in a new permanent exhibition at the Field Museum, Chicago. The exhibition, titled Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories opened in May 2022 and includes fifty new works of art commissioned by or loaned to the Field Museum. The discussion first describes antecedents to creating the exhibition and then examines this representational strategy by considering the work of four artists featured in the exhibition: Karen Ann Hoffman (Oneida), Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo), Monica Rickert-Bolter (Potawatomi and Black), and Julie Buffalohead (Ponca).