Introduction to ENCODED: Change the Story, Change the Future
On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a gaggle of 17 Native artists staged an unsanctioned intervention contained in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing. Using augmented reality (AR), the artists intervened within the gallery’s Nineteenth-century paintings, digitally superimposing cosmological figures, pow-wow dancers, and suffocating layers of ivy. This project, ENCODED: Change the Story, Change the Future, was co-curated by film-maker and curator Tracy Renée Rector and an anonymous Indigenous co-curator.
The Purpose of ENCODED
The unsanctioned digital intervention launches because the American Wing celebrates its centenary, asking essential questions: what stories does American art tell? Who decides what’s worthy of display? And what happens when the museum is not going to make room, so artists take it? The project comes because the Met has taken some steps towards fostering a way of belonging for Native art and artists within the American Wing. However, the museum still has a protracted solution to go in representing Native American art and culture.
The Met’s Efforts to Represent Native American Art
In 2020, the museum hired Patricia Marroquin Norby as its first associate curator of Native American art. In 2021, it debuted a brand new display of the Charles and Valerie Diker collection of 139 works from greater than 50 tribes. However, the works were displayed in a segregated corner of the American Wing. Earlier this 12 months, the museum opened a survey dedicated to the Ojibwe Abstract Expressionist painter George Morrison, however it was installed in a room adjoining the Diker collection works, separate from Morrison’s Twentieth-century New York contemporaries.
Artist Perspectives on the Project
Nicholas Galanin, a Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist who contributed multiple works to ENCODED, believes that institutions have a responsibility to take care of the community that they represent, or have taken culture from. Galanin’s enduring dubiousness about institutional collecting practices informed certainly one of his previous works, which points to the double standard in how the theft of Native cultural objects sanctioned by and for the West is perceived. On the opposite hand, the Seneca-Cayuga artist Amelia Winger-Bearskin describes a more nuanced relationship to the institution, having a lovely relationship with the Met growing up in New York.
The Interventions Themselves
The interventions themselves are each 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’s exterior. For example, Jeremy Dennis transposed the White House on top of a painting of the Parthenon, showing the identical disregard for Western sacred sites that has been shown to Native ones. Priscilla Dobler Dzul digitally enrobed Thomas Crawford’s sculpture Mexican Dying Girl in a florally embellished funerary big cat skin.
The Impact of ENCODED
Some artists’ transformations work through wordplay, like Mer Young transposing a famous photograph of We’wha over Childe Hassam’s Avenue of the Allies, Great Britain. The original painting depicts a patriotic display of flags from European and Latin American nations along Fifth Avenue in support of US involvement within the First World War. These nations were no allies to queer Indigenous people, and Young’s intervention offers a pointed play on the contemporary LGBTQIA2S+ language of allyship. The project’s curator, Tracy Renée Rector, desired to be sure that the artists could represent themselves as they wanted, with a throughline of cosmology and opportunities to indicate ways of resistance and create latest narratives.
Conclusion
ENCODED: Change the Story, Change the Future is a strong project that challenges the dominant narratives of American art and history. By using augmented reality to intervene within the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing, the artists are capable of reclaim their very own stories and cultures. The project is a call to motion for institutions to take responsibility for the cultures they represent and to make room for diverse perspectives. As Rector notes, history is commonly told by the winners or those in power, and it’s time for institutions just like the Met to bring back counterbalances and offer a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of American art and culture.
