Indigenizing the Museum: Dare Turner’s talk will address what it means to Indigenize a museum and she will share her most recent curatorial projects.

Dare Turner is an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe of California, an art historian, and the Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum. In 2024, she co-organized the museum-wide initiative entitled Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which included nine exhibitions, interpretative interventions across the museum, a publication guided by Native methodologies, and an array of public programs.

At the Brooklyn Museum, she curated Aaniin: I See Your Light, which utilized beadwork designs by Nico Williams to transform the Museum’s outdoor plaza, and co-curated Towards Joy: New Frameworks for American Art a radical reimagining of the American Wing guided by Indigenous ways of knowing and Black feminist theory. Her writing has been featured in exhibition catalogs including Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum; Towards Joy: New Frameworks for American Art; Into the Time Horizon: Nevada Museum of Art; Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth-century American Landscapes; and Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place.

Critical Conversations is a collaboration between the Ford Family Foundation and UO Center for Art Research at the University of Oregon, in partnership with the Grand Ronde Tribe.