An Ingenious, Indigenous Intervention at the Met

In December, I was witness to a break-in of sorts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Just a couple months prior, the Louvre had been ransacked in broad daylight heist fit for a popcorn movie, involving cranes, costumes, power tools, and escape scooters. This was very different. Works of art had in effect been quietly smuggled into the Met, the point not to plunder but to claim space and impart an important message.

ENCODED: Change the Story, Change the Future opened on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, placing 25 works by 17 Indigenous artists throughout the American Wing of the Met. It was essentially a guerrilla exhibition, one that existed in the realm of 'augmented reality', as a digital layer placed precisely upon works throughout the gallery. visible only through a phone or tablet.

The American Wing includes many images depicting the pastoral American landscape and the figures who 'conquered' it. It should be noted that the museum has made an efforts to center Native artists and the fact of its existence on stolen land—for instance, displaying Indigenous art in the American Wing, hiring a curator of Native American art, and commissioning a pair of paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman. However these images and the history they portray—of the continent as a terra nullus or a 'land without a people', waiting to be claimed—still underpins the 'facts on the ground' of both the museum itself and the nation writ large.

According to the intervention's organizers, "ENCODED takes place on Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape people. The Lenape were forcibly removed from this land. ... ENCODED is not a protest, or a demand for inclusion, it is a ceremonial act of remembering and reimagining; it is a portal inviting us to see what happens when new narratives enter old frames. ... This is more than an ephemeral exhibition. It is a movement of many movements: this exhibition extends beyond the museum as a reminder of what has always been here and is an offering of a collective imagination towards a shared future."