Seventeen Native American artists staged an unauthorized digital intervention at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Wing on Indigenous Peoples Day, October 13, using augmented reality technology to transform 19th-century paintings and sculptures. The artists digitally overlaid cosmological figures, powwow dancers, and symbolic imagery onto works depicting generic landscapes, portraits of wealthy settlers, and grandiose historical scenes.
The unsanctioned digital project, titled "ENCODED: Change the Story, Change the Future," runs through December 31 and was co-curated by filmmaker and curator Tracy Renée Rector alongside an anonymous Indigenous co-curator who also sponsored the initiative. The project was developed in collaboration with Amplifier, a non-profit media and design laboratory. The timing coincides with the American Wing's centennial celebration, raising critical questions about whose stories American art tells, who decides what deserves display space, and what happens when artists claim space that museums won't provide.
The intervention comes as the Metropolitan Museum has made some efforts to include Native American perspectives in its American Wing. In 2020, the museum hired Patricia Marroquin Norby as its first associate curator of Native American art. The following year, it unveiled a new display featuring the Charles and Valerie Diker collection of 139 works from more than 50 tribes, though these pieces remain segregated in a corner of the American Wing. Earlier this year, the museum opened a survey exhibition dedicated to Ojibwe Abstract Expressionist painter George Morrison, running until May 31, 2026, curated by Norby. However, the Morrison exhibition was installed in a room adjacent to the Diker collection, separated from his 20th-century New York contemporaries like Helen Frankenthaler, William T. Williams, and Jackson Pollock.
Nicholas Galanin, a Tlingit and Unangax artist who contributed multiple works to ENCODED, emphasized institutional responsibility in an interview. "Institutions have a responsibility to care for the community that they represent, or have taken culture from," Galanin told The Art Newspaper. His skepticism about institutional collecting practices informed his previous work "Anax Yaa Nadéin (it is flowing through it)" from 2022, featuring masks and baskets with balaclava-style eye and mouth openings. This piece highlights the double standard between how the theft of Native cultural objects for Western institutions is perceived versus the criminalization of Native people who might reclaim those same objects through similar means.
Galanin's critique is supported by research data from ProPublica showing that only 15 of the 139 Indigenous works in the Diker collection have solid or complete provenance documentation. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was updated in 2023 to require greater deference to tribes' Indigenous knowledge and authority in returning human remains, funerary items, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. "Museums are nimble when they really want to be—this is how they get their things done," Galanin added.
Not all ENCODED participants view the Metropolitan Museum as an adversary. Seneca-Cayuga artist Amelia Winger-Bearskin, who uses artificial intelligence as a creative medium, describes a more complex relationship with the institution. "I have a beautiful relationship with the Met growing up in New York—my son took classes there. I had a friend who led an art and tech incubator inside the Met when they had a grant to look at emerging technologies," Winger-Bearskin explained. "The Met has always taught me how to interact with it. I think it's set up for these types of interactions—building this AR layer on top of it to expand these conversations."
The digital interventions themselves combine playful creativity with pointed social commentary. Visitors can access a self-guided tour through a link on their phones, activating virtual transformations as they move through the American Wing and the museum's exterior by holding up their devices before selected artworks. Shinnecock photographer Jeremy Dennis created one intervention by transposing the White House over a painting of the Parthenon, demonstrating the same disregard for Western sacred sites that has been shown to Native ones, such as the defacing of the Black Hills to create Mount Rushmore. Artist Priscilla Dobler Dzul digitally wrapped Thomas Crawford's sculpture "Mexican Girl Dying" (1846-48) in an ornately decorated funerary big cat skin, complete with the animal's head.
Several artists employed clever wordplay in their transformations. Mer Young overlaid a famous photograph of We'wha, a Zuni two-spirit artist and spiritual leader who traveled to Washington, D.C. in 1886, onto Childe Hassam's "Avenue of the Allies, Great Britain" (1918). The original painting depicts a patriotic display of flags from European and Latin American nations along Fifth Avenue supporting U.S. involvement in World War I. Young's intervention offers a pointed commentary on contemporary LGBTQIA2S+ language of allyship, noting that these nations were hardly allies to queer Indigenous people.
Curator Tracy Renée Rector emphasized the importance of authentic representation in the project. "I wanted to make sure the artists could represent themselves as they wanted," Rector said. "A through line was cosmology: not only responding to American masters, but opportunities to show ways of resistance and not just reframing but creating new narratives." Regarding the project's unauthorized nature, Rector noted that about five years ago, the Met displayed placards offering Native perspectives on artworks, but those are no longer exhibited. "I'd love institutions, especially the Met, to bring back that counter-balance. As we know, history is often told by the winners, or those in power," she concluded. The project represents a bold attempt by Indigenous artists to reclaim narrative space and challenge traditional museum authority over cultural representation.
