Blood is a gift and the land is a gift and our past is a gift. In the questions they ask and in the wandering they do, the short films in this program uncover and explore generational memory. They give thanks to those who are gone and those who are yet to be born, and to those who are here living right now. They drift through time, movement, memorial, and landscape towards some unknown and never known place and serve as a much-needed reminder that we’ll all get there together, just not at the same time.

(Sky Hopinka, guest curator)

Featured artists include:

  • Lindsay McIntyre (Inuk, b. 1977, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada).
  • Olivia Camfield (Muscogee Creek Nation, b. 1997, Fredericksburg, TX) and Woodrow Hunt (Cherokee, Klamath, and Modoc Tribes descendent, b. 1997, Portland, OR).
  • Fox Maxy (Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians and Payómkawichum, b. 1992, San Diego, CA) Miguel Hilari (Aymara/German, b. 1985, Hamburg, Germany).

Preoccupied: indigenizing the museum is a wide-reaching project that proposes Indigenizing interventions to address and refuse the oppressive hierarchies of coloniality that pervade the realm of culture and serve as the underpinning of museums. The project encompasses community engagement, a series of nine monographic and thematic exhibitions, institutional interventions, public programs, and an untraditional catalog.

Curated by Leila Grothe, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art and Dare Turner (Yurok Tribe), Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum, with support from Curatorial Research Assistant Elise Boulanger (Citizen of the O​sage Nation).

This project is generously supported by the Ford Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Eileen Harris Norton Foundation, the Estate of Carolyn Lee Smith, The Dorman/Mazaroff Art Exhibition Fund, the Hardiman Family Endowment Fund, the Sigmund M. and Mary B. Hyman Fund for American Art, The Clair Zamoiski Segal and Thomas H. Segal Contemporary Art Endowment Fund, and the Robert Lehman Foundation.