Imagine wandering through The Met’s American Wing, where 19th-century landscapes suddenly come alive. Overlaid on these static paintings are images and words from Indigenous artists whose ancestors inhabited those lands long before they were painted. Led by filmmaker and curator Tracy Renée Rector, in collaboration with the Amplifier design lab, the ENCODED project makes this a reality. Seventeen Indigenous artists use augmented reality (AR) technology to stage a digital intervention in The Met’s narrative of American history.
The exhibition’s core question is simple: Who is celebrated in American history, and who is the true American? Through your phone’s camera, you might see Thomas Sully’s Queen Victoria (1838) transform into photographer Josué Rivas’ depiction of Umatilla dancer Acosia Red Elk. Or you could watch Jerome B. Thompson’s landscape interrupted by comic-style speech bubbles declaring, “Look at them acting like they discovered this place.” These activations are accessible anywhere in The Met via the project’s website.
More than a protest, this project is an act of expansion. The organizers state, “The unauthorized nature of this exhibition is the work itself.” Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger describes his contribution as “a reflection of our existence as a disruption to the colonial agenda, moving unpermitted in a space like The Met, which defines ‘America’ through art.” Luger’s work, Midéegaadi: Fire, overlays a giant buffalo dancer onto Thomas Cole’s Catskills landscape, summoning the land’s original inhabitants—bison and their human kin.
Nicholas Galanin’s NEVER FORGET transforms paintings that romanticize settler views of the land as “empty and waiting to be claimed” into a demand for recognition and reclamation. Galanin insists, “Repair must replace nostalgia,” framing the work as a call to action.
ENCODED demonstrates how art in the digital age can serve as a vibrant tool for resistance and cultural memory, intervening in the museum’s collection without altering it—an invigorating and essential act of art.
Exhibition Details:
Work: ENCODED: Change the Story, Change the Future
Curators: Tracy Renée Rector and an anonymous Indigenous curator
Venue: Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met), American Wing and exterior, New York
Dates: Ongoing as of Monday, October 13 (Indigenous Peoples’ Day)
How to View: Activated via AR using your phone’s camera through the project’s website within the museum
Note: Although The Met hired its first Native American art curator in 2020, the artists chose an unauthorized setup to bypass control mechanisms.
