Brooklyn Museum Hires First Full-time Indigenous Art Curator

Marisa Guthrie
·2 min read

The Brooklyn Museum has hired its first full-time curator of Indigenous art. The institution announced Thursday that Darienne Turner will join the museum in August. She is currently an assistant curator of Indigenous Art of the Americas at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she has been since 2017.

Turner will focus on growing the museum’s North American Indigenous collection while developing canon-expanding exhibition programming. She is an art historian and enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe of California. She is the first Native person to hold a curatorial role at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

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“We’re so pleased to welcome Turner to our growing curatorial team,” said museum director Anne Pasternak in a statement. “The Brooklyn Museum is committed to addressing the exclusion and erasure of Indigenous peoples. Drawing on her considerable expertise, Turner will help us think critically about our engagement with Indigenous communities and our important collection of Indigenous art.”

Added Turner: “The Brooklyn Museum’s collection is simply remarkable, and I am thrilled to work alongside brilliant colleagues and Native community members to share it with the public. The opportunity to represent a historic collection at an institution dedicated to rethinking representation was one I couldn’t pass up. The artworks in the museum’s care offer the keys to understanding who we are as living Native communities, and they highlight the ways in which Native people have thrived on this continent since time immemorial.”

The Brooklyn Museum has a significant collection of Native American art, with more than 13,600 items dating primarily from 1100 b.c.e. to 1500 c.e. and the late 19th and 20th centuries. There are important works from the American Southwest, including of the Hopi, Zuni and other Pueblo groups in Arizona and New Mexico; from California, including Indigenous Pomo, Maidu and Hupa communities; the Pacific Northwest, including works of the Kwakwaka’wakw, Haida and Heiltsuk Nations. The museum also has an important collection from the Great Plains, including early 19th-century Eastern Plains works acquired at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and works of the Osage Nation after the tribe’s removal to Native Territory in Oklahoma.

Turner is the fourth curator to join the museum in the last 18 months, following Stephanie Sparling Williams, Andrew W. Mellon curator of American Art; Kimberli Gant, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Ernestine White-Mifetu, Sills Foundation curator of African Art.

The museum also is in the final stages of a $9 million renovation of its Asian and Islamic art galleries. The museum’s collection includes 17,000 pieces; some of them will be seen for the first time throughout the 20,000 square feet of renovated galleries.

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