ASU-LACMA Navigating change in museums lecture series | Dare Turner | Curation as Care: Stewarding the Brooklyn Museum’s Indigenous Art Collection

April 15 | 1 to 2 p.m. MST | Zoom

In this talk, Dare Turner (Yurok Tribe), Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum, discusses Indigenous community representation, engagement and dialogue through the curation of historical and contemporary Native art in encyclopedic museums. Turner will address the concept of "curation as care" as it relates to her recent projects and her role in stewarding the Brooklyn Museum's Indigenous art collection. She will also speak about the exhibition initiative she co-curated with Leila Grothe at the Baltimore Museum of Art entitled “Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum,” the reinstallation of the Brooklyn Museum's American Art wing and her collaboration with museum professionals and Indigenous knowledge keepers alike.

Dare Turner is an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe of California, an art historian and the Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum. In 2024, she co-organized the museum-wide initiative entitled “Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum” at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which included nine exhibitions, interpretative interventions across the museum, a publication guided by Native methodologies and an array of public programs. At the Brooklyn Museum, she curated “Aaniin: I See Your Light,” which utilized beadwork designs by Nico Williams to transform the Museum’s outdoor plaza, and co-curated “Towards Joy: New Frameworks for American Art,” a radical reimagining of the American Wing guided by Indigenous ways of knowing and Black feminist theory. Turner graduated from Stanford University and Bard Graduate Center and taught "Decolonizing Design" at Maryland Institute College of Art. Her writing has been featured in exhibition catalogs, including “Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum”; “Towards Joy: New Frameworks for American Art”; “Into the Time Horizon”: “Nevada Museum of Art”; “Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth-century American Landscapes”; and “Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place.” In October 2026, her forthcoming co-curated exhibition “Hopi Kachina Dolls: Blessings for a Balanced World” will open at the Brooklyn Museum.