The Brooklyn Museum has announced Darienne “Dare” Turner as its inaugural full-time curator of Indigenous art. Turner, who is currently an associate curator of Indigenous art at the Baltimore Museum of Art will take up her post at the New York institution in August. In her new role, Turner will be tasked with curating canon-broadening exhibitions, and with expanding the museum’s collection of Indigenous art. Many of the more than 13,600 works held by the museum were was made by peoples including Hopi, Kwakwaka’wakw, Miaidu, Osage, Pomo, and Zuni.
“The Brooklyn Museum is committed to addressing the exclusion and erasure of Indigenous peoples,” said Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak. “Drawing on her considerable expertise, Turner will help us think critically about our engagement with Indigenous communities and our important collection of Indigenous art.”
Turner, an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe of California, joined the BMA in 2017, becoming the first Native person to hold a curatorial role there. Prior to arriving at the Baltimore institution, she taught graphic design at the Maryland Institute College of the Arts. She holds a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Stanford University and a master’s in decorative arts, design history, and material culture from the Bard Graduate Center. Her essay “Terrestrial Gateways to the Divine” appeared in the catalogue for the Bard Graduate Center exhibition “Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place” (2018–19); the New York Times named the volume one of 2018’s best art books.
“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,” Turner said. “The opportunity to re-present 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.”
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