Dare Turner: Indigenizing the Museum

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 curated the Brooklyn Museum's largest site-specific commission of Indigenous art Aaniin: I See Your Light, which transformed the Museum's plaza by featuring beadwork designs by Nico Williams (Anishinaabe). Additionally, she 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. At the Baltimore Museum of Art, she led the museum-wide initiative entitled Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum, which included nine exhibitions, interpretative interventions across the museum, a publication guided by Native methodologies, and an array of public programs. 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.