Patricia Marroquin Norby is Bringing a Native Perspective to the Met

When the nation’s foremost museum got serious about the nation’s first inhabitants, they needed an Indigenous lodestar. They found one in Norby, its first curator of Native American art.

Big, bold and by many accounts about time, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 56-word land-acknowledgment plaque, placed on its Fifth Avenue facade in May, honors the Indigenous peoples past and present (principally the Lenape) whose homeland the institution occupies. Visitors to the Met, or the Art Institute of Chicago, or any of the other museums where land acknowledgments greet them, may well wonder how these sentiments, crafted with extreme care and usually in consultation with Indigenous communities, fit with galleries containing some two centuries of art depicting Native Americans as occasionally brave, sometimes demonic and most often doomed. Not to mention their proximity to many art historical celebrations of Manifest Destiny in landscapes by Alfred Bierstadt, Thomas Moran and others. This is difficult terrain and the Met has been both staunch and cautious in charting it: the bronze plaque was years in coming, while the murals by Kent Monkman, a Canadian artist of Cree descent, that greeted visitors in the Great Hall from 2019 through April, were an audacious recent commission, offering witty references to celebrated works in the museum’s collection.