Curation as Care

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 the Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum and a member of the Yurok Tribe. In 2024, she co-organized Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum at the Baltimore Museum of Art, which included nine exhibitions, interpretative interventions across the Museum, and a catalogue. At the Brooklyn Museum, she curated Nico Williams: Aaniin, I See Your Light and co-curated Towards Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, a radical reinstallation of the American Wing guided by Indigenous ways of knowing and Black feminist theory. Her forthcoming exhibition and book, Hopi Kachina Dolls: Blessings for a Balanced World, will debut at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2026.