Collection-based exhibition,"Native Pop: American Indians Shaping Popular Culture"

As part of an expansive effort to center the histories and perspectives of Native peoples in its work, The Newberry Library (NL) is organizing the exhibition "Native Pop: American Indians Shaping Popular Culture," to be presented in 2025 and accompanied by a public program series, digital learning resource, and exhibition catalogue. Drawing on NL’s permanent collections of Indigenous art and history, the project will explore how Native people have engaged with, contributed to, and resisted American popular culture over the course of 300 years. “Native Pop” will be co-curated by NL curator and VP Will Hansen, and River Kerstetter, an independent Onʌyota’a:ka artist whose work engages with historic archives. Featuring diverse artistic traditions and histories from across North America, the exhibition narrative will demonstrate how Native artists have used elements and devices of pop culture to resist the misuse, theft, and outright invention of Native cultures. The exhibition will be organized across chronologies and geographies around the themes of Kinship, Sovereignty, Ways of Knowing, and Time Travel, and will feature objects including paintings, photography, beadwork, zines, fine prints, and ephemera. In additional to a digital resource designed to help K-12 educators teach exhibition content in the classroom, NL will produce exhibition catalogue in the form of a zine, with 5,000 copies reserved for free distribution to schools, nonprofits, and Native communities.