How Denver Art Museum Is Looping Indigenous Communities into Its Program

Denver has long served as a gateway to the West, a land rich in natural beauty and home to Indigenous communities such as the Cheyenne, Apache, Comanche, Shoshone and Ute. Having a museum in this region is an opportunity, but it also carries responsibilities, as Christoph Heinrich, director of the Denver Art Museum, emphasized during his presentation of the 2025 program.

The Denver Art Museum was among the first institutions in the U.S. to collect Native American art, beginning in 1925, and has maintained a steadfast commitment to highlighting the contributions of Indigenous artists. “The impact of Indigenous people on the collection is fundamental,” Heinrich said in his speech, “It has always been essential for us to collect contemporary art by Native American people.”

This month, the museum is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its Indigenous Arts of North America collection with a complete rehanging of its Indigenous works. “As we approach the 100th anniversary of the DAM’s Indigenous Arts of North America collection, we take this moment to honor and uplift Native voices and perspectives by communicating the many contributions Indigenous artists, advisors, and scholars have made to our museum,” Dakota Hoska, associate curator of Native Arts, told Observer. “We are excited to expose our larger audiences to the beauty and innovation found in Native North American artwork throughout time.”

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The 2025 program deeply reflects this orientation. In October the museum is hosting the first survey of Ojibwe-descent artist Andrea Carlson. By blending an eclectic range of cultural and pop references, the artist’s visionary and intricate paintings explore the notion of Indigenous Futurism to create works that challenge historical injustices and museum practices that have harmed Indigenous communities. Focusing mainly on notions of sovereignty and resistance, Carloson’s psychedelic yet paradoxically hyper-realistic works expand the narrative around how Indigenous artists and people are interpreted in the broader culture.

The show will include forty works on paper and sculptures spanning her career, presenting three of Carlson’s large-scale stacked landscapes for the first time, as the artist originally intended them to be shown. “The DAM has long been committed to commissioning, collecting, and exhibiting works by contemporary Indigenous artists as a key part of its mission these last 100 years,” Dakota Hoska told Observer during the presentation. “Continuing this tradition, we’re thrilled to present the first comprehensive museum survey dedicated to Andrea Carlson, an artist of Ojibwe descent who spans her nearly two-decade practice. Her multi-layered work explores the interplay between space, time, story and landscape, challenging traditional narratives of ownership and consumption while embodying a starkly beautiful visual language.”

Opening in April 2025 is the first large-scale survey of Cree artist Kent Monkman, organized in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Known for his masterfully executed figurative paintings, Monkman provocatively reexamines Western and European art history, reintroducing Indigenous figures who have long been marginalized or erased from these narratives. The exhibition will showcase forty-one monumental paintings from the museum’s extensive collection of Monkman’s work, alongside newly created pieces and significant loans from other institutions and private collections. As the title, “History is Painted by the Victors,” suggests, Monkman’s large-scale history paintings offer an alternative narrative, continuing his mission to decolonize bodies and sexuality while creating space for Indigenous and 2SLGBTQ+ voices in the broader canon of art history.

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“’Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors’ showcases Monkman’s contemporary and often monumental approach to the history painting genre, creating dialogues that challenge viewers to question the narratives they believe to be true,” explained John P. Lukavic, curator and head of the Denver Art Museum’s Native Arts Department. Drawing heavily on the art historical canon, particularly the Hudson River School, Monkman addresses critical issues impacting Indigenous communities and their deep connections to the land, including climate change, environmental protection, the impact of governmental policies on historically marginalized groups, generational trauma and the visibility and pride of Two-Spirit and other queer-identifying communities. The exhibition will also feature the epic work mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People), on tour from the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the first time.

As part of its ongoing commitment to advancing the dialogue around Indigenous art and culture, the Denver Art Museum also hosts an annual Native Arts Symposium. This gathering offers a rich blend of scholarly contributions, lectures, performances, food and community events. The 2025 symposium will expand into a two-day program featuring an ambitious lineup of panelists who will explore the past, present and future of Indigenous arts and its representation in museums and on the global stage.

Perhaps the Denver Art Museum’s 2025 program and its distinctive dedication to connecting with, celebrating and supporting Indigenous communities—from including them in the decision-making processes of exhibition curation to encouraging their active participation in its gallery spaces—could become a model for other institutions looking to rectify past erasure and to engage meaningfully with Indigenous voices and perspectives.