Indigenous Artists Reclaim History With AR in the Met’s American Wing

On October 13, a group of Indigenous artists took over the American collection at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to emphasize the need to elevate alternative narratives on Columbus Day—now widely observed as Indigenous Peoples’ Day—as the holiday’s name and meaning face renewed national scrutiny.

Yesterday, Amplifier—a nonprofit design lab known for using art and media to shift culture and amplify social movements—unveiled ENCODED: Change the Story, Change the Future, an augmented reality intervention that temporarily transformed the Met’s American Wing. Installed directly within the museum’s canonical collection of American art, the project brought Indigenous creativity quite literally into the frame, using the imaginative potential of 3D technology to assert a counter-narrative long erased from official histories.

Through AR overlays and immersive sound, ENCODED uses digital art and emerging technologies to activate existing paintings and sculptures in real time—to reclaim space, expand historical narratives and open new pathways for confrontation and dialogue about the meanings and values embedded in the collection itself—all as the American Wing marks its 100th anniversary.

By scanning a QR code, visitors embark on a self-guided tour that reveals another kind of story—one layered alongside and between the narratives depicted in historic paintings and sculptures. These Indigenous interventions coexist with Eurocentric portrayals and romantically idealized landscapes, recognizing and celebrating two distinct roots of American ancestry. ENCODED is accessible through the Amplifier website inside the Met galleries and anywhere in the world through December 31, 2025.

Conceived by an anonymous Indigenous donor and co-curated by Tracy Renée Rector in collaboration with Amplifier, the project features seventeen Indigenous artists living across Turtle Island (also known as North America). Among them are some of the most recognized names in contemporary Indigenous art, including Cannupa Hanska Luger and Nicholas Galanin, along with Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Bear Fox, Bird x Bird, Cass Gardiner, Demian DinéYazhi’, Jarrette Werk, Jeremy Dennis, Josué Rivas, Katsitsionni Fox, Lokotah Sanborn, Mali Obomsawin, Mer Young, Priscilla Dobler Dzul, Flechas and Skawennati, each engaging with the collection through their own vision and voice.

The title ENCODED came from consulting with Shinnecock Nation tribal member and featured artist Jeremy Dennis, Tracy Renée Rector tells Observer. “We were discussing the significance of oyster shells, shell middens and uncovering the layered histories of this region that are often unseen or at least not immediately apparent to many. This felt like an excellent way to frame the intention of the show, Native history and Lenspehoking.”

Thinking through the significance of this collective show in Lenapehoking, shell middens emerged as a metaphor for the many layers of history and the act of uncovering buried narratives, Rector adds. “As many creatives are experiencing a radical shift in a sense of safety and belonging in these political times, a number of the artists were excited to contribute to this unsanctioned show, expressing a sense of freedom in unapologetically taking up space as a community.”

Cannupa Hanska Luger’s intervention, for instance, overlays animated Indigenous figures who dance freely and joyfully across Thomas Cole’s serene Catskill landscape, disrupting its pastoral stillness and reclaiming their vital presence within the idealized scene. “The works that I’m presenting are an intervention on a narrative that American art, and the American art canon, has maintained, which is that the landscape of North America was void of population,” the artist said in a statement. To him, seeing these works dancing across these idealized landscapes can prompt viewers to see history as a narrative frozen in time, while culture remains alive and vibrant despite centuries of oppression. “Their dancing is a symbolic representation of a culture that thrives and survives the static aspect of history,” he said. “Having them move on these static paintings, I think, reinforces the idea of our survivors and our continued existence under the oppressive weight of being omitted from history.”

Painted largely in the 19th Century by artists of the Hudson River School and the Luminist movement, most of the landscapes in the Met’s American Wing are vast, luminous and idealized—expansive vistas of wilderness, lush nature, soaring mountains, glowing skies and tranquil waters that draw from the Classical idyll and the pastoral tradition to celebrate a presumed harmony between humans and nature. However, viewed through a contemporary lens, these works are not simply scenic; they reflect and promote a national myth: America as promised land, fertile new soil, destiny—as if the land were untouched and unpopulated. This denies the reality that Indigenous people had long lived there, building societies, caring for the land and maintaining a far more symbiotic and sustainable relationship with it. Behind the poetic illusion lies a propagandistic message, an ideology only recently challenged for erasing an entire side of American history—one that Columbus Day (or Indigenous Peoples’ Day) also calls into question.

Notably, ENCODED is not conceived as a protest, nor as the kind of entertaining spectacle AR is often reduced to. Instead, it operates as a deliberate act of cultural negotiation—a creative strategy in which artists harness new technologies to reassert Indigenous presence within American art and history. Rather than overwriting or erasing what already exists, the project insists on acknowledging multiple voices, contributions and perspectives within the nation’s story.

“Change the Story, Change the Future,” reads the ENCODED website—a powerful and timely reminder that without full awareness of a country’s history, it becomes nearly impossible to imagine, let alone build, a future capable of embracing the true richness of its heritage, identity and potential.