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Interview / Museums / Future Archives
Dare Turner, Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum, talks to Litro about cultural belongings as relatives, community authority, institutional memory and why care in museums has to mean more than preservation.
A museum object is rarely only an object. It has usually been named, moved, catalogued, stored, interpreted, photographed, insured, displayed and written into an institutional record. Long before a visitor meets it in a gallery, it has already passed through systems of authority: the collector who acquired it, the curator who classified it, the label that explained it, the database field that fixed it into place.
Dare Turner’s work begins by unsettling that chain of authority.
Turner is the Brooklyn Museum’s Curator of Indigenous Art, a member of the Yurok Tribe of California, the museum’s first full-time curator of Native art, and the first Native person to hold a curatorial role at the institution. In her care are more than 13,000 objects, though “objects” is not the word she reaches for first. She speaks instead of belongings, and more specifically of relatives: cultural works with agency, power and continuing relationships to the communities from which they come.
That shift in language is not decorative. It changes the work.
To call something an object is to make it available to the habits of the museum: storage, display, scholarship, conservation, interpretation. To call it a belonging is to ask who it belongs to, who has the authority to speak with or about it, and what forms of care it requires beyond temperature, light level or mount. To call it a relative is to move further still, into a relationship that is reciprocal, living and not fully contained by the museum’s own systems.
In Turner’s account, care is practical before it is rhetorical. It can mean bringing Native community members into the vault to encounter belongings through touch, memory and language. It can mean inviting artists to study historical works closely, to turn them over, examine their backs, understand their construction and learn from ancestors whose hands remain present in the work. It can mean asking whether something should be shown, how it should be stored, whether it needs to be fed, and what knowledge should be recorded for future generations only with consent.
One of the most striking moments in our conversation comes when Turner describes bringing Osage visitors into storage to see belongings associated with one of their ancestors. There, they held and prayed with a peyote gourd and spoke Osage. The question that stayed with her was not only what the object meant, but when it had last heard its language. Was it in 1910, when it entered the collection? Was it before that? The scene quietly reverses the usual museum hierarchy. The institution is not simply presenting knowledge. It is being taught how to listen.
That question of authority runs through Turner’s work. Museums have long positioned curators, collectors and scholars as the central interpreters of cultural material. In the Brooklyn Museum’s own history, Turner speaks carefully about the legacy of Stewart Culin, the non-Native founding curator of her collection area, who acquired thousands of works in the early twentieth century through collecting expeditions. His legacy, she says, is mixed. His work brought cultural belongings to new audiences and made future interpretation possible. But his curatorial model was also fundamentally different from the one Turner practises now.
The difference is not simply generational. It is structural. Where older museum practice often placed institutional expertise at the centre, Turner’s work asks how authority can be shifted toward descendant communities, artists and those who understand the original contexts in which these belongings acted. This does not mean abandoning scholarship. It means recognising that scholarship is incomplete when detached from the people whose histories, memories and responsibilities remain bound up with the works themselves.
For Litro’s Future Archives strand, the conversation matters because Turner is not only speaking about representation in the gallery. She is speaking about institutional memory: what gets preserved, what disappears, and what future curators will inherit. Labels vanish. Paper files go missing. Old computer files become unreadable. Exhibition records remain partial. Turner says she wishes she had more access to labels and installation records from Culin’s era, not because they would settle the past, but because they would reveal how knowledge was framed, limited and passed on.
That is where the database enters the story. In another kind of article, metadata might sound technical, even dull. Here it becomes an ethical question. When community members share knowledge during a collection visit, and when they consent to that knowledge being held beyond the immediate conversation, Turner wants it entered into the museum’s knowledge systems so that a curator 50 or 100 years from now does not have to begin again from absence. The archive, in this sense, is not a neutral storehouse. It is a record of relationships, permissions and responsibilities.
Care, then, is not a soft word. It is not a substitute for politics, nor a way of avoiding the harder questions of collecting, authority and colonial history. Turner is clear that museums must be careful about who they position as the authority. She is also clear that Native belongings should not be understood only through colonial narratives, even when those histories must be faced. Care means asking what the belonging needs, what the community wants, what should be recorded, what should remain quiet, and what forms of interpretation make room for more than the institution’s own voice.
Near the end of our conversation, Turner offers the closest thing to a thesis. A curator’s role, she says, moves far beyond putting art on walls. The curator’s task is to foster empathy, express gratitude and embody care beyond an object-specific understanding of preservation. The question is not only how to care for things, but how to care for communities, individuals and the relationships that enter the museum with them.
“A curator’s role moves far beyond just putting art on walls.”
About Dare Turner
Dare Turner is Curator of Indigenous Art at the Brooklyn Museum and a member of the Yurok Tribe of California. She is the museum’s first full-time curator of Native art and the first Native person to hold a curatorial role at the institution. Her work focuses on Indigenous art, cultural memory, community engagement and the care of more than 13,000 objects, belongings and relatives in the museum’s collection.
On role and responsibility
Eric Akoto, Litro
Could you briefly introduce your role at the Brooklyn Museum, and how your work connects with Indigenous art, cultural memory and public interpretation?
My name is Dare Turner. I’m a member of the Yurok Tribe of California, and I am the Brooklyn Museum’s Curator of Indigenous Art.
I’m the first full-time curator of Native art at the museum, and the first Native person to hold a curatorial role in the institution. In my capacity as a curator, I care for over 13,000 objects, belongings, and I like to think of them as relatives within the collection.
As a curator, I try to bring empathy and gratitude and care to all of the work I do, both in the vault and in the galleries, and in my engagement with Native community members.
On belongings as relatives
Eric Akoto, Litro
What does that care look like in practice?
It takes many different forms.
In terms of working with the collection, my favourite thing to do is to bring in Native community members and learn about the belongings we care for through their eyes and their perspectives. They are always going to be the ultimate authority on cultural belongings that their community produced.
Sometimes our engagement is focused on repatriation. Other times, it is artists who want to reverse-engineer historical artworks: look at them up close, touch them, turn them, look at the backside, things you would not necessarily see in the gallery, to understand how their ancestors made objects.
That is a really poignant experience: to hold the space with both the belongings and their descendant community members.
One moving experience was bringing Osage visitors through to see belongings associated with one of their ancestors. In that space, they held and prayed with a peyote gourd. They spoke Osage. That raised the question for me: when is the last time this belonging heard its language? Was that in 1910, when it was brought into the collection? Was it before that?
To me, doing those kinds of activities is just as important as making sure that a mount is appropriate in storage, or that belongings are on the right shelves. This is the way we nourish the belongings we care for.
“When is the last time this belonging heard its language?”
On authority and interpretation
Eric Akoto, Litro
What should museums be more careful about when presenting Indigenous histories and belongings?
Museums need to be really careful about who they position as the authority.
In past generations of curators, if we are working with the Stewart Culin collection, Culin was situated as the authority. That is problematic. The field recognises that this is a problematic legacy we have to reckon with.
Instead, we need to uplift different perspectives and shift authority to the people who should be deemed the authorities: the descendant communities, the artists who still work in these traditional modes, and the people who understand the ways in which these artworks were agents within their original context.
These were relatives that cared for the people in their community and vice versa. It can be a reciprocal and positive relationship that taps into ideas of care. Centering authority is what we have to be really careful around.
On community voice
Eric Akoto, Litro
How do you balance institutional interpretation with community voice and lived knowledge?
Compensating people to write about their community’s belongings is a great way to shift the dynamic.
For me, that means centering community voices, quoting artists directly, and sharing labels before they go on the wall. When I work with a contemporary artist, I share the labels before they are installed in the gallery, because I need them to say: yes, you are interpreting this right. Or they may say they would prefer that the focus shift more toward other concepts in the work.
If it is really tricky terrain, and I want to make sure we get it right, quoting the artist directly is often the best way to ensure that the way they want their work to be framed is the way we do so in the gallery.
On a longer legacy level, I also love to see labels that were written in past decades. They are instructive. Sometimes knowledge was presented because a scholar had deep knowledge about a particular region and the cultural belongings that come out of that. That needs to be maintained in the database.
Especially when we do community consultation, with permission, I want that information to be put into the database so that future generations of curators do not have to redo all this work.
Paper files disappear. Old computer files go away. But the database lives forever. As long as people say it is okay, I want to make sure those insights are recorded so that a curator 50 years from now knows what people today said about these historical belongings.
On contested histories
Eric Akoto, Litro
What does care look like when working with belongings that carry difficult or contested histories?
I think it means asking what they need.
That is something you do in community. How can I best care for these things? Should they be put on view? Should they never go on view? Do they need special care within the context of our storage units?
At times, we have fed objects at the direction of community members. They provide food, like corn flour, that is then placed around these objects, because they need to be nourished just like humans do. Care can take that form.
It is also careful negotiation and learning what stories to privilege. Museums can often focus on colonial narratives, which is important; these are histories that many people do not know. But it should not stop there. We do not want that to be the entire narrative or the only way Native belongings are understood. They should also be understood outside colonial histories.
In the galleries, we try to centre care and gratitude in the way we interpret works. There are moments where we do deeper dives into colonial history, but that is not the only organising framework. We did not want chronology, major moments in American history, or artistic schools to limit the kinds of stories we could tell at the Brooklyn Museum.
On preserving knowledge
Eric Akoto, Litro
For Future Archives, we’re interested in what survives and how it survives. What do museums need to preserve differently for future generations?
When communities share knowledge, if they give consent for that to be shared beyond the individual they are talking to, then that needs to happen.
It is easy when you are doing collection visits to lose sight of the institutional record and the importance of that record. But we want to make sure that when community members are saying, yes, you should know this, this should stay in perpetuity within the institution’s knowledge systems, we live up to that.
Fifty years from now, 100 years from now, whoever ends up being in my role should have all of the tools I developed and all of the knowledge I was able to cultivate in partnership with Native community members.
On care without performance
Eric Akoto, Litro
How do you avoid turning care into institutional language or something performative?
It means leading with empathy, being a careful listener and meeting people where they are.
Sometimes people want to share knowledge or broader historical context. Other times, they want to just be quiet with artworks they are visiting in the vault. Making space for all of those different opportunities, and expressing gratitude for the people who make the work possible, is part of what care looks like as a curator.
It is moving beyond just caring for objects and artworks, beyond making sure a painting has the best storage conditions or is well positioned in the gallery. It means making sure that when a Native person comes in and sees that painting, they see themselves, whether or not it has to do with Native subject matter.
Giving people an entry point to understanding different perspectives is a way to support care within institutional contexts.
What Care Preserves
The strongest thing in Turner’s answers is that care does not become sentiment. It remains practical. It is a matter of listening, paying, crediting, asking, recording, feeding, storing, consulting and sometimes leaving things quiet.
That matters because museums often speak in the language of stewardship while holding histories marked by extraction, hierarchy and silence. Turner does not flatten that history into accusation. She does something more useful: she shows what a different curatorial practice asks for. Authority has to move. Community knowledge has to be recorded with consent. Objects have to be understood not only as material evidence, but as relationships.
The future archive, in this sense, is not only the collection that survives. It is the record of how the institution learned to care differently.
