Upcoming Exhibitions
By mid-October 2024, the Museum will have eight distinct exhibitions on display for visitors. The exhibitions not held in the Main Gallery will be ready by August 2024, in time for the Museum to open its lobby for Fall Semester classes.
In our south lobby gallery, we will feature international textiles from our ethnographic collections. And, in our north lobby gallery, we will have an exhibition titled Locally Based, Globally Relevant.This interactive exhibit will recognize and honor the global impact of local Indigenous communities on land management practices and ecological conservation and restoration.
In our hall gallery, Through Our Eyes: A Reclamation will feature original artwork by three Indigenous guest-curators as they reinterpret the Edward S. Curtis and Joseph K. Dixon photography collections held at the Library of Congress and Indiana University. Though the Curtis and Dixon collections were produced through extractive and colonialist practices, this project intentionally prioritizes the guest-curators’ visions to redress colonial harm, recenter Indigenous perspectives, and uplift source community voices.
Our Reading Room will feature rotating selections from the Museum’s libraries and archival collections. The first exhibition will focus on maps of the Midwest. Displaying maps of the Midwest side-by-side will provide insight into the priorities and assumptions of the mapmakers and reveal the various lenses through which they viewed the land.
The Program Room will host Finding Home: Through Their Eyes, which displays works of art created by student refugees from countries around the world, including Turkey, Serbia, China, Ethiopia and Iraq, who are now living in Vienna, Austria. Their works express their own experiences or interpretations of displacement.
The nearby Community Gallery will feature works of personal expression created by local Boys and Girls Club members, utilizing a combination of graffiti throws and skate decks to explore what identity means to them.
In mid-October, the Main Gallery exhibitions will be on display for our Grand Opening. Curated by fashion scholar Heather Akou of the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, Divine Adornment: Community Stories of Belonging uses pieces from the Museum’s collection to explore fashion from an Islamic perspective. The exhibit focuses on what fashion means to people from source communities and how they inspire contemporary makers of textiles, clothing, and jewelry. It will present a nuanced, caring, and depoliticized perspective on Islam that is different from what most non-Muslims learn from the media. Themes of slow fashion, contemporary inspiration, making and belonging will be explored in this exhibition presented in both Arabic and English.
Lastly, Arthur Liou’s video installation, Whispers from the Divide, seeks to encapsulate the tangible and intangible barriers between the US-Mexico border. Through a series of pilgrimages to key locations along the border, Liou records a first-person journey and offers an immersive experience that transcends mere observation. The work fosters a space for empathy and understanding amidst a backdrop of political tumult and the complicated issues surrounding immigration and identity. The bilingual Spanish and English exhibition will feature an interactive space where guests and community members can share their personal experiences of the US-Mexico border.