The Denver Art Museum will be celebrating 100th anniversary of its Indigenous Arts of North America collection in 2025. The museum will launch a year of programming, including solo exhibitions of leading contemporary Indigenous artists Kent Monkman and Andrea Carlson.
The 100th anniversary programming will also include a reinstallation of 8,000 sq. ft. of the museum’s permanent Indigenous Arts collection spaces and a scholarly convening that reflects on the last century of collecting and looks forward to the future of Indigenous art and the role of museums.
As one of the first art museums in the country to collect Indigenous artworks from North America, and for decades the only major art museum in the world to focus its attention on Indigenous arts, the DAM’s institution-wide commitment to uplifting contemporary Indigenous artists at every moment in time has been an essential part of the museum’s collection and exhibition focus for the last century.
In 1925, the DAM established a collection dedicated to contemporary Indigenous arts, one of the only museums to make this commitment at that time. DAM currently dedicates more than 20,000 square feet of gallery space in its Lanny and Sharon Martin Building to exhibiting its Indigenous Arts Collection of more than 18,000 works. Indigenous artworks and artists are also incorporated into exhibitions and presentations across the DAM’s collections, including Modern & Contemporary Art, Textile Arts and Fashion, Architecture & Design, Western American Art and Photography, adding Indigenous perspectives to global art contexts.