Research Guides: Indigenous Art and Artists: Museums, Galleries and Exhibitions

Selected Museums

Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico
The MAPR engages diverse communities to facilitate learning experiences about the visual arts through the growth of a well-researched permanent collection exemplifying significant and representative examples of Puerto Rican art from the sixteenth century to the present.
Museu Nacional de Belas Artes de Cuba
A museum of fine arts that exhibits Cuban art collections from the colonial period up to contemporary artworks.
Museums Association of the Caribbean
The mission of the Museum Association of the Caribbean (MAC) is to create a network that aids museums and cultural organisations across the Caribbean to share and benefit from their common skills and experiences. We have been supporting museums since 1987: helping to develop standards and best practice; serving as advisors to governments and the public on museum development; exchanging information and ideas; connecting organizations internationally; and conserving and preserving our natural and cultural heritage. Includes a member museums map.

Anchorage Museum
The Anchorage Museum sits on the traditional homeland of the Eklutna Dena’ina. The museum is committed to recognizing and honoring the land, culture and language of the Dena’ina people.
Center for Native Futures
The Center for Native Futures is a newly-formed non-profit organization currently hoping to create a Native and Indigenous gallery space in the city of Zhegagoynak (Chicago).
Denver Art Museum
The Denver Art Museum was one of the first art museums in the nation to collect Indigenous arts from North America. As early as 1925, the DAM recognized and valued the fine aesthetic qualities of Native arts, when many other institutions only valued them as anthropological material. The collection contains the early artwork of Indigenous people, as well as the work of contemporary Native artists at every moment in time.
Eiteljorg Museum
The Eiteljorg in Indianapolis, Indiana tells the stories of the peoples of North America in all their diversity and complexity. It’s a place for historical context, artistic expression, new ideas, and individual perspectives.
Institute of American Indian Arts Museum of Contemporary Native Arts
AIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) is dedicated to increasing public understanding and appreciation of contemporary Native art, history and culture through presentation, collection and acquisition, preservation, and interpretation. MoCNA is recognized as the preeminent organizer of exhibitions devoted exclusively to the display of dynamic and diverse arts practices representative of Native North America. 
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Collections
Located on the Pacific Rim, LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States. Committed to showcasing a multitude of art histories, LACMA exhibits and interprets works of art from new and unexpected points of view that are informed by the region’s rich cultural heritage and diverse population. Specific collections at LACMA: Art of the Ancient Americans; Andean Arts; Maya Arts; Panamanian Arts.
Museum of Anthropology
Based at the University of British Columbia, MOA covers world arts and cultures, with a special emphasis on the First Nations peoples and other cultural communities of British Columbia, Canada.
National Museum of the American Indian
The NMAI cares for one of the world's most expansive collections of Native artifacts, including objects, photographs, archives, and media covering the entire Western Hemisphere, from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego.
Portage College Museum of Aboriginal Peoples’ Art and Artifacts
The MOAPAA collections showcase foundational artists across different genres and tell the stories of the beginnings of various Indigenous art forms from coast to coast to coast. Visitors to the museum can enjoy a self-guided tour, and guided group tours can also be accommodated with prior arrangements. The exhibits provide an in-depth look at North American Indigenous Art from First Nations, Métis, and Inuit cultures and house the only permanent collection in the world of the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc.

Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino
The Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino opened its doors to the public in December 1981. An institution created to conserve, study and diffuse the artistic legacy of the pre-Columbian peoples of all of the Americas was a pioneering, and remains a unique, initiative in Latin America.
Museo Larco
The permanent collection of Museo Larco showcases more than 5,000 years of history of ancient Peru, through a fascinating collection of pre-Columbian art.
Museo Nacional de Antropología
The National Museum of Anthropology houses archeological and anthropologic testimonies, forged by a multiplicity of cultural groups over years of history; it, moreover, pays homage to the indigenous peoples of present-day Mexico through a rich repertory of practices, representations, expressions, knowledge and traditions.

Bishop Museum
Bishop Museum was founded in 1889 by Charles Reed Bishop in honor of his late wife, Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the last descendant of the royal Kamehameha family. The Museum was established to house the extensive collection of Hawaiian objects and royal family heirlooms of the Princess, and has expanded to include millions of objects, documents and photographs about Hawai‘i and other Pacific island cultures.
Guam Museum
Over 300 curated artifacts, thousands of images, multiple audios, and short films have been carefully pieced together in seven different galleries to guide visitors through the historical, Chamorro narrative of Guam.
Honolulu Museum of Art
The Honolulu Museum of Art is home to a collection of artworks from Hawai‘i and the Pacific region that represent a multitude of forms, traditional practices, and contemporary processes. Numbering over 1,300 objects, the collection features sculpture, woven and plaited works, bark cloth (or kapa), wood vessels, paintings, and feather work by Indigenous and Hawai’i-based artists and artisans.
Te Ahu Museum
Te Ahu Museum in Kaitaia hosts a remarkable collection that illuminates the stories and histories of the Far North District (Te Hiku o te Ika) of New Zealand. Treasures among the pre-European Mãori collection include pounamu, early carvings and the 500 year-old skeletal remains of the extinct kuri (Polynesian dog). Other major themes are gum digging and the Dalmatians, kauri gum and timber, early shipwrecks and missionary pioneers.

Selected Exhibitions

Fiji: Art & Life in the Pacific
The first substantial project on the art of Fiji to be mounted in the United States, Fiji: Art & Life in the Pacific featured over 280 artworks drawn from major international collections, including the Fiji Museum, British Museum, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Cambridge), the Smithsonian, and distinguished private collections. Exhibited at LACMA from 2019-2021.
Infinity of Nations
At the National Museum of the American Indian, the objects in this exhibition were largely collected by George Gustav Heye (1874–1957), a New Yorker who quit Wall Street to indulge his passion for American Indian artifacts. Over time, Heye gathered some 800,000 pieces from throughout the Americas, the largest such collection ever compiled by one person. Today, the objects in Heye’s collection are being reinterpreted by the descendants of the people who made them, providing American Indian perspectives on the Native past and present.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map
This exhibition at the Whitney Museum is the first New York retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), an overdue but timely look at the work of a groundbreaking artist. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map brings together nearly five decades of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures in the largest and most comprehensive showing of her career to date.
Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in L.A.
The Library Foundation of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Public Library present "Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in L.A." as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative. The exhibition celebrates the rich social fabric of Los Angeles through the lens of the city’s vibrant Oaxacan community — specifically, the Zapotec communities which make up one of the largest Indigenous groups in Mexico and Los Angeles.