The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has installed a plaque on its Fifth Avenue facade acknowledging the building sits atop Lenape land.
A plaque honoring the Lenape land was added to the exterior of the Met’s main building on Tuesday.
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art is situated in Lenapehoking, homeland of the Lenape diaspora and historically a gathering and trading place for many diverse Native peoples, who continue to live and work on this island,” the museum published in a readout.
“We respectfully acknowledge and honor all Indigenous communities — past, present, and future — for their ongoing and fundamental relationships to the region,” the museum’s statement added.
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The Met statement noted the newly installed plaque “reflects years of extensive consultation and development with diverse specialists on the topic.”
In addition to the acknowledgment, the museum is exploring a site-specific honoring for the Met Cloisters in northern Manhattan located close by the Lenape trails and caves.
The museum has received criticism in the past for hosting Native American art in its art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas galleries, which is far removed from the visual narrative of the United States.
After the museum received a gift of 91 Native American art pieces from Charles and Valerie Diker in 2017, the Met said it would begin displaying works by Indigenous people in the American Wing.
Patricia Marroquin Norby, a Purepecha woman, became the museum’s first full-time curator of Native American art in September of last year.
Norby and Sylvia Yount, curator of the American Wing, co-authored an article noting territorial acknowledgments are common in Canada, “but it’s only recently that US museums have begun to place them at their entrances.”
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“Such statements are integral to the goals of building and maintaining respectful relationships with Indigenous communities whose original lands museums now occupy,” the authors wrote, adding the acknowledgment indicates an institution is committed to “appropriately honoring” communities whose ancestral items are on display.
