Native American art and culture stepped into the spotlight this year

The closure came with a contrite statement from director Sean Decatur — “The Halls we are closing are vestiges of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives, and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples. Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others,” he wrote. Whatever virtue the action carried, it wasn’t wholly by choice: Recent changes in the Federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act required museums like the AMNH to consult in much greater detail with Indigenous nations before displaying cultural objects of any kind. The rules aim to prevent sensitive or sacred objects, like those used in ceremony, from being on public view without the nations’ consent.

The Eastern Woodland and Great Plains galleries were relics of an era when such sensitivities were at best ignored, or even flouted. In the most intense periods of colonialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, important pieces were frequently taken by settlers from Indigenous communities by lopsided trade or even theft. Replete with rubbery mannequins displaying everything from garments to jewelry to significant objects like wampum, the galleries were a holdover monument to colonial opportunism.

Countless other displays across the country — including at the Field Museum in Chicago, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — had to be altered or concealed as the fine details were sorted. But AMNH’s closure of an entire wing was a signal that for museums, real partnership with Indigenous nations was no longer a matter of virtuous choice. It was the law.

It was quite a start to the year. But the bolstered regulations both reflected and empowered a current running quietly beneath the surface of museum practice for some time. Last year, thoughtful exhibitions of Indigenous art from the Southwest Pueblos at both New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, suggested real change was simmering. That fall, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., opened its first major survey of North American Indigenous art in more than 70 years. Curated by the Salish-Kootenai artist Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, it put contemporary Native American art center stage at one of the most important institutions in the country.

Less than a year later, one major event put Native American culture in the global spotlight: In April, Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee artist from New York’s Hudson Valley, opened “the space in which to place me,” as the official representative of the United States at the Venice Biennale. The Biennale is the world’s most important contemporary art showcase, with artists handpicked by national juries as emissaries for their home countries. Gibson, the first ever Indigenous artist chosen to represent the United States, seized the moment: His installation for the American pavilion included homage to the work and ideas of generations of Native American artists without whom his own career might not have been possible.

You didn’t have to travel to Italy to see Gibson’s work: His mural in Boston’s Dewey Square, “your spirit whispering in my ear,” was installed in September, where it will remain for at least the next two years. It’s a satellite of his much larger “POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT,” a sprawling exhibition of his large-scale textile and video work that opened at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams in November.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. While New York’s natural history museum and others hurriedly closed and concealed whole sections of their holdings, elsewhere, things were opening up. At the MFA, the NAGPRA-mandated removal of eight objects on display happened alongside “Marking Resilience,” the first exhibition curated by Marina Tyquiengco, the museum’s first-ever curator of Native American art.

The show, which had opened in November 2023, was an intimate display of contemporary prints, and a subtle signal of change at the museum itself. Almost all of the pieces on view — by such Indigenous contemporary art icons as James Luna, Duane Slick, and Gibson himself — were newly acquired.

The MFA’s commitment was never more clear than a few weeks ago, when it installed “The Knowledge Keepers,” a pair of chromium sculptures of Indigenous cultural leaders flanking its front door, by Alan Michelson, a Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River. Both are of real, living people with specific roles in their respective Massachusetts communities — Julia Marden, a registered member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe, preserves and teaches the practice of twining; Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr., a Nipmuc citizen, describes himself as “a cultural steward for his Tribe.”

They’re Michelson’s response to Cyrus Dallin’s 1909 “Appeal to the Great Spirit,” a sculpture of a nameless Indigenous man of unknown tribal affiliation that has stood on the MFA’s lawn for more than a century. The schism from past to present is jarring, and intentionally so, Michelson’s figures radiating life, present and future, Dallin’s a past vision of Indigenous ruination. Key to understanding the shift is the clear-eyed insistence that Indigenous culture be portrayed as contemporary and thriving — a fact that museums displaying objects as historical artifacts, not art, have until very recently denied.

Also embracing that notion in May of this year, the Portland Museum of Art made its own first with a career survey of the remarkable basketry of Passamaquoddy artist Jeremy Frey, the museum’s first solo exhibition by an Indigenous artist. Frey, in his 40s, learned ancient Wabanaki weaving techniques, then mastered them; the results are objects nested in tradition, but entirely contemporary, and his own. Portland’s show signaled a clear continuum between a millennia old technique and an innovative current practice pushing into the future.

In an exhibition of her work on view today at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick challenges the Hudson River School’s romantic landscapes with her own amendments of the land as Indigenous, as any consideration of the American landscape must now do.

Meanwhile in Vermont, the Shelburne Museum prepares to change its own landscape. In September it announced the architecture team and plans for its revamped Perry Center for Native American Art, with a design team headed up by Two Row Architects, an Indigenous-led firm based at the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation, west of Toronto. (Boston’s Annum Architects and Cambridge landscape architects Reed Hilderbrand are partners on the project.) The building, project architect Matthew Hickey of Two Row told me, would express the value of “our ancestors’ knowledge, and really pulling that to the forefront.”

Designed in consultation with 75 Indigenous groups, the center helps set a standard that the revamped federal rules demand. With its soft, swooping, clay-colored exterior nestled in greenery, it’s designed to become one with the land, not dominate it. Construction will begin in the spring, and is scheduled to finish in 2026. So let’s not close the book on 2024 so much as see it as a significant chapter, with countless more yet to be written.

Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.