Patricia Marroquin Norby, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha), associate curator of Native American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), presents this year’s Wyeth Lecture in American Art. Dr. Norby’s lecture will focus on her forthcoming book Water, Bones, and Bombs and her curatorial practices that affirm Indigenous representations. She will share her vision for and approaches to collecting, presenting, and interpreting Native American art at the Met and beyond.

In September 2020, Dr. Norby made international history with her appointment at the Met, becoming the first full-time curator of Native American art in the museum’s 150-year history. Since then Dr. Norby has broken institutional barriers by engaging bold, refreshing, community-centered approaches that foreground Indigenous voices and experiences within the Met’s collections, exhibitions, and programs. Her curatorial vision and strategies have been celebrated by the New York Times, PBS, Forbes magazine, and Bitch Media, and she has been described as “a new voice in an old institution” by the Santa Fe New Mexican’s arts and culture magazine, Pasatiempo. Dr. Norby previously served as senior executive and assistant director of the National Museum of the American Indian New York and as director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry, in Chicago.