Symposium Perspectives
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- Опубліковано 5 вер 2024
- Kevin Gover is the Under Secretary for Museums and Culture at the Smithsonian. The Office of the Under Secretary for Museums and Culture oversees the Institution’s history and art museums, its cultural centers, and the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian exhibits, and the National Collections Program. He had served as director of the National Museum of the American Indian from 2007 until January 2021.
Gover oversees the Institution’s museums, including the Anacostia Community Museum; Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art; Arts and Industries Building; Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (New York City); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; National Air and Space Museum; National Museum of African American History and Culture; National Museum of African Art; National Museum of American History; National Museum of the American Indian and its George Gustav Heye Center (New York City); National Portrait Gallery; National Postal Museum; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery.
Gover, a citizen of the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, served as the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, and its George Gustav Heye Center in New York City for fourteen years. He also oversaw the Cultural Resources Center in Suitland, Maryland. He led the museum to pursue equity and social justice for Native people through education, inspiration, and empowerment, and the museum has worked to expand people’s ideas of what it means to be Native American.
Under his leadership as director of the National Museum of the American Indian, the Washington and New York museums have opened numerous critically acclaimed exhibitions, including Americans (2018), which uncovers the many ways American Indian images, names, and stories have been part of the nation’s history, identity, and pop culture since before the country began; Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations (2014), which examines the history and legacy of U.S.-American Indian diplomacy from the colonial period through the present; Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian (2010), a long-term exhibition of more than 700 works of Native art from throughout North, Central, and South America that demonstrates the breadth of the museum’s renowned collection; and The Great Inka Road: Engineering an Empire (2015), which explores the construction and use of the Inka Road, considered one of the monumental engineering feats in history and now recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Other exhibitions opened during his tenure include Fritz Scholder: Indian/Not Indian (2008), Brian Jungen: Strange Comfort (2009), A Song for the Horse Nation (2011), Kay Walkingstick: An American Artist (2016), Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound (2017), T.C. Cannon: At the Edge of America (2019), and Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting (2019).