Stolen land and enslaved labor.

America’s two foundational sins.

Crimes against humanity responsible for all the wealth and power the country has accumulated since. Every dollar and drone.

Any accounting of the American story over the past 250 years not centering this truth is propaganda.

America was built on stolen land and built with enslaved labor. Period. The rest is detail.

Through an extraordinary gift, The New York Historical, New York’s first museum, can now advance its enduring mission of history and civics education through Native American art. The nation’s story as told by and through the indigenous people whose land was stolen.

New York Historical Chair of the Board of Trustees Agnes Hsu-Tang and her husband Oscar Tang have made promised gifts from their landmark collection of modern and contemporary Native American art to the institution. The museum showcases the items during “House Made of Dawn: Art by Native Americans 1880 to Now, Selections from the Hsu-Tang Collection,” through August 16, 2026.

The exhibition takes its name from N. Scott Momaday’s (Kiowa) 1969 Pulitzer-winning novel House Made of Dawn. The book ultimately inspired the formation of the Native American portion of Hsu-Tang’s art collection, but first, it inspired her to take a road trip across the country.

“I remember being awestruck by the sights of Shiprock and Antelope Canyon, and feeling humbled, but also uplifted,” Hsu-Tang said in a press release announcing the gift. “It is our hope that these remarkable works of visual history—collectively named after Momaday’s masterpiece alluding to an ancient Navajo invocation for reconciliation—will inspire meaningful conversations on the occasion of our nation’s semiquincentennial.”

Meaningful conversations.

Conversations around stolen land and enslaved labor.

Conversations the federal government wants no part of as it pitches a flag waving, Yankee Doodle dummy version of the nation’s history.

Modern And Contemporary Native American Art

Iconic ancestors. Famed forebearers. Contemporary masters.

The Hsu-Tang Collection connects nearly 150 years of creativity from Native American artists working at the forefront of Modernism. Modern art writ large. The modernity of works on view, how they so easily and obviously dialogue with broader American and global art trends of the past century, will astonish the uninitiated.

Paintings, watercolors, sculptures, prints and drawings, photography, textiles, baskets, mixed media, glass, precious metal, and rare books. Pottery, of course. The collection’s wellspring is the late-19th century and early-20th ceramics of Nampeyo of Hano (Tewa) and Maria Martinez (San Ildefonso). GOATs. Essentials to Native and American art. Painters and illustrators of the era, Angel De Cora (Ho-Chunk) and Hart Lone Wolf Schultz (Blackfeet), and poet and opera composer Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Dakota), are also featured.

Advancing further into the 20^th century, the exhibition introduces important works on paper by artists such as Awa Tsireh (San Ildefonso), Julian Martinez (San Ildefonso), Quah Ah Tonita Peña (San Ildefonso), Gerónima Montoya (Ohkay Owingeh), Tse Tsan Pablita Velarde (Santa Clara), Acee Blue Eagle (Muscogee), Archie Blackowl (Cheyenne), the Kiowa Six, and many others who invented and advanced the “Flat Style” and achieved international recognition including at the 1932 Venice Biennale.

Also featured are a pair of mid-20th century works by modernist pioneers Oscar Howe (Yanktonai Dakota) and George Morrison (Ojibwe). They took Native American art out as far as it had ever gone. They helped initiate the contemporary era of Native art along with the creation of the Institute for American Indian Art in 1962.

No conversation about American art since 1960 is complete without recognition of IAIA in Santa Fe, the only four-year degree fine arts institution in the world devoted to contemporary Native American and Alaskan Native arts.

The “House Made of Dawn” exhibition brings to light the artistic accomplishments of three generations of groundbreaking IAIA teachers and students beginning with the OG’s: Fritz Scholder (Luiseño), Momaday, Allan Houser (Apache), T.C. Cannon (Kiowa), Earl Biss (Crow), Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi), Joy Harjo (Muscogee), Dan Namingha (Hopi), and David Bradley (Chippewa) among them.

Standing on their shoulders are the contemporary Native artists who have taken the genre and Native representation to new heights–to full mainstream status. Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith (Salish), Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo), Anita Fields (Osage), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Diego Romero (Cochiti), Courtney Leonard (Shinnecock), Frank Buffalo Hyde (Onondaga), Preston Singletary (Tlingit), Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti), Tom Jones (Ho Chunk), Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw/Cherokee), and many others.

The best of the best.

Not the best contemporary Native artists; the best contemporary artists.

Tang Wing for American Democracy

Tang’s generosity also provides for opening the Tang Wing for American Democracy at The New York Historical on June 18. The 71,000-square-foot addition greatly expands The Historical’s landmark building and wide-ranging schedule of exhibitions, educational initiatives, and public programs.

The Tang Wing will enable a tenfold increase in participation in The Historical’s award-winning Academy for American Democracy. Developed to address critical gaps in the teaching of American history and civics, the Academy’s four-day intensive program will now serve 30,000 sixth-grade students each year in new classrooms.

The Tang Wing for American Democracy opens with American democracy at greater peril than any time since the Civil War. Full on fascism. A rogue Supreme Court eviscerating bedrock civil rights and human rights protections. Protections previous generations fought and died for. A feckless “opposition” party. Congress abdicating its authority. A hollowed-out media unable to hold the powerful to account. Corporate complicity.

The ship is going down.

All hands on deck.

Artists especially.

Art, after all, is the people’s history. When–if–this horrendous period of American history passes, it will be artists who give the world its most candid accounting. The concentration camps. The kidnappings. The corruption. The suffering.

“Art is truth, and my quilts bear witness,” artist Carolyn Mazloomi has said. “They are evidence, testimony, and a lived record of American history.”

‘Chasing Freedom’

Claire Oliver Gallery presents Chasing Freedom, a new work by Carolyn Mazloomi, on view through May 23, 2026. The exhibition centers on a single monumental quilt, the largest work Mazloomi has made to date, which unfolds as a sweeping visual timeline of Black American history. History that begins with enslavement.

This is the first of two planned quilts that together will cover the most significant milestones in the Black American experience, from the brutality of enslavement and the courage of those who sought liberation, through the civil rights and Black power movements, to the ongoing pursuit of freedom and equality in the present day.

"As both a historian and a quilt maker, I use textile art to document and preserve cultural memory and to tell stories that might otherwise be forgotten," Mazloomi said in a press release. “The pursuit of justice and freedom like the quilt itself, is built stitch by stitch, generation by generation."

Chasing Freedom is a narrative quilt in the fullest sense. Through stitched imagery, appliqué, and symbolic storytelling, Mazloomi structures the work as a series of historical vignettes, each panel a distinct scene of resistance, perseverance, or transformation. Viewers are invited to move physically and emotionally through the chronicle, engaging with the layered histories embedded in each section of cloth.

If provocative contemporary art centering Black History is your thing, make additional time for “Fly in the Sugar Bowl,” a solo exhibition of new and recent works by Julian V.L. Gaines at Cristin Tierney Gallery. Spanning painting, sculpture, and assemblage, Gaines’s work examines the tensions between Black experience and the structures of systemic inequality in the United States.

Lenapehoking

Stolen land.

Manhattan is the Lenape island of Manhahtaan (Mannahatta) in Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland.

The Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side shares this Land Acknowledgement:

Nulelìntàmuhëna èli paèkw Lenapehoking

Kulawsihëmo ènta ahpièkw.

Nooleelundamuneen eeli payeekw Lunaapeewahkiing.

Wulaawsiikw neeli apiiyeekw.

We are glad because you people came to Lenapehoking. Live well when you are here.

The Lenape Center and choreographer Emily Johnson helped develop the statement.

Two opportunities remain to participate in Johnson and Kai Recollect’s Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter, a series of fires centering Indigenous protocol and knowledge. The fires take place in Abrons’ newly renovated plaza.

These celebrations of communal gathering and history feature guest artists and organizers sharing stories and performances in honor and protection of the land, water, and air of Lenapehoking.

Fires will be held from 6:00 to 8:00 PM May 21 and June 25. Attendance is free; RSVPs are encouraged.

Abrons Arts Center builds a community where artists, learners, and audiences explore creative possibilities. Rooted in the immigrant and working-class history of its neighborhood, Abrons offers free and affordable exhibitions, performances, classes, residencies, and space access.

Abrons Arts Center is part of the historic Henry Street Settlement. Founded in 1893 by social work and public health pioneer Lillian Wald, Henry Street Settlement delivers a wide range of social service, arts and health care programs to more than 60,000 New Yorkers each year. Henry Street challenges the effects of urban poverty by helping families achieve better lives for themselves and their children.

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