The Shelburne Museum in Vermont announced May 5 that it will build a new Native Art Center to house works by members of more than eighty North American tribes and bands. The $12.6 million Perry Center for Native American Art will be designed by award-winning architect David Adjaye; Encompassing 9,750 square feet, the building will be “highly sustainable” and configured “from the ground up in partnership with Indigenous voices to support culturally appropriate interpretation and care of Indigenous material culture,” according to a press release.
Among the institutions that Adjaye has recently designed is that of Washington, D.C. National Museum of American History and Culture; he is behind the long awaited expansion of the Studio Museum in Harlem and was chosen to design the new art museum at Princeton University as well as the future Africa Institute in Sharjah and the International Finance Corporation’s net zero headquarters in Dakar. The Ghanaian-born architect said in a statement that he and his team were “inspired by the potential of the Perry Center to not only enhance the Shelburne Museum as a destination for education, but also to empower indigenous communities. represented by the collection and reconceptualize the role of a museum installation in the 21st century.
The new center is named after collector Tony Perry, who grew up in Vermont. Her family donated their collection of Aboriginal art – much of the embroidery, child-rearing art, and Southwestern pottery – to Shelburne after her death. Shelburne director and chief executive Tom Denenberg told the VT Excavator that by naming the center after Perry, rather than an Aboriginal cultural figure, the museum hopes to honor the collector’s gift.
“The building was designed to be extremely respectful of Indigenous perspectives, even with spaces where an Indigenous person can come and be with an object from their tribes’ collection,” he told the publication. “These kinds of permeable spaces are going to be very important, and I feel like that’s going to be more important than the name on the building.”
Longtime Vermont resident and women’s activist Beverly Little Thunder, a Lakota elder and member of the Standing Rock Lakota band from North Dakota, dismissed the idea, saying, “If they really wanted to honor the people they were exposing art, they would find a way to give it a different name.
Denenberg noted that the works in the Perry collection were “ethically acquired” and confirmed that the Shelburne Native Art Collection was inventoried in accordance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
No timetable has yet been attached to the new institution.
