10/15/2026
whatever you love and collect, Illuminée can provide, lighting, storage, shelving, cabinets, and suggestions for preserving, and displaying your collection...
Brooklyn Museum :: Hopi Kachina Dolls: Blessings for a Balanced World
October 2, 2026 – June 27, 2027
"Kachina dolls (tithu) represent Katsinam, spirits who bring much-needed moisture and keep the world in balance for the Hopi, an Indigenous tribe in arid northeastern Arizona. Carved from cottonwood and distinctively painted, the dolls are treasured gifts from the Katsinam, given primarily to Hopi girls and women.
This exhibition is the first to examine the Hopi kachina doll tradition from their recipients’ perspective. The Brooklyn Museum’s Center for Feminist Art is a natural home for this unprecedented presentation foregrounding Hopi women’s experiences, knowledge, and creative expression.
A note from Dare Turner, the Brooklyn Museum's Curator of Indigenous Art
As an Indigenous woman curating historical Native art within an encyclopedic institution, my role can be complicated. Over my years in the field, I have often weighed my responsibilities against those of many other types of curators. Perhaps the most crucial difference I see is that as an Indigenous art curator, I work with relatives, not objects. These relatives come in the form of both artworks and the communities from which they emerged. Though the artists who crafted the majority of artworks in the Museum's Indigenous art collection have since passed away, I am accountable to both those ancestors and their descendants.
With this framework in mind, Hopi Kachina Dolls: Blessings for a Balanced World addresses some basic questions: Why should we curate a show that focuses on kachina dolls? What fresh perspectives might we offer to the field of Native art, which has generated countless exhibitions on this topic? How do this exhibition and the many historical artworks it contains relate to our current moment? How can we do right by the Hopi community and present kachina dolls in all their vitality?
My Native art curatorial methodology fundamentally resists Adorno's assertion that museums sever vital relationships between objects and observers. I see the Museum not as a sepulchre, or tomb, but as a place of awakening. Rather than understanding museum objects as dead or dying, I view the Native belongings I care for at the Brooklyn Museum as "sleeping on a shelf in a museum storage room, completely decontextualized from their cultures of origin . . . .
"** This distinction, offered by scholar Sherry Farrell Racette, allows me to see Hopi kachina dolls (tithu) as patiently waiting to be woken up by members of their cultural community. The dolls included in our exhibition awoke by hearing their people's traditional language, receiving traditional foods as gifts, feeling their relatives' touch, and experiencing care.
Blessings for a Balanced World prioritizes facilitating reconnection; community work is an essential part of curatorial work and ensures exhibitions remain relevant to Native people's concerns. Hopi community members at the heart of this project shared stories of reciprocity and relationality to help us better contextualize their community. They taught us that tithu should be understood as precious blessings of deep cultural significance, educational tools, and a reflection of Hopi identity across generations. They emphasized the importance of situating tithu not as static artifacts, but as dynamic, living agents in the lives of girls and women who receive them from the Katsinam, the spirits who keep the world in balance. (edited from a press release)
more information [https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/hopi-kachina-dolls]
Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History Think Local First Santa Cruz
