Though she only arrived in Richmond at the end of August, Siera Hyte is, by necessity, already looking several years into the future.
“The period between when construction starts and when the new wing opens, that’s when I’ll have the benefit of being able to do really deep tribal consultation,” she says.
Hyte is talking about the planned $261 million expansion to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that is supposed to get underway at the end of next year. A key aspect of the expansion will be new dedicated gallery space for Indigenous American art.
Hyte comes to the VMFA from the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, where she earned acclaim for organizing the transhistorical exhibition “Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village,” which examined how Indigenous perspectives shaped the cultural landscape of Taos, New Mexico.
In addition to her education and commitment to spotlighting Indigenous artists past and present, she brings a specific curiosity in Virginia’s community.
“As a member of the Cherokee Nation, even though my ancestral homelands are not in Virginia, they are in the Southeast,” she says. “Being from an eastern woodland tribe, I’m really interested in being here and learning more about the artistic traditions of tribes in the state.”
With an undergraduate degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a graduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin and stints working in Montana and San Diego in addition to Maine, she arrived in Richmond with broader geographic experience than most.
“For everywhere that I’ve that I’ve lived—and I think this is true of all tribal nations—each place has a distinct history and culture, of course, but also a distinct political history and set of political priorities,” she says. “As a native person living in someone else’s homelands, it’s important to me that my work aligns with community priorities.”
Hyte’s curatorial perspective reflects a reverence for the past but also a vital interest in the future, an idea sometimes summarized as Indigenous futurism.
“If I could ensure that people come away with one thing, it’s that indigenous communities are alive and thriving,” she says.
