LENAPEHOKING: AN EVENING WITH BRENT MICHAEL DAVIDS
Lenape Center is co-presenting at evening with Park Avenue Armory. Marking the 400th anniversary of the start of construction of New Amsterdam on what is now lower Manhattan, this evocative evening of chamber music and storytelling considers the myth of Manhattan’s purchase while celebrating the enduring presence of Lenape and other Indigenous nations.
Featuring captivating compositions by Brent Michael Davids, the program includes works such as “Touching Leaves Woman,” “The Last of James Fenimore Cooper,” and the world premiere of “Ode to Joe.” This memorable musical journey, incorporating unique Native American instruments as well as a string quartet and chorus of singers, engages audiences with Indigenous cultural expressions to envision decolonial futures through the power of music and narrative.
May 30, 2025 at 8:00pm
NYC's 400 years with its first people
Design, Unearthed and Unfettered, in Cooper Hewitt’s Triennial
Lenape Center Co-founder and Executive Director, Joe Baker, shares a statement for the commemorating NYC’s 400th Anniversary.
Joe Baker
Dec 28, 2024
Design, Unearthed and Unfettered, in Cooper Hewitt’s Triennial
Design, Unearthed and Unfettered, in Cooper Hewitt’s Triennial
"Starting in November, 25 new site-specific installations that explore the idea of home will fill the former Carnegie mansion in Manhattan.
In “Going Home,” the triennial’s opening section, an installation by the Lenape Center comments on the mansion’s setting. Titled “Welcome to Territory,” it features the three suspended turkey-feather capes, a kind once worn by the Lenape people, the region’s original inhabitants."
Article by Laurel Graeber
Photographs by Jeenah Moon
October 23, 2024
Museums closed Native American exhibits 6 months ago. Tribes are still waiting to get items back
"For more than six months now, the ceremonial Ohtas, or Doll Being, has been hidden from view after the museum and others nationally took dramatic steps to board up or paper over exhibits in response to new federal rules requiring institutions to return sacred or culturally significant items to tribes — or at least to obtain consent to display or study them."
Article by Philip Marcelo
July 31, 2024
Lenape Blessing and Welcome at Lincoln Center
"As a part of Nona Hendryx’s Dream Machine Experience, the Lenape Center’s band Yellow Trees performs a live set of new country music in tribute to the legendary National Rodeo Hall of Fame inductee, Ace Berry (Delaware Tribe of Indians). Born in Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 1947, Ace Berry grew up in a family of Native American cowhands and followed that profession all his life, winning rodeo events all over the West. A five-piece band, Yellow Trees’ members hail from Lenape, Navajo, and Hawaiian Native nations and center storytelling traditions in their music. "
June 12, 2024
400 years after the birth of New York, Native Americans demand accountability
"Dispossessed of their land four centuries ago by Dutch settlers who arrived in what is now New York, the descendants of Manhattan's original occupants, the Lenapes, are fighting for recognition."
Article by Alexis Buisson
May 31, 2024
New Yorkers planted a tiny forest in a spot where the city used to warehouse prisoners and smallpox
“Before a Dutch colonist bought the strip of land in 1637, it was home to the Lenape people, who called the land Minnehanonck. In the late 1660s, the land was acquired by a British captain whose descendants eventually used it for farming and renamed it Blackwell's Island. When the city took it over in 1828, it built a penitentiary, the New York City Lunatic Asylum, and a smallpox hospital on what became known as Welfare Island.
Curtis Zunigh of the nonprofit Lenape Center told attendees at the planting that the mini-forest is an opportunity "to reverse the process of many generations that have threatened the existence and the wellness of this land and our collective spirit.”
Article by Eliza Relman
April 14, 2024
Rose B. Simpson's Soaring Metal Sentinels Watch Over Madison Square Park
Lenape Center partnered with Madison Square Park Conservancy on the installation of Santa Clara Pueblo artist Rose B. Simpson’s public artwork in Manhattan.
“Seven 18-foot-tall figures surround a bronze female form in Seed, on view in Madison Square Park through September 22. The installation’s weathered steel sentinels are the artist’s tallest sculptures yet. Seed continues in northern Manhattan’s Inwood Hill Park, where two eight-foot-tall bronze sentinels look toward the Hudson River and the woods. Madison Square Park Conservancy worked on Simpson’s project with the Lenape Center, which Kamin Rapaport said identified Inwood Hill Park as a meaningful site. According to legend, Dutch colonialist Peter Minuit “purchased” what is now known as the island of Manhattan from the Lenape people there for just a few beads and other trade goods, marked by a rock and accompanying plaque.”
Article by Elaine Velie
April 10, 2024
New York, Native American City
"Dispossessed of their territory by the Dutch in the 17th century, the Lenape left the region and traces of their past were erased. At a time of celebrations surrounding the arrival of the first settlers, the descendants of the natives seek to perpetuate the memory of their ancestors and claim their place in the American national story."
Article by Raphaëlle Besse Desmoulières
March 30, 2024
Bring Indigenous History to Life with This Free Curriculum
“The curricula on the Lenape, offered across four different installments for students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, reflects the belief of Talbert and Lenape Center Executive Director Joe Baker that students should continuously learn about the “challenging history” of the Lenape because of “how young colonial thinking begins,” Baker said at the post-show panel discussion with Talbert and her co-authors at the Public Theater on Nov. 29.
Currently, New York State standards include little specific instruction on the Lenape in fourth grade curriculum. Additional limitations include little time to teach social studies in elementary school more broadly, “much less about the Lenape,” teachers’ lack of content knowledge, and teacher concern that there are not age appropriate ways to present material that limits instruction altogether. “
Article by Morgan Gilbard
Dec 8, 2023
Mary Kathryn Nagle's Manahatta Opens New York Premiere December 5
"The work follows a young Native woman who reconnects with her ancestral Lenape homeland after moving from Oklahoma to New York for a banking job in 2008. The piece was written as part of The Public's Emerging Writers Group, and returns to The Public for a full production following earlier runs at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Yale Repertory Theatre."
Article by Logan Culwell-Block
December 05, 2023
Mayor Adams Hosts First-Ever Mayoral Reception Celebrating Native American and Indigenous Heritage
"Joe Baker, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Lenape Center, speaks at Gracie Mansion to kick off the first ever Native American Heritage Month with Mayor Eric Adams at Gracie Mansion. "
Transcript
November 14, 2023
Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories
"Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories considers the power of art to construct and dismantle inaccurate Indigenous histories through a dynamic display of contemporary art by Lenape (also called Delaware) artists in dialogue with historic Lenape ceramics, beadwork, and other cultural objects and representations of Penn’s Treaty by European American artists.
Never Broken is curated by Joe Baker, co-founder and Executive Director of Lenape Center in Manhattan, and Laura Turner Igoe, Chief Curator at the Michener Art Museum. "
Exhibition Sept 9, 2023 – Jan 14, 2024
The Legacy of Nora Thompson Dean
This audio and video was created in partnership with the Morgan Library & Museum, as part of Nora Thompson Dean: Lenape Teacher and Herbalist. The exhibition honored Nora Thompson Dean (1907–1984), a Lenape teacher and herbalist who worked to preserve Lenape culture. Joe Baker, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Lenape Center, discusses the significance of the exhibit.
Exhibition June 6 - September 17, 2023
Google Arts & Culture
Through a partnership with Google Arts & Culture, Lenapehoking, the first Lenape-curated exhibit on Lenape land, can now be accessed virtually. The virtual exhibit includes photos and descriptions of the pieces on display, historical context for the exhibition, and additional resources highlighting Lenape Center's work in resisting erasure and coming home to Lenapehoking.
Live from NYPL - The Land We're On: Living Lenapehoking
Contributors to A Lenapehoking Anthology explore the personal journeys of people seeking welcome in their ancestral homeland while pushing back against their erasure.
View recording
March 6, 2023
Celebrating Lenape Heritage through Art
"Inside the Brooklyn Public Library’s Greenpoint branch, culture, heritage and art come to life. Rainbow-colored beads that form beaded bandolier bags sparkle and shimmer. Tapestries of dried bean and seed pods cascade down walls. This sacred space is the Lenapehoking exhibition located on the library’s second floor.
Lenapehoking, the first Lenape-curated exhibition of its kind in New York City, opened on January 28 with a virtual kick-off event. In his opening remarks Laszlo Jakab Orsos, Vice President of Arts of Culture for the Brooklyn Public Library, called the exhibition opening 'an historic moment.' "
Article by Amy Wu
March 29, 2022
The Lenape diaspora, once on the brink of erasure, championed in New York exhibition.
"The cultural traditions of Lenape communities have been disquietingly understudied but are highlighted in a small exhibition titled Lenapehoking at the Brooklyn Public Library branch in Greenpoint (until 30 April) that is billed as the first-ever Lenape-curated exhibition in New York. The show and its adjacent programmes, which have been organised by the Brooklyn Public Library in collaboration with the artist and curator Joe Baker—an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians and the executive director of the Lenape Center, a non-profit organisation founded in 2009 to uplift the Lenape diaspora—aims to correct the perception of the Lenape as an extinct culture."
Article by Gabriella Angeleti
Jan 24, 2022
The Met - Committing to the Beauty of Lenape Art
How Joe Baker reclaimed a historic artform in order to assert his Lenape identity.
Article by Benjamin Korman
November 23, 2021
'Back to Manahatta'
New film highlights Lenape efforts to reclaim a presence in New York City with cultural center.
Article by Stewart Huntington
November 19, 2021
Urban Omnibus - Home in Lenapehoking
An interview with Joe Baker and Hadrien Coumans about their collaboration with BKSK Architects in building the turtle shell above the former Tammany Hall, an intention to build civic understanding of people and place in Lenapehoking.
February 6, 2020
NORA THOMPSON DEAN
Nora Thompson Dean: Lenape Teacher and Herbalist
Exhibition June 6 through September 17, 2023
"An exhibition in the Rotunda of the 1906 Library and an installation in the Morgan Garden, developed collaboratively with the Lenape Center and Hudson Valley Farm Hub, honors Nora Thompson Dean (1907–1984), a Lenape teacher and herbalist who worked to preserve Lenape culture. Born and raised in Oklahoma, Dean made multiple influential visits to Lenapehoking, the ancestral lands of the Lenape (an area that now encompasses New Jersey and sections of New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut). The exhibition, incorporating letters, photographs, and printed materials, sheds light on different aspects of Nora Thompson Dean's life and teaching. It is complemented by an installation of plants important to the Lenape in the Morgan Garden, including corn, squash, and beans.
This exhibition and garden installation is organized by the Morgan Library & Museum in collaboration with The Lenape Center and the Hudson Valley Farm Hub. It is made possible by the Sherman Fairchild Fund for Exhibitions."
