"American Indian art is some of the most beautiful ever made anywhere on earth. Some of us have loved it as long as we can remember. And with a new permanent-collection installation at the National Museum of the American Indian in Lower Manhattan, we can love it even more.

The museum has revised and refined some of its own controversially revisionist thinking. And the new permanent collection at the Heye Center, called “Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian,” and scheduled to be in place for 10 years, is different from its predecessor.

The bells and whistles have been toned way down.

There are fewer videos, shorter texts. The only recorded voices, activated by visitors from touch screens, are brief interviews with various historians who closely studied specific objects in preparation for the reinstallation.

The installation itself, overseen by Cécile R. Ganteaume, an associate curator at the museum, is arranged by geographical region, beginning — to the far left as you enter the main gallery — with Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, moving through Brazil and Mexico and farther into North America, ending with Inuit work from the Canadian Arctic.

For some scholars, defining American Indian cultures by region is an outmoded method, unrealistically schematic. But Ms. Ganteaume takes care to keep geographical borders loose and permeable by pointing out crosscurrents of influence that constantly moved through them, propelled by long-distance trade, wars, migrations and the forced displacements of entire Indian nations after the European arrival."

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Grace and Culture Intertwined (The New York Times 11/6)