"Everyone who visits a museum display about American Indians "wants to see feathers, tepees and horses," Kevin Gover, director of the National Museum of the American Indian, lamented recently in his Washington office. But new installations at NMAI's New York facility, as well as at the Denver Art Museum and Brooklyn Museum, are out to prove, in Mr. Gover's words, that "Indians are not what you think they are."

The effect of these stereotype-busting displays is sometimes jarring, especially because the canon now includes contemporary art. Today's curators want visitors to view Indian artworks not as quaint ethnographic artifacts, but as vital expressions of a living culture, spanning prehistory to the present.

Nowhere is this impulse stronger than at the Denver Art Museum. Its completely reconceived 23,000-square-foot installation features about 90 works created since 1950, part of an entirely new display of 700 highlights from one of the finest, deepest collections of such material in the country—some 18,000 pieces, collected over the past 85 years. Organized into nine geographic areas, it jumbles old and new in provocative, sometimes exasperating ways.

One of Denver's great masterpieces is a 1720s Eastern Sioux deerskin shirt embellished with painted abstract designs, possibly representing birds. The curators invite its comparison to a nearby 2010 fringed "war shirt" commissioned from Bently Spang, the suddenly ubiquitous Northern Cheyenne artist whose designs, which are meant to be seen, not worn, are also on view in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Composed from memory cards, plastic and hemp cord, Mr. Spang's boxy creations stitch together photographs of images from his Montana homeland, such as flowers and rocks."

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Shows That Defy Stereotypes (The Wall Street Journal 3/15)