Designed to Be Red: Native American & Indigenous Poster Works

Native designers are not often shown as authors of their own ideas or images, controlling neither how and when their stories are depicted, nor through what channels and mediums. Instead, Indigenous existance has been historically reduced to iconography that supports the American mythos that its numerous and distinct tribes are dead and in the past. Mythmakers and marketing teams have long used graphic design to tell stories about Native Americans, First Nations, Métis, Alaska Natives, and other Indigenous peoples rather than with them, creating reductive, inaccurate, and harmful representations of a living, vibrant, and varied group of people. 

Despite this, Native graphic art has a rich history that shows that its practitioners are not merely subjects of design but shapers of it—innovators who have created dynamic, subversive, and optimistic work despite centuries of cultural obliteration, land theft, and socio-economic marginalization. Through examples spanning nearly two centuries and representing over 44 tribes and nations, this exhibition reveals and celebrates design histories that have always existed alongside, despite, and in resistance to dominant colonial narratives, illustrating the full spectrum of Native life.

Brian Johnson is an award-winning designer, curator, and partner of Polymode studio. He has guest lectured and hosted workshops at the School of Visual Arts; the Walker Art Center; AIGA’s National Design Conference; the Institute of American Indian Art; his alma mater, the Rhode Island School of Design; and is one of the founders of the online learning platform BIPOC Design History. His recent clients include: The New York Times Magazine, MIT Press, A24, Nike, Airbnb, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Johnson is 2025 Mellon Fellow at the Institute of American Indian Art (IAIA) Research Center for Contemporary Native Arts and was awarded the 2023-2024 Hyperallergic Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators where he focused on Native-made works to combat erasure and decolonize design. He is a contributor to Gatherings: New Directions in Indigenous Book History, the forthcoming publication with the University of Pennsylvania Press with his essay “What If The Designer Was Native?”