“Designed to Be Red” Brings Nearly 200 Years of Native Posters to Poster House

For nearly two centuries, Native artists have used posters to speak for themselves. About 100 of those works now hang in “Designed to Be Red,” an exhibition at Poster House in New York City that runs through February 21, 2027.

Most Americans still know us through pictures someone else made. Sports mascots, butter boxes, and Western movie posters turned hundreds of living nations into one tired image from the past. Curator Brian Johnson (Monacan Indian Nation) built the show around Native people making images of themselves. His selection draws from more than 60 tribes and nations, and it shows we’ve been shaping design all along.

Several pieces come from the Red Power movement of the 1970s, when activists fought for land and self-government. Around 1975, the Mohawk newspaper Akwesasne Notes took an 1885 portrait of Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa Lakota) by a white photographer. It added his famous call to “put our minds together and see what life we will make for our children.” An outsider’s picture became a message for a new generation.

The Menominee Solidarity Committee made “Respect Our Vision” in 1976, a year after the National Guard surrounded Menominee activists during a standoff over land in Wisconsin. The poster shows a woman wrapped in an American flag and ringed by soldiers, calling for respect for Menominee sovereignty.

The show isn’t all protest, though. Much of the work celebrates Native life or welcomes people in. Rocky Fiddler (Cree) made “Count Yourself In!” to promote Canada’s 1986 census. His three cartoon figures blow horns like it’s a party. Showing up in the count is how Native communities get seen. The Smithsonian hired Ryan Red Corn (Osage) in 2009 to design a poster marking a season of anniversaries at the National Museum of the American Indian.

Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw-Cherokee) and Dana Claxton (Hunkpapa Lakota) made their 2021 poster to cover Gibson’s 21-foot-tall sculpture of the same name. Gibson borrowed the title from a house music song and built the sculpture as a monument to Indigenous and queer communities. Crystal Worl (Tlingit and Athabascan) gave her 2020 poster a Tlingit title and drew it in formline, the traditional design style of Northwest Coast peoples. Putting her language on a poster helps keep it alive.

Johnson is a designer himself and a partner at the studio Polymode. He co-founded BIPOC Design History, an online learning platform, and was a 2025 Mellon Fellow at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

The museum rates the show PG-13 because some older pieces include racist and violent images and language. Plan on spending about an hour. Poster House is at 119 W. 23rd Street, and you’ll find an audio guide on the Bloomberg Connects app.

Upcoming events include an Indigenous Designers Night with Relative Arts on November 20. Johnson’s companion book, also titled “Designed to Be Red,” is sold in the museum shop.