This season, Shelburne Museum is displaying 23 handmade, hand-painted clay vessels by Native Americans in a way that could make the typical museumgoer gulp. "Built From the Earth: Pueblo Pottery From the Anthony and Teressa Perry Collection," at the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education, has no glass display cases. Instead, these masterworks — some large, all breakable — sit on pedestals elevated by low platforms that put just a couple of feet between visitor and vessel.

That's because a team of Native American consultants from the tribes who created the pottery advised that the bowls and jars "are living beings that need to be able to breathe," Victoria Sunnergren, the museum's associate curator of Native American art, said during a press opening last week. While she talked, museum preparators painted metal mounts that hold the vessels securely in place, making the hardware nearly invisible.

The consultants also advised that the exhibit's labels identify the anonymous artists who created these vessels between 1840 and 1950 as "makers formerly known." "Makers" acknowledges the everyday uses of the pots rather than their production as art, Sunnergren explained. "Formerly known" indicates that, while the makers' names may have been lost, they were well known to their communities.

Sunnergren has shaped the exhibition well beyond the consultants' input, identifying a unifying visual theme of a spiral that echoes both Pueblo concepts of migration and the act of making the vessels from coiled clay. But her collaborative approach is emblematic of the care the museum is taking as it launches its new Native American Initiative.

This major undertaking includes both Sunnergren's hiring last October as the museum's first Native American art curator and the construction of a new $12.6 million building to be funded mainly through foundation grants.

The Perry Center for Native American Art belatedly gratifies the wishes of the museum's founder, Electra Havemeyer Webb, who always intended to have a dedicated building for displaying her Native American collection. Scheduled to open in spring 2026, the center will showcase a significant collection of Indigenous art — 250 items from the archives of late Vermont restaurateur Anthony Perry combined with an existing collection of 300 items. Together these works represent 80 tribes across the U.S.

Throughout the planning process, which began with Perry's death in 2017 and his wife's subsequent gift of their collection, the museum has consulted Native American representatives, including scholars, artists and curators, who are helping to vet the combined holdings and provide guidance on ways to show their material culture.

Even the choice of architect for the building, the celebrated David Adjaye of Adjaye Associates, signals the museum's dedication to cultural competency. Adjaye, whose firm has locations in London, New York and Accra, Ghana, "specializes in border-crossing projects," museum director Tom Denenberg said.

Adjaye was lauded for his tiered, crown-like design for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, D.C. Current projects include the Edo Museum of West African Art in Benin City, Nigeria — where, in 1897, the British military plundered the Benin Bronzes. Museums around the world are finally beginning to return those thousands of elaborate sculptures and plaques from the ancient Kingdom of Benin.

For the Shelburne Museum project, still in its conceptual stage, Adjaye Associates will work closely with the Indigenous Canadian architectural firm Two Row Architect, based in Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation in southern Ontario. Two Row incorporates Indigenous symbolism and ways of thinking into its projects after consultation with Native groups. Its projects include the A•wit•gati Longhouse & Cultural Centre in New Brunswick and an award-winning multiresidential development for the Fort Severn First Nation in Ontario. Two Row is already collaborating with Adjaye Associates on Quayside, a large zero-carbon community development in downtown Toronto.

Jami Powell, curator of Indigenous art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and a citizen of the Osage Nation, applauded Shelburne Museum's efforts. Shelburne has "contracted with well-respected representatives in the field — people who are familiar with museums and Native American art," she told Seven Days.

"I think the collection and the founding of a center is important nationally, but it's particularly significant for what we now call 'New England' to have another institution that is paying close attention to Native American art besides the Hood and the Peabody," Powell added, referring to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. Other northeastern institutions with significant Native American holdings include Colby College, the Abbe Museum and the Portland Museum of Art, all in Maine.

Museum displays of Native American art and material culture have long been problematic. Not until 1990 did Congress pass a law requiring that museums alert Native tribes to their sacred, ceremonial and funereal holdings and return them when requested. Centuries of grave looting, exploitation and violence make it as difficult as it is necessary to establish the provenance of displayed items.

Even the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which first displayed its Charles and Valerie Diker Native American collection in 2018, was found to have adequately documented the provenance of only 15 percent of the collection's items, according to a recent ProPublica investigation.

"The Met moved quickly seven years ago," Denenberg said during a recent conversation in his office. "I want to move methodically. This is very new and different to all of us." Perry and Charles Diker, he added, were friends who had acquired pieces from each other's collections.

As for museum founder Webb, her Native American collection included baskets made by Pacific Northwest tribes that famed stained-glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany used for design inspiration. Webb acquired them from the Tiffany estate sale in 1946, the year before Shelburne Museum opened. According to Webb's early hand-drawn map, Sunnergren said, she had hoped to build an "Indian Village" at the museum's southwest corner — roughly the spot where the Perry Center will rise.

In the 1960s, Webb's Native American collection went on view at the Beach Lodge, a log building on the museum grounds designed to resemble a hunting camp. But by the 1990s, the exhibit was deemed outdated and dismantled, apart from a few decorative items that remained until 2007. None of the collection has been displayed since.

Sunnergren and Denenberg are in the process of reassessing each item in the Perry and museum collections according to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, with the help of Kory Rogers, curator of design arts and senior curator of American art; Nancie Ravenel, director of collections; and Alex Kikutis, collections manager.

The 1990 law, Sunnergren said during an interview in her office, "requires us to alert tribes to what we have" in certain categories "and give back what they want to keep." The rule doesn't apply to "promised gifts," a category that includes most of the Perry collection — namely, objects that don't yet have museum ownership paperwork. But the museum has decided to pursue the same course for everything, she said.

According to Sonja Lunde, director of the Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont, Shelburne Museum's effort is part of a larger trend.

"Museums are changing — and urgently so," Lunde wrote in an email. She added that her own institution is up for a revamping: "The Fleming's current gallery installation of Native American art and artifacts, which dates to 2006, largely omits the voices of Indigenous peoples from the Museum's displays and interpretations of their own cultural heritage."

Sunnergren describes the Perry collection as "very secular," as well as heavy on moccasins, clothing and dolls. (Only 40 items are pottery.) The museum's own collection contains very little from Abenaki tribes, but the Abenaki land the museum occupies is honored by a birch-bark canoe currently on display in the Pizzagalli Center. A married couple from the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation, Al and Mariette Grayhawk, made the canoe in 2018 using traditional methods.

Sunnergren, whose desk plate says, "Ask me about my cats," was born in Hertfordshire, England, and grew up in south Florida. She is pragmatic about her work as a white curator. "These are not my cultural items. I need to respond to what the people they belong to want," she said.

She was first drawn to the beauty of Native American pottery the summer after her first year of high school, when a local philanthropic organization sponsored her to assist with an art and music camp at a Navajo Nation festival organized by the Museum of Northern Arizona. She spent every summer at the festival while studying at Florida State University and was running the event by the time she graduated, with a double major in art history and religion and a minor in museum studies.

Sunnergren went on to the University of Delaware, where she focused on Pueblo pottery for her master's degree and won an Andrew W. Mellon fellowship as a doctoral student. In September, she will defend her dissertation on the gender fluidity of certain historical and contemporary pottery makers.

In her office, Sunnergren spun her laptop around to show an image of one of the Zuni jars in "Built From the Earth."

"These are water birds on a water jar," she said, pointing to the painted figures positioned on the crest of a spiral. "It's a very playful design" — the kind of detail that might have influenced Tiffany or John Sloan, cofounder of Ashcan School of visual art, who sponsored an exhibition of Native American painters in New York in 1922.

Sunnergren added, "People are starting to realize that you can't understand [American] art and decorative arts without understanding Native American art." For the Shelburne's many visitors, the Perry Center will help make those influences more visible.