Imagine traversing the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing — the 75 galleries, the grand and sunlit atrium of Charles Engelhard Court — and watching its static paintings come to life, superimposed with the words and images of Indigenous Americans who populated the depicted landscapes long before they were painted. This Indigenous Peoples’ Day, 17 Native artists staged a still-ongoing, unsanctioned digital intervention at the museum, using augmented reality to layer their own work atop the wing’s 19th-century paintings and reclaim space in American history for themselves. According to the organizers, “ENCODED: Change the Story, Change the Future” is not a protest but an expansion. “The unsanctioned nature of this exhibition is the work,” Cannupa Hanska Luger, a featured artist, told Hyperallergic. “Acting without permission inside a space such as The Met, that supposedly defines ‘America’ through historical art, is in itself a reflection of our very existence as a disruption to ...