Barnes FoundationBenjamin Franklin Parkway / Museum District

Sky Hopinka: Red Metal Dust

Now showing21 March 2026 – 18 January 2027$30

A site-specific installation of 11 new video, photography and text works by Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band), interrogating American histories and Indigenous homelands in the Annenberg Court.

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On now All of November 2026

One panel shows a blank roadside billboard in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, under big clouds, its outline traced in copper. Hopinka took it on a trip with a friend who was filming a Cherokee country musician, and the restaurant where they stopped sits in the corner. It is one of 11 panels, all 86 inches tall and up to about 17 feet wide, set into the Annenberg Court, the long entrance hall you walk through to reach the Barnes collection.

The photographs were shot on film over a year and a half: from an Amtrak window, from planes, in Arizona, on the Washington coast and in Oklahoma. Hopinka layered projected transparencies over them, then laid on copper sheets left unwaxed, so visitors' breath and presence will change their colour over the run. For once in a museum, breathing on the art is part of the plan.

The installation is free and needs no admission ticket.

Look for

The Tahlequah billboard
Look for a blank billboard under a cloudy Oklahoma sky, its outline picked out in copper, with a corner restaurant at the edge of the frame.
Untitled 11
People walk away with their backs to the camera on a reservation, Hopinka's play on the old trope of the Indian walking off into the sunset.
The big copper panel
In one work a large swath of copper covers so much of the photograph that, in Hopinka's words, it becomes a landscape itself.
The unwaxed copper
Hopinka polished every sheet before opening and left it untreated, so look for where it has already started to oxidise since March.