TOTEM is a book; an exhibition; a conversation; an archive;
an intervention; a collaboration; a series of public installations.
"Erin Turner's TOTEM is the fascinating account of an Oklahoma white man's homage to Native Americans in the 1930s. Simultaneously sympathetic and analytical, the collected texts address the contradictions between stereotyping and good intentions, entangled histories and local politics. In a unique educational approach, Turner contextualizes this vernacular public art in its time and in our very different epoch."
—Lucy Lippard, author of
Partial Recall: Photographs of Native Americans
"Through conversations with artists, historians, journalists, and Indigenous voices, Erin Turner turns this unusual roadside park into a living forum for reckoning with history, representation, and place. The result is an invitation to look again at the familiar landmarks and discover that their meanings are far more complicated—and far more alive—than first appears."
—Micahael Mason, Writer and Editor
"TOTEM offers more than a centennial critique of appropriation and Indigenous [mis]representationalong Route 66: Turner and her collaborators probe deeply into how and why a "totem" park materialized in Oklahoma, approaching Galloway's well-intentioned public artwork within the context of a country seeking a national aesthetic through Native American artforms. TOTEM engages contemporary Indigneous voices to deliver concise, layered, and promising examinations on how this monumental site reflects the way we use art to tell stories about ourselves."
—Pablo Barrera (Wixáritari), Curator
TOTEM: As Monument & Archive examines the shifting perceptions of aesthetics, Native representation, and transhistoric remembering through the lends of Ed Galloway's Totem pole Park, an artist-built environment in Foyil, Oklahoma. The book brings together research and projects from artists, curators, activists, historians, politicians, and journalists, who consider site through the lenses of the monument and the archive focused primarily on Oklahoma, although representative as the discourse of a nation.
Published May 2026 by This Land Press, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
TOTEM: As Ephemera is a group exhibition in dialogue with Erin Turner's first book, TOTEM; As Monument & Archive, published by This Land Press in 2026. Together, the exhibition and the book raise questions about ephemeral everyday actions—gestures meant to last only briefly—that instead of disappearing can be traced and collected, allowing us to understand the present in conversation with a past that remains.
