Overview
Noah Mapes is an art historian who specializes in Indigenous North American art and material culture. His research focuses on trans-historical Anishinaabe aesthetic practices and their role in governance. Noah’s dissertation project, tentatively titled “Materializing Relationality: The Aesthetic Intervention of Non-Human Beings in Anishinaabe Diplomacy,” investigates the agential and vital roles of art and objects in the formation of Anishinaabe political consciousness and diplomatic relations with settler colonial governments.
Noah was the assistant curator for the exhibition Deskaheh in Geneva 1923-2023: Defending Haudenosaunee Sovereignty, which opened at Quai Wilson, Geneva, Switzerland (2023), and continues to travel. He is currently assisting with this exhibition’s accompanying publication. As a curatorial assistant at the Chazen Museum of Art, Noah curated Origin, Vision, Place, Voice: The Art of Truman Lowe (2021). Furthermore, Noah was a Native American Fellow at the Peabody Essex Museum, acting as a research assistant for On This Ground: Being and Belonging in America (2022). Noah has presented his research at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (2025), Harvard University (2024), Native American Art Studies Association Conference (2023), the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies (2022), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2021).
Prior to joining the History of Art & Visual Studies graduate program, Noah earned his BA in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2021. He has worked at and collaborated with the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, New York; the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts; the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin; the Ho-Chunk Nation Museum and Cultural Center in Tomah, Wisconsin; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison Wisconsin; and the Neville Public Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Noah is a descendant of the Odaawaa-Zaaga'iganiing / Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe.