Ramp it Up celebrates the vibrancy, creativity, and controversy of American Indian skate culture. Skateboarding combines demanding physical exertion with design, graphic art, filmmaking, and music to produce a unique and dynamic culture. One of the most popular sports on Indian reservations, skateboarding has inspired American Indian and Native Hawaiian communities to host skateboard competitions and build skate parks to encourage their youth. Native entrepreneurs own skateboard companies and sponsor community-based skate teams. Native artists and filmmakers, inspired by their skating experiences, credit the sport with teaching them a successful work ethic. The exhibition features rare and archival photographs and film of Native skaters as well as skatedecks from Native companies and contemporary artists.

A Song for the Horse Nation presents the epic story of the horse's influence on American Indian tribes from the 1600s to the present. Drawing upon a treasure-trove of stunning historical objects—including ledger drawings, hoof ornaments, beaded bags, hide robes, paintings, and other objects—and new pieces by contemporary Native artists, the exhibition reveals how horses shaped the social, economic, cultural, and spiritual foundations of American Indian life, particularly on the Great Plains.

The story of American Indians and horses is one of the great sagas of human contact with the animal kingdom. The foundation of this extraordinary relationship was laid in 1493, when Christopher Columbus brought the first horses to the Western Hemisphere. As Spaniards surged westward from the Caribbean and northwards from Mexico, American Indians caught their first glimpse of the horse, and soon adopted it into their world. Horses revolutionized Native life and became an integral part of tribal cultures, honored in objects, stories, songs, and ceremonies. By the 1800s, Native American horsemanship was legendary in American culture at large, celebrated in paintings, photographs, Wild West shows, and later in movies and television programs. Today, the image of the mounted Native warrior remains fixed in the American imagination. With traditional and contemporary stories, songs, and poetry and using archival photographs, lithographs, maps, books, magazines, and audio-visual presentations, the exhibition brings the story up to the present, demonstrating that the horse, though no longer ubiquitous, is still venerated in Indian Country today.

This exhibition is an outgrowth of the NMAI publication A Song for the Horse Nation: Horses in Native American Cultures, edited by George P. Horse Capture and Emil Her Many Horses (2006).

This exhibition of 77 works from the museum's collection will inaugurate the new Diker Pavilion for Native Arts and Cultures. Beauty Surrounds Us features an elaborate Quechua girl's dance outfit, a Northwest Coast chief's staff with carved animal figures and crest designs, Seminole turtle shell dance leggings, a conch shell trumpet from pre-Columbian Mexico, a Navajo saddle blanket, and an Inupiak (Eskimo) ivory cribbage board. The exhibition includes two interactive media stations, at which visitors may access in-depth descriptions of each object and, through virtual imaging technology, view and rotate a selection of the objects to examine them more closely.