Peoria Riverfront MuseumPartner Story

In September, we celebrated a special milestone in our partnership with the Peoria Riverfront Museum—five incredible years of art sharing and community engagement!

This momentous occasion came on the heels of another project at the Peoria Riverfront Museum that we were honored to support. At the end of August, the museum debuted its latest decoy exhibition alongside 14 new hand-crafted display cases built by the Peoria Tribe of Indians in Oklahoma for its Center for American Decoys. The unprecedented collaboration marked not only the first major business transaction in generations between a central Illinois entity and the Peoria Nation but also a homecoming for the city’s namesake tribe, which was forcefully removed from the state almost 200 years ago.

Having originated in the lands surrounding the Great Lakes, the members of the tribe are Illinois Indians, descendants of those who created the great mound civilizations in the central United States 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. According to its website, the tribe is a confederation of Kaskaskia, Peoria, Piankashaw, and Wea Indians that united into a single entity—then called The Confederated Peorias—in 1854 and only became known as the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma in 1939.

For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples hand-crafted duck decoys from natural materials like reeds, grasses, and feathers and used them to hunt waterfowl. The trapping devices were eventually adapted by European settlers, and the wooden sculptures evolved into decorative works of fine art that even today, are meticulously carved, painted, and finished by hand. For museums like the Peoria Riverfront Museum, they are a means of telling inspiring stories about the region’s past, “teaching new generations the culture of self-reliance, creative competition and American freedom in which they were conceived.”

The Peoria Riverfront Museum, a multidisciplinary institution that opened in 2012, is situated along the Mississippi Flyway, a major bird migration route. In addition, the Illinois River Valley is historically home to some of the most remarkable Midwestern carvers. Considering this special history, the museum opened its Center for American Decoys to collect, exhibit, study, and share world-class decoys while celebrating this uniquely American folk art.

The new, state-of-the-art, internally lit display cases—underwritten by the museum’s Ronald P. Bonati Fund—house the most recent decoy exhibition, titled Masterworks, which includes 47 decoys on loan from New York’s American Folk Art Museum, a collaboration made possible with the support of our Partner Loan Network.

To celebrate, the Peoria Riverfront Museum hosted a dedication ceremony, which was attended by Chief Craig Harper of the Peoria Nation and eight other representatives from the Peoria Tribe, as well as Jason Busch, Director and CEO of the American Folk Art Museum. The event sparked a series of ceremonial activities, including an exchange of decoys between the Peoria Riverfront Museum and the PeoriaTribe as a sign of true partnership and mutual respect; the presentation of a historically significant blanket, which once belonged to the Chief, to the museum’s President and CEO John Morris; and a city council meeting in which the Chief was awarded the key to the city of Peoria by Mayor Rita Ali.

Since our inaugural 2019 collaboration, Vantage Points: Contemporary Photography from the Whitney Museum of American Art, we’ve watched the Peoria Riverfront Museum flourish into a cultural hub where creativity and connection intersect. 

Our journey together has been full of meaningful moments, and this project will certainly be remembered for its far-reaching impact. It was a historic occasion, a homecoming for the Native American tribe that is also the city’s namesake, the start of a new chapter for the museum’s Center for American Decoys, and a wonderful example of how we support our partners and expand access to American art.

We were grateful to be a part of this project and witness history in the making!

Recently, the Peoria Riverfront Museum opened Glenn Ligon: I Am Somebody, a contemporary art exhibition centered on Untitled (I Am Somebody), which is on loan from our own collection and is part of the artist’s renowned Door Paintings series. Also on display is a grouping of artworks from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art through our Partner Loan Network in Solitude: The Necessity of Art, marking the eighth exhibition and 15th project in our five-year partnership.

If you have the opportunity to visit, keep in mind that the museum offers free admission every second Sunday of the month with support from our Access for All initiative. 

We are deeply grateful for the Peoria Riverfront Museum’s unwavering commitment to fostering community engagement and presenting world-class American art. We look forward to many more years of collaboration!