Sky Hopinka: Red Metal Dust

Sky Hopinka has a new installation, Red Metal Dust, on view at The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. It opened March 21, 2026, and runs through January 18, 2027, in the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Court. The work consists of eleven new photographic landscapes, each printed on copper—a material Hopinka had never worked with before.

There's a specific reason for the choice. In Ho-Chunk mythology, copper is considered a living thing, and the title Red Metal Dust comes from the tribe's way of naming it: not as a monument, but as a remainder. Hopinka leaves the copper untreated, so it will oxidize and change over time, responding to the environment around it. The images themselves are meditative landscapes, and because they're on copper, they'll keep shifting long after they're hung.

Hopinka is of the Ho-Chunk Nation and the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, and he works across video, photography and text. His art centers on personal perspectives of Indigenous homelands and the way language acts as a container for culture. He was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington, and has lived in Palm Springs and Riverside, California; Portland, Oregon; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he studied and taught Chinuk Wawa.

The Barnes commissioned this site-specific installation to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It's only the second time an artist has been commissioned for the Annenberg Court, following Pat Steir in 2019. The show is free and open to the public, so you can drop in whenever you're near the museum.