Rooted in Resilience, Resisting Erasure

The Penn Museum’s integrated marketing communications campaign for its new Native North America Gallery centered Indigenous voices, ensuring that the stories spoke with agency and authenticity across all channels.
The tagline “Rooted in Resilience, Resisting Erasure” amplified the gallery’s curatorial goals: to explore the self-determination of Native peoples across the United States who are still thriving—despite a historic agenda to erase Indigenous identities, cultures, and languages.
To drive market awareness and visitation goals, a multimedia campaign was designed as a strategic mix of owned (website, email, social media, magazine), paid (ads across TV, radio, print, digital, OOH), and earned (press coverage) media. Partnerships with Indigenous communities and local cultural organizations supported the campaign’s grassroots outreach.
During the campaign’s teaser phase, weekly social media videos highlighted the voices of Indigenous curators, artists, and a conservator whose stories represented the four regions showcased in the gallery: Northeast (Delaware/Lenape); Southeast: Eastern Band Cheroke, Muscogee (Creek); Southwest (Pueblo); Northwest, (Lingít, Alutiiq). By spotlighting the stories of an ancient artifact and contemporary artwork, the content conveyed a continuum of creativity and resilience. Four months before opening, the campaign launched across Philadelphia through traditional and digital platforms, including an NBC10 TV commercial narrated by one of the gallery’s Indigenous curators.
Overall, “Rooted in Resilience, Resisting Erasure,” demonstrated how this integrated campaign advanced our nonprofit’s mission by expanding audiences who not only visited the gallery but also gained a deeper, nuanced understanding of the nation’s story as America commemorates its 250th anniversary.