Material Monument to Thomas Morton (Playing Indian), 2025

Mixed Media sculpture, combining 3D modelled and printed mimicry, the readymade, and the handmade.

New Red Order is a public secret society facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys. Through video, sculpture, and performance they examine desires for indigeneity and promote Indigenous futures. The larger-than-life sculpture Material Monument to Thomas Morton, humorously highlights the controversial colonial figure and Puritan defector Thomas Morton: leader of the Merrymount Colony, known for staging multi-day celebrations around an 80-foot maypole, and pursuing a perhaps excessive attraction to indigeneity. Morton was eventually exiled and his settlement burnt to the ground by the Puritans for circulating alcohol, arms, and embracing Indigenous self-governance.

Typical symbols found in pop culture, monuments and mascots from across Boston merge with the Tlingit sculptural tradition of “shame poles”—a type of totem pole erected to signal failure and debt —to forge, through a satirical twist, a ‘shameless pole’—which garishly embraces revelry, refusal, and resistance. The artwork prompts not just a critique of the past, but a call to action to recuperate alternative settler dynamics in solidarity and alignment with Indigenous people.

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Marketplace Center
S Market St. & Commercial St.
Boston, MA 02109

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New Red Order

Adam Khalil, b. 1988; Zack Khalil, b. 1991; Jackson Polys, b. 1976; all based in New York

New Red Order is a public secret society that collaborates with informants to create exhibitions, videos, and performances that question and rechannel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. New Red Order orients their work through the paradoxical conditions of Indigenous experience, and explores the contradictions and missteps that embody desires for indigeneity in the myths, dreams, and political foundations of the so-called Americas. Through modes of entertainment and corporate address, museological display, re-appropriation, and a multiplicity of swerving artistic strategies, NRO aim to collectively advance understandings of how identity is conveyed and configured within contemporary art practices, in order to create sites of acknowledgment that promote solidarity and shift obstructions to Indigenous growth.

New Red Order is facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit). They have presented their work with Art Sonje, Artists Space, Creative Time, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Lincoln Center, Momenta Biennale de l’image, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, New York Film Festival, Sharjah Biennial, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Biennial 2019, Walker Art Center, and Whitney Biennial 2019, among others, expanding the public secret society network across numerous institutional platforms.