America’s Cultural Treasures: This text is a part of a sequence sponsored by the Ford Basis highlighting the work of museums and organizations which have made a big impression on the cultural panorama of the USA.
A few of my very favourite [teaching] items that I’ve facilitated with artworks have been right here at MoCNA, having the ability to speak in regards to the issues that we have to speak about as people proper now: social justice, the atmosphere, identification, stuff that younger persons are hungry for.
Lucy Ranney, Lead Instructing Artist, ArtWorks Santa Fe
Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo), a distinguished modern artist, talks in regards to the distinction between her experiences at faculties the place Native college students have been considerably underrepresented and Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). She describes her time incomes a grasp’s diploma at one establishment as “horrible” and “unreal.” “I had to learn to communicate with some of the most uninformed and unconscious and insensitive, racist people you could imagine,” she explains.
After spending that point in that wilderness, Simpson returned house to New Mexico to search out elements of herself she had been lacking by enrolling in a grasp’s program at IAIA, the place she is now an alumna and trustee.
“The reason that I returned to IAIA… is there is a freedom in being in a roomful of Native creatives. When you’re in a space where you’re constantly having to explain your identity to other people, your growth is limited,” she says. “I returned to IAIA specifically to give myself sort of a break so that I could focus on who I was and what my expression looks like, rather than my Native identity, because you’re in a peer group of Native people who have a similar experience.”
Artist Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo) (picture by Jason S. Ordaz, courtesy Institute of American Indian Arts)
The IAIA Museum of Modern Native Arts (MoCNA) in Santa Fe comes out of this pedagogical considering and conscientious artmaking which means to carve out an area for extra expansive residing. Throughout various narratives about the USA — together with artwork historic ones — Native and Indigenous Individuals are ceaselessly solid right into a primeval previous they don’t seem to be allowed to flee. In opposition to this grain of being pitied or idealized, championed or ignored, Native American artists have advocated for telling their very own tales somewhat than being the themes of another person’s. The IAIA reveals the complete vary of artistic expression that may emerge from situations by which artwork college students have the liberty to deal with understanding and manifesting their inside structure as a substitute of addressing a tradition that’s detached or actively hostile to them.
“What I constantly hear from students is that they feel like this is their community, like it’s home, like it’s a family,” says Jason Ordaz, the establishment’s communications director. “I feel like we’re giving them a sense of pride, belonging. We’re giving them an education in contemporary Native art, and I think we are giving them each other.”
The IAIA Museum of Modern Native Arts (picture by Sallie Wesaw Sloan)
Birthed in 1962, IAIA seeks to offer Native and Indigenous Individuals with the skilled coaching and formal training within the arts that give them the instruments to create their very own narratives and, by extension, improve their lives and thrive as a substitute of merely surviving.
Native and Indigenous Individuals have a very uneasy set of selections on the subject of working within the nation’s arts and tradition fields. Governmental policymakers have lengthy used institutional training to forcibly assimilate Natives into the cultural mainstream. Then again, with out systematized coaching and formal training, they’re ceaselessly excluded from key positions within the arts ecosystem that might allow them to inform Native and Indigenous tales, particularly with the assist of main establishments.
There was a long-term pattern of disinvestment in cultural establishments that remember, assist, and even acknowledge communities which have been traditionally underserved, notably communities of shade. In response to the Institute of Museum and Library Providers (an impartial federal company that gives library grants, museum grants, coverage improvement, and analysis), there are roughly 35,000 museums in the USA. Different sources point out that about 300 Native American cultural museums exist, and an untold variety of cultural facilities. Nevertheless, Anya Montiel, a curator on the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Museum of the American Indian, testifies that there are solely 10 museums devoted solely to Native arts. MoCNA is one in all them.
The museum began out as a gross sales gallery and educating house referred to as the IAIA Gallery in 1962, when the college started gathering and exhibiting pupil art work. In 1971, the Institute employed Charles Each day, a educated museum skilled who would go on to show on the college for over three a long time, because the director of the gallery, which he renamed the IAIA Museum. It wasn’t till 1992 that the museum moved from the Institute’s campus to the Santa Fe Federal Constructing downtown, the place it nonetheless resides. In 2009, the identify was modified as soon as extra to the IAIA Museum of Modern Native Arts and in 2020, it acquired accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums. From this place within the coronary heart of Santa Fe’s vacationer economic system, the museum supplies key alternatives for the deepening and growth of its mission to “elevate contemporary Indigenous art through exhibitions, collections, programs, partnerships, and new research.”
Left: MoCNA Curator of Collections Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer (Choctaw/Hopi) (picture by Jason S. Ordaz, courtesy Institute of American Indian Arts); proper: MoCNA Director Patsy Phillips (Cherokee Nation) (picture by Babak Dowlatshahi)
When Lloyd “Kiva” New (Cherokee) and Dr. George Boyce co-founded the Institute of American Indian Arts, they’d a imaginative and prescient for Native formal training that ran counter to the prevailing stress to assimilate into mainstream tradition. “The underlying philosophy of the program at the Institute is that unique cultural traditions can be honored and can be used creatively as a springboard to a meaningful and productive life,” New wrote in a 1969 report back to the then-staff director for the Particular US Senate Subcommittee on Indian Training, Adrian Parameter. He went on to debate the methods by which the US authorities had failed in even their good religion makes an attempt to enhance the scenario of his individuals due to a profound lack of ability to see Native People, that’s, to acknowledge their humanity, as a substitute rooting training in “a policy of coercive acculturation, the premise being that the sooner the Indian was conditioned to abandon his ways and join the melting pot, the better off he would be.”
In Celebrating Distinction: Fifty Years of Modern Native Arts at IAIA (2012), editor Ryan Flahive contextualizes the college’s institution within the fraught historical past of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which was constituted in 1824. Flahive explains that within the wake of the American authorities’s 1953 Relocation Act and “termination” coverage, the Institute of American Indian Arts’s institution “reflected the BIA philosophy of educating Indians to leave the reservation.” Theodore Jojola (Pueblo of Isleta), the director of the Indigenous Design and Planning Institute on the College of New Mexico, testifies in the identical quantity that the germinal seed of IAIA was summer time artwork applications begun in 1960 on the College of Arizona, funded by the Rockefeller Basis. After a suggestion by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board of the Division of the Inside, BIA facilitated the institution of IAIA as an arts-related vocational academy for college students aged 15 to 22. Flahive explains additional that the college was initially supposed to switch the humanities program run by the Santa Fe Indian Faculty, based in 1885 with the specific intention to forcibly assimilate Native kids. New and different directors, he explains, constructed IAIA’s curriculum on a precept of “cultural difference as the basis of free expression.”
This pedagogical method was a method to synthesize two selections that, on the time, have been framed as antithetical: to protect Native values and worldviews, and to empower Native college students to create artwork in a up to date social, cultural, and political panorama that actively sought to both neglect them or deal with them and their art work as bygone artifacts of a primitive previous. In response to MoCNA Curator of Collections Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer (Choctaw/Hopi), who has been with the museum for 31 years, New’s precept of free expression additionally constituted a radical aesthetic shift.
Set up view of Jordan Ann Craig: My Manner Residence at MoCNA
“IAIA students were encouraged to create works that reflected a contemporary, personal expression drawing inspiration from their own Native heritage, other world cultures, and American modern art movements, such as abstraction,” she explains. “This new educational model represented an intentional departure from the dominant style of Indian art practice, particularly the flat ‘Studio Style’ painting of the 1930s, developed at the Santa Fe Indian School under Dorothy Dunn.”
Dunn, a White American artwork educator who based the boarding college’s arts program, solely taught and proliferated this fashion of portray amongst a whole technology of Native artists. Rooted in her conflation of Native artwork traditions right into a single, mounted aesthetic, the work developed on this fashion seem two-dimensional, illustrative, and idealized, offering no temporal, spatial, or social context. Some would possibly describe these scenes as “timeless,” however Elissa Wheeler, the museum retailer supervisor, sees the prevalence of this fashion now as pernicious, leaving little room for the complete breadth of Indigenous artistry: “People are coming to Santa Fe to see the stereotypical noble Native on horseback with the sunset behind him.” Wayne Gaussoin (Diné, Picuris, and French Descent), the museum educator, describes this fashion as “the romanticized imagery Americans have been told by mainstream media and Disney and even history books.”
Jewellery, work, and tapestries that showcase these severely limiting views proceed to be fascinating to customers, and thus financially advantageous to makers. In response to the New Mexico Tourism Division, direct customer tourism in 2023 generated $8.6 billion. It additionally signifies that for town of Santa Fe, customer spending generated an estimated $811 million in state and native tax income. As estimated by the tourism board, these figures make New Mexico the third-largest artwork market within the nation, second solely to New York and San Francisco. The biggest contributor to this standing is the Southwestern Affiliation for Indian Arts’s (SWAIA) annual Indian Market. Ordaz attests that it’s “the biggest [market] for Native and Indigenous People in the world.” SWAIA itself claims that over 100,000 individuals attend the Indian Market every year and generate greater than “$160 million annually in revenues for artists and the community.”
Whereas IAIA’s faculty and museum search to assist the monetary well being and well-being of its college students, college, and workers, it additionally appears to be like to assist them thrive in different methods. The priority right here shouldn’t be solely with gaining tutorial credentials which have buy within the locations exterior of Native life, however with new methods of considering and making. The important thing workers members of the Museum of Modern Native Arts are involved with offering the instruments that Natives can use to flourish. The start line for them is training.
Left: IAIA Provost Felipe J. Estudillo Colón (Laguna Pueblo); proper: IAIA Trustee Karl Duncan (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and San Carlos Apache) (photographs by Jason S. Ordaz, courtesy the Institute of American Indian Arts)
Some of the necessary alternatives the museum supplies Native and Indigenous artists is the yearly present of labor by college students graduating with a bachelor’s diploma within the Positive Arts. Gaussoin describes the exhibition as a “huge opportunity for students to show their work in a very recognized museum,” including that he is aware of from expertise that “it’s kind of challenging and daunting for art students, Native and non-Native, to get your work out there and seen.”
Simpson, who was one of many choose artists chosen for the Whitney Museum of American Artwork’s biennial in 2024, recollects that MoCNA “was one of the first places where I showed my work. It’s one of the places that holds space for certain creative processes that other museums don’t necessarily have time or space for.”
“Most importantly, I understand that it’s right downtown, so lots of passersby will walk into the museum and see what’s going on there,” she continues. “For the student community, it’s also really important to see what’s going on there and the collections and the shows … to see yourselves in a professional space for the first time. It changes your pathways to what’s possible.”
Left: AMITIKATXI feminine artist collective (Tiriyó, Katxuyana, and Txikiyana), “The Forest is Our Future, Which Makes Us Grow” (2021) in MoCNA’s 2024 exhibition Womb of the Earth: Cosmovisions of the Rainforest (picture by Seph Rodney) proper: Set up view of Kite and Wíhaŋble S’a Heart: Dreaming with AI at MoCNA by means of July 13, 2025 (picture by Sallie Wesaw Sloan)
Transitioning from the theoretical assemble of an imagined museum exhibition in a classroom to an precise present, with all its attendant scholarly analysis and investigation and cautious set up mechanics, is a serious shift. To have the chance to current one’s work in knowledgeable setting is a key a part of this academic mannequin, which, following New’s conviction, understands Native tradition as the premise from which the artist can dive into their artwork observe and develop the legs to swim.
One other manner MoCNA deepens and extends its mission is by facilitating the alternate of knowledge exterior of the precincts of the college. Patsy Phillips (Cherokee Nation), the director of the museum, discusses the profound impact that the Institute has had on facilitating a generational switch of data: “I’ve learned this firsthand, teaching, a lot of our students want to go back to their communities, and [if there isn’t a] community center or museum, they want to go back and establish one.”
Specialised information received’t simply pool within the establishment, however proliferate into college students’ communities. Felipe J. Estudillo Colón (Laguna Pueblo), the present IAIA provost, echoes Phillips and makes the hyperlink between Native Peoples’ previous and future.
“Intergenerational transfer of knowledge [is] part of how Indigenous communities have sustained themselves for time immemorial, and it’s the seed on which a lot of the work we do here grows,” he displays. “We dedicate ourselves not just to becoming professionals in our own right but to […] helping to pass on that knowledge and that information.”
This handover of data doesn’t solely happen between generations — it additionally occurs, by means of MoCNA, throughout the divide of nation-states and geographies. On the helm of the museum, Phillips has embraced exhibiting worldwide Indigenous artists who current work that has international significance. For instance, the exhibition Publicity: Native Artwork and Political Ecology, which opened on the museum in August of 2021 and traveled to venues in Oklahoma and California, drew on experiences of Indigenous Individuals in the USA, Australia, Greenland, Japan, Canada, and the Pacific Islands. As Phillips testifies within the exhibition catalog, Publicity was “the first international exhibition of its kind.”
“The artists included in Exposure offer critical, experiential, and emotional analyses of the nuclear story and reveal the absence of Indigenous voices in the official narrative, which has been dominated by settler colonialism,” she writes.
Swedish artist Stina Folkebrant and IAIA alumnus David Naranjo (Santa Clara Pueblo) ’17 portray the mural Okhúwa Munu: A Dialogue Between Cultures and Nature on the museum in 2024
In these methods, MoCNA demonstrates that Indigenous artistry is wider and deeper than is usually understood, as a result of it ripples out into the ocean of the world.
On the identical time, the museum is rooted right here in North America and takes severely its accountability to the present technology of Native People. Felipe Colón explains that this obligation extends past the mere preservation of Native tradition.
“The average museum, they collect; they interpret; they display. It’s about preserving a moment in time, preserving an object. It’s about preserving a perspective, but what’s unique about MoCNA, about IAIA, is that we are also charged with perpetuating,” he says. “So, we take out what we created for this [exhibition], incorporate it into the curriculum, teach it to the next generation of artists and Indigenous artists and cultural practitioners so that they can then embody that and continue to pass that on.”
This isn’t a group of static traditions frozen in time, however somewhat residing, evolving cultures which are establishing and revealing their relevance with each Indigenous murals displayed within the museum’s galleries.
One method to inform the origin story of the USA of America is to start with the experiences of Native Individuals. The truth is, that is the required place to start out. As Tony Abeyta, a Navajo Diné artist who graduated from IAIA and now lives and works in Santa Fe part-time, attests, “American Indian art is really part of the American art story. […] It’s been marginalized and put into the category of some kind of cultural story that people can’t identify with, or don’t understand. And yet, there’s these great parts about our story that happened hundreds and thousands of years before colonial contact, before borders, before urban sprawl, before all of that.”
To carry the previous in cautious respect whereas understanding that it should not totally decide a group’s life possibilities requires skillful dealing with. That is the work completed by the Museum of Modern Native Arts. Like a tapestry long-established by each custom and innovation, it weaves collectively Natives throughout generations and widespread geographies, the a whole bunch of countries, communities, and tribes and distinct languages they communicate. By nurturing successive generations of artists, MoCNA helps so as to add shade and worth, kind and depth to the still-emerging picture of Native and Indigenous life.
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