Preserving the Records of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts

FAIN: PG-258433-18

Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Culture (Santa Fe, NM 87508-1300)
Ryan Flahive (Project Director: May 2017 to March 2021)

The purchase of archival supplies for the rehousing of 95 cubic feet of institutional records that document the activities, exhibits, and programs of the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts at the Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Culture. Founded in 1962, the Institute is the only center of multi-tribal higher education in the United States and has fostered generations of students pursuing creative and intellectual engagement with native art and culture. The museum, which opened in 1973, is dedicated to exhibiting, collecting, and interpreting the work of contemporary Native artists. The museum’s archival records support the study of humanities topics such as art and tribal education, 20th-century American art history, and the Native art movement and its themes of story-telling, landscape, and the environment. They are used by faculty, students, curators, and scholars of Native contemporary art.

This grant proposal, “Supporting the Processing of the Records of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts” (IAIA MoCNA) is aimed to purchase supplies necessary to appraise, arrange, preserve, and describe an important group of records from the world’s only museum dedicated to contemporary personal expression of American Indian artists, 1990-2012. The collection documents the activities, programs, and exhibitions of the museum and is significant to the humanities due to the museums unique mission, “dedicated to increasing public understanding and appreciation of contemporary Native art, history and culture through presentation, collection and acquisition, preservation, and interpretation.” Specifically, the project goal is to purchase necessary supplies for the rehousing of the collection during archival processing to be completed by IAIA archives staff.