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MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTURE
Fiscal Year Feats
$353,000
received in grants
$126,000 private giving for Here, Now and Always $48,000
raised for exhibitions
$64,000
raised for education
$91,000
raised in Native Treasures online auction, Collectors’ Sale and sponsorships
$62,000
in endowment payouts
Museum of Indian Arts and Culture
Culture is everlasting The Long View of a Short Year
Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Executive Director Della Warrior says the downtime that resulted from the museum’s temporary closure at the end of fiscal year 2020 (July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020) is going to pay off down the road.
“We’ve had time to pull some of this stuff together. We’ve been working on a lot of grants since the pandemic began,” Warrior says. They include a $60,000 COVID-19 emergency grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to support the creation of digital content and 2021 exhibitions. In addition to that successful grant and other in-process initiatives, the Museum of New Mexico Foundation raised an impressive total of $1,260,000 during FY2020 for exhibitions and education at the museum. A significant portion of those dollars support the ongoing renovation of the permanent exhibition Here, Now and Always, an upgrade of the 1997 installation that presents new approaches to community-based education and exhibition presentation.
Though work on the renovation was halted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Warrior says the de-installation of Here, Now and Always began again in earnest this fall. Construction will follow with a grand re-opening scheduled for spring 2022. “On top of the nearly $1.5 million raised in private donations for the Here, Now and Always renovation project, FY2020 boosted total grant funding for the project to $510,000,” says Jamie Clements, Museum of New Mexico Foundation President/CEO. “This has put us on track for a spring 2022 reopening.”
Silver Linings
Another silver lining in fiscal year fundraising came with the very first virtual Native Treasures auction in June. The $65,000 in proceeds from the auction of Native jewelry, paintings, pottery and artwork marked an auspicious beginning for the museum’s online funding ventures, which continued in late October with a virtual Native Treasures Collectors’ Sale.
Left: Beautiful Child by Kathleen Wall (Jemez Pueblo), the 2019-2020 MIAC Living Treasure award recipient. Right: Looks to the Sky by Preston Singletary (Tlingit) and Joe David (Nuu-cha-nulth). Photo courtesy of Blue Rain Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
With the shutdown of the 2020 Indian Market and the Palace of the Governors Native American Artisans Portal Program, the online Native Treasures events provided Native artists and artisans with a much-needed sales boost. Due to the COVID-19 slowdown, the 2020 Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Living Treasure awardee, Jemez Pueblo potter Kathleen Wall, will continue her tenure with a one-year extension of the honor in 2021.
Meanwhile, costly installation work on Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass, an exhibition of Native glass art scheduled to open in spring 2021, has also benefitted from private funding. The exhibition is set to be the centerpiece of the museum’s 2021 programming.
“We’re very excited. It’s going to be beautiful,” says Warrior.
Private gifts funded a lineup of other online initiatives in FY2020, from virtual exhibitions to a database of artist profiles to interactive lectures and panel discussions. These web-based offerings presented new ways for the museum to expand its goals of increasing appreciation of Native arts and culture. Highlights included virtual, museum-based concerts with Indigenous musicians, including G Precious and Innastate, broadcast live by the Department of Cultural Affairs and archived online.
Another standout project was the Summer Coloring Book (download it on the museum website’s Education Resources page), which features artwork from Native artists Jason Garcia (Santa Clara Pueblo), Abel Nash (Hopi) and Isaac Murdoch (Serpent River First Nation).
In all, despite the damper of COVID-19, fundraising only saw a slight dip during FY2020. The staying power of the museum’s endowment points to a crystalline path ahead for the future of the museum and its array of promising exhibitions and educational initiatives.
