A Year of Community Engagement Elevating Native Voices With the hiring of Pollyanna “Polly” Nordstrand (Hopi) as executive director of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, followed by Marita Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo) as director of education, museum visitors experienced fiscal year 2022-23 (July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023) with new leadership and inspiration. Private donors expressed their support by giving $261,000 for museum exhibitions and education via the Museum of New Mexico Foundation. Museum visitation topped 50,000, including more than 1,800 children. The museum’s practice of building partnerships with tribal museums and Native communities went on full display in July 2022 with the openings of two major exhibitions. The first was the reopening of Here, Now and Always, which in 1997 revolutionized curatorial methodologies with its inclusion of Native peoples in decision-making roles. More than 1,200 people attended the much-anticipated big reveal. Institute of American Indian Arts students carried the festivities into the fall with their performance of handmade giant puppets that interpreted narratives from the exhibition’s core themes. The renovation of the original exhibition was made possible by $1.6 million in private giving through the Foundation, including support from the Family of Marie and Tony Hillerman and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The second opening, Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery, again represented the power of putting exhibitions into the hands of Native curators. As the opening venue for the exhibition, a partnership of Santa Fe’s School for Advanced Research and the Vilcek Foundation in New York, the museum was the first to engage the public in the extraordinary pottery selections of the Pueblo Pottery Collective, whose more than 60 members from tribes throughout the Southwest curated and wrote about the works on view. The exhibition’s viewing in Santa Fe was partially funded with $56,000 from the 2021 Native Treasures Art Market. “We could not have done Grounded in Clay without some proceeds from Native Treasures and support from donors to the museum’s Exhibition Fund of the Museum of New Mexico Foundation,” says Tony Chavarria, the museum’s curator of ethnology. The 19th annual Native Treasures Art Market in May 2023 featured over 180 extraordinary artists, attracting thousands of people and tens of thousands in Native art sales, rippling into $1.5 million in local economic impact. 6 | museumfoundation.org
Opposite: Necklace, Santo Domingo Pueblo. Gift of Grace Bowman, Collection of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology. Photograph © Addison Doty.
Darby Raymond-Overstreet (Diné), Woven Landscape, Monument Valley, 2022. Digital print. Photo courtesy of the artist.
To support the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, contact Lauren Paige at 505.982.2282 or Lauren@museumfoundation.org.
