While in residence at SAR, C. J. Alvarez is working on a history of the Chihuahuan Desert that considers this area as an ecosystem rather than a political territory along a border. As we talked, I learned more about his new environmental history of the border region and what he’s gaining from his time in Santa Fe.
Two decades ago, with a vision of a space for artists that would elicit feelings of warmth and personality, SAR commissioned a new artist studio. The Native American artist fellowship program—then in its fourth year—needed a space more conducive to artistic creativity. The Dubin Studio was built adjacent to the Indian Arts Research Center (IARC) through the generosity of Ronald and Susan Dubin. Learn more about SAR’s two most recent contemporary Native American artist fellows and the Dubin Studio’s continued legacy of supporting artists through the open working space.
SAR senior scholar Dean Falk has contributed a piece to the journal Nature on South African physical anthropologist and paleontologist Raymond Dart.
A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and also of Cherokee descent, Jeffrey Gibson was SAR’s 2008 Ronald and Susan Dubin Native artist fellow and is now a MacArthur fellow, the winner of one of the “genius” grants given annually by the MacArthur Foundation.
“Aging in place” is a common phrase meaning that older people prefer to age (most frequently through the end of their lives) in their homes, in spaces that represent their lives, and ideally close to family and friends. This white paper is the result of a salon held at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) that took place on June 6, 2019, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was generously sponsored by the Ethel-Jane Westfeldt Bunting Foundation.
Printmaker and painter Jordan Ann Craig has turned to a new outlet for her creativity: lingerie. Her new company, Shy Natives, founded with her sister Madison Craig, has such compelling, fresh designs, it was recently featured in Vogueworld, a daily online news site of Vogue Magazine.
After Deborah Boehm finished her book Returned: Going and Coming in an Age of Deportation, which she partially wrote as an SAR Research Associate in 2013, she knew she needed to do more. During her research, she had formed deep relationships with immigrant families impacted by deportation. “Many of those I had interviewed had been also been detained, and their stories were so harrowing,” she says. “Their lives had been unraveled by state action.”
SAR board member and eminent archaeologist, Jerry Sabloff has devoted considerable effort to the study of settlement patterns in Mexico and Central America—the when, where and how non-elite Maya people lived and worked. Sabloff discusses his discoveries in a Q&A interview in the 2019 issue of Knowable Magazine and presents on the topic in this fall’s SAR In-Depth course.
At the heart of her research, SAR senior scholar Dean Falk asks, “What can fossils, babies, and Einstein tell us about the way our brains have evolved?” Falk addressed this question and more during a tour of lectures and interviews across western Australia this summer, where, on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio program “Late Night Live”, she touches upon evolution and language, the uniqueness of Einstein’s brain, and “hobbits”, or the newly discovered (and short) human species, Homo floresiensis.
“It may ruffle feathers, but diversity means there’s a different way of doing things. If you want buy-in from the Native communities, you have to listen to them.” —Teri Greeves, SAR’s 2003 Eric and Barbara Dobkin Native artist fellow, quoted in a recent New York Times article exploring the current Minneapolis Institute of Art exhibit, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists.
