2020-2021 Interns
Sháńdíín Brown
2020-2021 Anne Ray Intern
Sháńdíín Brown is a citizen of the Navajo Nation, and a recent graduate of Dartmouth College, where she earned her Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Native American Studies. Brown is interested in curatorial work, and previously interned at the Dartmouth Hood Museum of Art, where she curated her first exhibition, Unbroken, which focused on the transition from traditional to contemporary within Southwest Native American ceramics. She has also previously held positions at the Heard Museum, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the University of Arizona Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center.
As an intern at the IARC, Brown hopes to gain further experience in Native American collections management and registration, programming and education, and research. She has stated that, “as a Navajo woman, [her] passion is to strengthen and support Indigenous peoples’ culture, history, and art, and to educate people about it.” Brown is also interested in pursuing graduate studies in the future.
During her tenure at SAR, Brown will spend half of her time working on collections/registration projects and the other half working on academic/programming projects. She is also interested in working with another local Native arts organization to further her study of contemporary Native American art. She will be in residence at SAR from September 1, 2020-May 28, 2021.
Emily Santhanam
2020-2021 Anne Ray Intern
Emily Santhanam is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and comes to the IARC from Oklahoma, where she has worked as a curator for the Chickasaw Nation Cultural Center for the past three years. Santhanam earned her Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2016, and hopes to pursue a master’s degree in the future. She is primarily interested in museum curation, and in 2018, she worked on an exhibition at the Chickasaw Nation Cultural Center that featured loaned works from the IARC and was titled, “Sculpting Cultures: Southeast and Southwest Native Pottery.”
During her time on campus, Santhanam plans to utilize the IARC collection to explore themes such as trade, adaptation, tourist culture, and commodification particularly in relation to the IARC’s collection of contemporary works created by past artist fellows. She looks forward to working at an institution that supports contemporary artists by fostering an environment in which they can study older works for context and inspiration. Santhanam explained that, “to support Native American arts is to support the communities behind them, the histories that enrich them, and the future lives that will be inspired by them.”
During her tenure at SAR, Santhanam will spend half of her time working on collections/registration projects and the other half working on academic/programming projects. She is also interested in working with another local Native arts organization to further her study of contemporary Native American art. She will be in residence at SAR from September 1, 2020-May 28, 2021.
Photo courtesy of Emily Santhanam
Colloquium: 2020-2021 Anne Ray Interns
2020-2021 Anne Ray Interns, Sháńdíín Brown and Emily Santhanam, presented on research they worked on while in residence at SAR on Thursday, May 20, 2021. A recording of their presntation is available on our YouTube channel.