Erin Monique Grant, SAR’s 2019 Anne Ray Intern, reports on the 12th Annual International Conference of Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums hosted in Temecula, California. Grant shares her experiences and reflects on the events that included a keynote address by US poet laureate Joy Harjo (Muscogee Creek Nation).
The School for Advanced Research (SAR) is pleased to announce the publication of the Guidelines for Collaboration, theoretical and practical guides to building successful collaborations between Indigenous communities, museums, and other collecting institutions. The Guidelines are the product of several years of critical discourse between over sixty Native and non-Native museum professionals, cultural leaders, artists, and scholars experienced in collaborative work in various institutions in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. Available only in limited release until now, the Guidelines are already being used by internationally recognized institutions including Chicago’s Field Museum and University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) in collaboration with the Getty Conservation Institute.
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.
SAR Announces 2019-2020 Resident Scholars: C.J. Alvarez, Patricia Crown, Rashmi Sadana, Fátima Suárez, and Davina Two Bears.
The School for Advanced Research (SAR) is pleased to announce the appointment of Elysia Poon as the new director of SAR’s Indian Arts Research Center (IARC). With over a decade of experience within the organization as the IARC curator of education and nearly twenty years of museum experience, Poon has demonstrated a commitment to collaborative programming and a dedication to community-based collections care. Under her leadership, the IARC will continue to advance national conversations around how collecting institutions and Native American communities can work together to foster cultural heritage and promote contemporary art practices.
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.
Sophie Hunter, the former Samuel H. Kress fellow with the Museums of New Mexico conservation unit, shares how the IARC Guidelines for Collaboration helped develop a conservation plan for a large collection of Jicarilla Apache pitch-coated baskets at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
2019 Ronald and Susan Dubin Native Artist Fellow, Ian Kuali’i takes the stage on August 8, 2019, in SAR’s Eric S. Dobkin Boardroom to share about his fellowship experience. Through hand-cut paper works and ephemeral Land Art/Earth Works installations, Kuali’i bridges contemporary and traditional techniques and designs while addressing themes related to his own history and identity, as well as what he expresses as “intertwined system of bio-cultural landscape and modernization”
Mateo Romero is interested in motion—bodies and ideas moving through space, history, ceremony, art. Romero describes his work as juxtaposing “timeless, archaic elements of Pueblo culture” with “contemporary abstract expressionist palette knife and brush work.” In 2002 he came to SAR’s Indian Arts Research Center (IARC) as the Ronald and Susan Dubin Native artist fellow.