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.
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.
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.
Every August, Santa Fe fills with people passionate about Native American art. Visitors and locals filter downtown to peruse the booths of Indian Market and to strike up conversations with the artists. Here is your guide to IARC’s former Native American...
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.
“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.
