IAIA celebrating 60 years with 'Stories We Carry' show

Oct. 16—In the world of contemporary Native art, all roads lead to the Institute of American Indian Arts — the Santa Fe college that for six decades has educated and celebrated some of the finest young talent in the country.

School President Robert Martin makes the sweeping pronouncement with more than a little pride, perhaps because most anywhere you find Native American art and artists, you will find a link to the sprawling, 140-acre campus just south of the city.

"We're increasing the voice — the Indigenous voice — in film, studio arts, creative writing," Martin said, repeating a mantra he made 10 years ago when he said the institute is "the birthplace of contemporary Native art."

IAIA is celebrating its 60th anniversary, though not on the the site of its birthplace. Founded in 1962 under the leadership of the late George Boyce and Lloyd Kiva New, among others, the institute opened as a vocational high school for Native American students on the campus of Santa Fe Indian School on Cerrillos Road.

It later moved to a part of the old College of Santa Fe campus in midtown before journeying, like explorers seeking just the right place to call home, to its current locale on Avan Nu Po Road in 2000.

The constant through the decades, Martin said, is "the creativity of the students, the talents they brought to the campus and who flourished no matter where we were."

Today's students can immerse themselves in a variety of studies at IAIA, ranging from studio arts to digital arts to filmmaking to creative writing to museum studies to cultural administration to performing arts to Indigenous liberal arts.

An all-day celebration of the history and legacy of the school will take place Monday with a "Making History" symposium, featuring reflections on where the institute has been and where it's going.

In addition, the school is hosting an exhibition of contemporary Native American jewelry titled The Stories We Carry. It opens Sunday with a reception at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in downtown Santa Fe.

The museum, founded in 1972, is celebrating its 50th anniversary — an added observance for two Santa Fe arts centers that have become institutions with national, if not international, reputations.

Photographer Cara Romero, who attended the college from 2000-03 on the current campus, will take part in an alumni panel Monday as part of the celebration.

The institute, she said, continues to give Native students "the opportunity to become part of a legacy. You become part of a family, and that family is intergenerational, so you learn about tremendous artists and influencers and social innovators within our own community that you don't learn anywhere else.

"It gives you an understanding for the very first time in your life that you can become something wonderful," she added.

The school was founded under the oversight of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but school officials fought for decades to break free of federal oversight so they could exercise more autonomy in how IAIA operated. They succeeded in the mid-1980s, when the institute became became a congressionally chartered nonprofit, according to the book Celebrating Differences: Fifty Years of Contemporary Native Arts at IAIA, 1962-2012.

The move "recognized that the federal government was responsible for IAIA's financial well-being, but allowed the school to run its own operations under a White House-appointed board of trustees," the book says.

Martin said such autonomy made all the difference in pursuing efforts to physically expand the campus and add new programs over the years without having to go through the bureaucracy of Washington.

Patsy Phillips, museum director, said Friday there has been a strong tie between the two entities. But as far as the public is concerned, the links have been "totally invisible."

The museum hosts annual spring exhibitions of graduate students' art, and visiting artists whose work shows at the museum often visit the IAIA campus to give lectures. In addition, Phillips and other museum faculty have taught classes or given presentations at IAIA, she said.

"Everything we do is in support of the students," Phillips said.

Challenges have arisen over the years. Years ago, budgetary problems once forced teachers to use ceramic ovens as storage units for materials and books. In the late 1990s, even after the institute had established its independence, there were congressional actions to cut its budget and perhaps do away with the place, said Loren Kieve, chairman of the school's board of trustees.

After the developers of the Rancho Viejo neighborhood donated land for the campus in the early 1990s, the board of trustees decided to take half of what was then a $6 million federal allotment (down from $10 million or so in previous years, Kieve said) and decided to, as he put it, "plant corn in the ground where there was nothing there."

Result?

"The corn has flourished, it's gone forward and is now the shining jewel of the Indian American art and culture of today," Kieve said.

Jamison Banks, who teaches printmaking at IAIA, remembers being on the other side of the classroom as a student when the school was housed on the College of Santa Fe campus in the 1990s.

"There's a whole lot of opportunity now [for students] than there was back then, and that's a good thing," he said. "It's great to see this kind of blossoming, this evolution of what we thought was potentially possible back then."

Felipe Colón, academic dean of IAIA, said the institute has evolved to the point where its graduates are not just going out in the world to make art, but also run museums, galleries and colleges promoting Indigenous art forms.

"They are heading up the institutions, writing books, changing the landscape of how indigenous arts are talked about around the country and the world," he said.

Noting the institute hopes to get to the point where it can offer doctorate programs, Colón said he expects Monday's event to be one of storytelling, remembering the past and planning for the future.

"It's an ongoing story," Colón said of the institute's history and legacy. "We will continue to collect those stories, we will continue to share those stories, we will continue to write those stories — stories that will inspire our students for generations to come."