SANTA FE IAIA Resilience
A collaboration with Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer and the Institute of American Indian Arts
The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), located in Santa Fe, NM, serves a population of students primarily from tribal communities from the Southwest, and other Native American communities from throughout the U.S. and Canada. Along with the rest of the country, our Native communities struggled to stay safe, survive, accept, and adapt to the pandemic threat. As an art and Native cultural institution, the best way we know how to reflect and process is through the arts and collaboration. This project involved several campus departments and programs to bring the community together to plan a community exhibition that included indoor and outdoor spaces to address ways that we and our communities were managing living and responding during a pandemic. The core question driving this project was: how do Native art and arts education inform Santa Fe’s landscape of “the good life?”
Religion in Santa Fe
As the purported oldest capital city in the United States, Santa Fe has an extensive history of cross-cultural and cross-social interactions between Indigenous and colonial powers. As such, the history of art in Santa Fe is closely linked to interactions between these communities. At the confluence of stunning physical terrain, local expressions of art and presentation, and interactions with outsiders, Santa Fe’s art scene embraces both expressive practice and educational possibilities. Home to the Pueblo Native American community, both historic and modern works of Pueblo art and buildings are front-and-center as the city’s leading architectural visuals. Centers such as Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts are leading examples of efforts to weave Indigenous art histories into public education.
Suggested Readings & Resources
Artist-in-Residence (A-i-R) Journal, Institute of American Indian Arts
Ronald L. Grimes, Symbol and Conquest: Public Ritual and Drama in Santa Fe (University of New Mexico Press, 1992).
Ana Pacheco, A History of Spirituality in Santa Fe: The City of Holy Faith (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2016).
Meet the Team
Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer
(she/her) Hopi/Choctaw
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Curator of Collections
Statement of Gratitude
This project was made possible through collaboration with numerous participants at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, including the following: Valerie Antone, Tayloure Baker, Katherine Barry, Kimberly Becenti, Isaac Boss, Leah Boss, Veronica Bustamante, Ben Calabaza, Isabella Cox, Alice Crazy Bull, MayAnn Etsitty, Angelica Gallegos, Desmond Hayes, Topaz Jones, Nicole Lawe, Ixel Lindstrom, Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer, Terrell Martinez, Daniel McCoy, Grace Nuvayestewa, Robyn Tsinnajinnie, Kaela Waldstein, Mountain Mover Media, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. We also wish to express gratitude to the following Pandemic Renga Writers: James Thomas Stevens, Deborah Taffa, Brianna Reed, Kamella Bird-Romero, Boderra Joe, and Ibe Liebenberg.
Our Good Life Project was seeded by Harold Morales, Rupa Pillai, and Kayla Wheeler with support from Amrita Bhandari, Ariel Mejia, Sierra Lawson, Fatima Bamba and many others from the Center for Religion and Cities’ collective.
The work is supported through generous funding from Morgan State University and the Henry Luce Foundation.
The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) respectfully acknowledges that it is located on the traditional Puebloan lands of the Tanoan and Keres speaking Peoples. We honor and thank them for their graciousness as stewards of the land.