Showcasing featured and upcoming exhibitions and events at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.
Spend any time at all in Santa Fe and people will undoubtedly hear of a venue with an alphabet soup of a name: IAIA’S MOCNA. It sounds intimidating at first, but the name is a prestigious one in the world of Native American art. The Institute of American Indian Arts’ Museum of Contemporary Native Arts— IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts is its preferred name—is the country’s only museum for exhibiting, collecting and interpreting the most progressive work of contemporary Native artists. The museum, which has a collection of 9,000 artworks all created after 1962, is dedicated solely to advancing the scholarship, discourse and interpretation of contemporary Native art for regional, national and international audiences. The museum frequently shows cutting-edge contemporary art that pushes the boundaries of Native American art. It’s also in a splendid location, just several hundred feet from the Santa Fe Plaza.
Featured Exhibition
The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts has a packed slate of events scheduled now through early next year, but one of the highlights is Indigenous Futurisms: Transcending Past/present/ Future, which is now on view through January 3, 2021. The exhibition will highlight artworks that “present the future from a Native perspective and illustrate the use of cosmology and science as part of tribal oral history and ways of life,” according to the museum. “The science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives depicted in these artworks are often reality for Indigenous communities worldwide. The imagery and narratives also emphasize the importance of Futurism in Native Cultures. Artists use sci-fi-related themes to pass on tribal oral history to younger audiences and to revive their Native language.”
The theme of the exhibition pulls from a number of different pop culture sources including Star Trek and Star Wars, whose heroine, Princess Leia, wore a hairstyle based off the Hopi squash blossom whorl. Artists in the exhibition include Marcus Amerman (Choctaw), Frank Buffalo Hyde (Onondaga/nez Perce), Elizabeth Lapensée (Anishinaabe/métis), Steven Paul Judd (Kiowa/choctaw), Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo), Ryan Singer (Diné), Robert Dale Tsosie (Navajo/picuris Pueblo), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/unangax); Teri Greeves (Kiowa), Skawennati (Mohawk), Neal Ambrose Smith (Salish/métis/cree), Debra Yepa-pappan (Jemez Pueblo) and many others.