Feb. 5—The School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe has received a $900,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support “expanding humanities programming at SAR,” an initiative of the school’s Indian Arts Research Center.
The grant, to be distributed over five years, will enhance the school’s $748,000 annual budget for the research center.
The funding will allow SAR to renovate the Indian Arts Research Center building, which was built in 1978 and designed by architect John Midyette. The grant will enable updates to aging building systems, enhance workspaces, provide a new gathering and meeting space and update the collection storage system, said Mary G. Madigan, SAR’s director of public programs and communications.
The work will include new heating and cooling systems, upgrading electrical systems, improving restrooms, and updating security and suppression systems.
The school has more than 12,000 artifacts of Native American art from dozens of Indigenous communities, mostly from the Southwest. The holdings are primarily pottery but also include jewelry, weaving, textiles and baskets.
One of the goals of the grant is to “promote equity between museum and Native communities,” SAR said in a news release, just as the American Museum of Natural History in New York City was closing two exhibit halls with Native American artifacts.
“We are considered to hold the premiere collection in the Southwest,” Madigan said in an interview. “We have [had] guidelines for collaborating with the communities that we have embodied for at least one or two decades. We just returned 60 artifacts to Mexico.”
The National Endowment for the Humanities requires a 4-to-1 match for the grant, and SAR plans to raise $3.6 million over the next five years.
“We’re in the quiet mode of the campaign,” Madigan said.
