The Institute of American Indian Arts is a college and museum focused on Native American art. It is situated in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is congressionally chartered, and was created by an executive order of former American President John F. Kennedy in 1962. It offers two- and four-year undergraduate degrees in museum studies, creative writing, visual communications and studio art. The college offered its first bachelor's degrees in 2001, and in 2006 graduated 43 students.
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The IAIA Museum: Dedicated to showcasing contemporary Native American Fine Art and to training the next generation of Native Museum professional
The IAIA Museum is a vital space for contemporary Native American arts and culture. Its interpretive approach is to design programs based on the Museum’s exhibitions and collections. The viewer can be exposed to the multiple environments in which Indian artists live and create. With this view, the Museum hopes to cut through the conventional discourse of “Contemporary v.s. Traditional” or the “Two Worlds” concepts which tends to sterilize and oversimplify studies in Native American fine art. The IAIA Museum strives to offer the public, instead, a more complex view of contemporary Native art that reflects its diverse cross-cultural influences and explores its complicated historical development through its educational programming.
